Anthropological Problems In Classical Indian Philosophy

Author(s): Wilhelm Halbfass
Publisher: Wilhelm Halbfass

Page 12

236 WILHELM HALBFASS like E. Cassirer's Essay on Man (1944), is, as we have seen, not at all completely absent in Indian thought. However, it remains true that it has never been developed and explicated in a way which would be comparable to what we find in the Western philosophical tradition. Instead, it is overshadowed, suppressed by other preoccupations, and it evaporates in the later development of Indian thought. Philosophical thought, insofar as it is concerned with the final and ultimate goal of moksa and with the paths leading to it can obviously not focus on man' as a temporal, social, earthly being; it emphasizes a reality in man (atman, purusa) which as such is not a human reality.--There is thought about man in Hinduism, but there is no tradition of historical and secular thinking, in which alone interest in and thought about man as homo sapiens, as self-producing "cultural" and technological animal can really grow and develop. In this paper, we have only been referring to ancient and classical Indian philosophy. It would, of course, be a very different question to investigate how modern Indian thought, which often, and obviously in response to the Western challenge, puts a peculiar emphasis on the concept of man, relates to, and contrasts with, this classical tradition47. 47 Conspicuous examples would be Bankimchandra Chatterji and Rabindranath Tagore, both reflecting Comte's "religion of man".-Even in otherwise rather traditionalistic modern Pandit literature, modified ways of dealing with man may be found; cf. Mahesacandra Nyayaratna, Brief Notes on the Modern Nyaya System, Calcutta s.d. (in Sanskrit), 8 (on manusyatva); Vidyasankara Bharati, Dharmikavimarsasamuccaya, Poona 1944, 142; 206 (man as purposeful, self-conscious actor).