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CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY, 1
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published or unpublished, but is extant only in Kalidas Bhattacharya's recollection of his conversations with his father. In these conversations he generalized the concept of alternatives into a logic of alternation. Beside the Aristotelian logic based on contradiction (this, not that) and the Hegelian logic based on synthesis (this and that), this is a third sort of logic based on disjunction (this or that).
The quasi-realism of "Concept of the Absolute and its Alternative Forms" is transcended in a more involved dialectic where knowing reveals reality as subject (chit), while willing, posits reality as object (sat), and feeling apprehends reality as subject-object dialectically united (ananda). Each of these three attitudes (knowing, willing, feeling) can be deduced from each of the others by formal logic," the basic concept of which is negation (including double, triple, and quadruple negation). There are two elementary categories, is (position, which is no form, and useless for deduction) and is not (a living form which can draw out something from something else), and five combinations of them." Logic gives possibilities. We start from the actuality or existence of what is given in experience and so simply is. By logic we discover possibilities, but cannot choose among them, since all are established by logic and so alternate. Actuality and possibility never clash but themselves alternate." Conflict among actuals (for example, religions) ceases when all are recognized as not only possible but alternatively actual, that is, by lifting up the actual to the realm of the possible, getting rid of the standpoint of actuality. Starting from the given, we proceed by reason, that is, negation, to reach other possibilities, each a negated being, and from each possibility still others are deduced. In the realm of possibility there is no position and
17 Kalidas unfortunately has forgotten how.
18 Different from and more basic than the categories of Jain logic, which however contributed to K. C. Bhattacharya's logical thought and is discussed in his early article, "The Jain Theory of Anekantavada" (theory that truth is indeterminate).
For example, there is no synthesis or hierarchy of religions; for each man only one is actual, but he recognizes the possibility of others.
20 This superior attitude of the pure logician he called the "angelic attitude."
