Book Title: Sambodhi 1989 Vol 16
Author(s): Ramesh S Betai, Yajneshwar S Shastri
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Page 140
________________ 131 is a report of experience. We cannot have certain ideas without having had the experience of the objects of which they are the ideas. In such cases it is not illegitiinate to pass from the ideas to the objects referred to by them. We should not have had an idea of absolute reality if we had never been in inmediate cognitive relation with it, if we had not been intuitively conscious of it. The proof of the existence is founded on the experience."10 The realistic colour of Radhakrishuan's epistemology will be more clearly and brightly seen in the light of the fact that Radhakrishnan.is neither a rationalist like either Plato or Hegel nor a transcendentalist like either Gaudapāda or S'amkarācārya. Unlike Plato and Hegel, he regards sense experience as genuine knowledge. And unlike Gaudapāda and sainkarācārya he fully admits the reality of empirical world known through sense and reason. Unlike these philosopheres, Radhakrishnan has not created an unbridgeable gulf either between sense and reason or between reason and intuition. He has rather advocated the view that there is a continuous development from sense perception to the vision of the real."11 He, therefore, regards it as "unfortunate that insistence on intuition is often confused with anti-intellectualism. Intuition which ignores intellect is useless. The two are not only not incompatible but vitally united."12 Growth in knowledge, for Radhakrishnan, always means enrichment and correction in knowledge and not the denial of the object genuinely known by any of the three ways of knowing. While explaining the nature of integral insight, Radhakrishnan has indicated this in the following words : “The different energies of the human soul are not cut off from one another by any impassable barriers. They flow into each other, modify, support and control each other. The Sanskrit expression “samyagdarśana" or integral insight, brings out how far away it is from occult visions, trance and ecstacy."13 We thus see that Radhakrishnan's epistemology is neither mere sensationalism, nor mere rationalism, nor mere mysticism but an organically conceived federation of all the three. This can happen if, and only if, Radhakrishnan's epistemology is out and out realistic. Yet this has hardly been brought into fore-front by scholars who have worked on Radhakrishnan. Hence the justification of our effort in this paper. Radhakrishnan's Ethical objectivism Radhakrishnan's realism which remains partly obscure in his episte

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