Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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A Modern Understandin of...
come to be known, that knowledge is not mediated by mental states.
Indeed, whatever a matter of inalienable faith may be said to be known as unknown, there being on some occasions a 'felt need, and on some occasions none, that one should put in best efforts to make it known as known. Inalienable faiths are all of them of cognitive import. Non-cognitive faiths are those which are dispensable.
Questions and searches, too, are cases of knowing something as unknown, provided the questions are not silly and the searches not unregulated, i. e. unbacked by guiding hypotheses. That about which one asks a relevant question is already known, and similarly with what is seriously sought after, 15 And, yet, in either case it must at the same time be also unknown, for were it not unknown there could not be question or search at all. It cannot be said that some part or aspect of the thing was known and some other part unknown. If by that is meant that only the part which is unknown is questioned or searched after, the difficulty would be "that if this part be wholly unknown there could not be question or search. Nor can it be said that this part itself is partly known and partly unknown, for the same difficulty would arise with regard to this latest unknown part. Neither, also, can it 'be said that the question is not about, and the search not for, any part, but about or for the whole thing considered as with the unknown part. True, when we ask a question16 about a thing it stands partly known and partly unknown. But that alone does not occasion the question. The question about a certain character of a thing necessarily presuppose that the possibility of that character in that thing is already known, the question that is raised being about its actuality; and between possibility and actuality the relation is not that of a part and a whole. The content in both the cases is absolutely
15 Perheps there is not much of difference between relevant question and serious cognitive search. The Sanskrit term 'jijñāsa' stands for both. 16. And similarly in the case of search.