Book Title: Search For Absolute In Neo Vedanta
Author(s): George B Burch
Publisher: George B Burch

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Page 15
________________ K. C. BHATTACHARYYA ing the free act (II 314)-a suggestion of Bhattacharyya's cryptorealism as a clue to the maze of Kantian idealism. 625 This maze is followed through devious arguments which integrate the doctrines of the three critiques. Primarily, however, the transcendental philosophy is concerned with the transcendental or nonobjective, that is, a content not distinct from the consciousness of it, which for Kant is the self as conscious act of freedom (II 301) realized through willing (I 285). This is the foundation and presupposition of the whole system. Even the Transcendental Aesthetic presupposes without proving a real self utterly unobjective; objective causality is intelligible only in reference to the self's free causality; and the conclusion that the self constructs the known object would be a mere figure of speech without prior theoretical knowledge of the self as real (II 304). Assuming the subjective attitude, that we do not know the self as object or mind, is the first, negative, step toward practical knowledge of the self as free cause (II 308). Self, to be sure, is mind, but mind is not self (II 313). Essentially the self is freedom. This is not indeterminism, for only right willing is free (II 343); there is no "bad freedom" (II 346). Good or free will knowing itself as free in the knowledge and as the condition of the moral law is Kant's "master principle" (II 347). This knowledge of the self or subject as freedom, which is the presupposition of Kant's transcendental philosophy, is the demonstrated conclusion of Bhattacharyya's The Subject as Freedom. Epistemological Problems Transcendental psychology, which is the theme of that book, is first defined two years earlier in the article "Knowledge and Truth" (read at the Indian Philosophical Congress in 1927, published 1928). Objective logic recognizes negation only as exclusion from a particular context. Epistemology recognizes negation as pure non-existence. But transcendental psychology, a sort of meta-epistemology, recognizes falsity, which is apparent existence, something we are aware of but do not know (II 151). A known content ("this is so") is not as such known as true, but only as implicitly true, "demanding" to be known as true (II 163). Only when it is challenged and confirmed ("I know that this is so") is it explicitly true. Now the truth, formerly fused with the content, is distinguished from it. Knowledge and truth, 25 Compare the assertion symbol of Principia Mathematica.

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