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BURCH
(1) Willing enters in a very awkward way into the discussion of feeling. It is said to be coordinate with feeling (as if the train of thought were here running on a double track). Feeling is dissociation from objectivity, withdrawal from the object; willing is identification with objectivity, conquest over the object (II 75), conscious projection of objectivity (II 76). There is progress and regress57 (as if the train of thought were backing up). The whole matter is passed over hastily. One might expect will to play a dominant role in the philosophy of freedom, just as it does in Kant's philosophy as interpreted by Bhattacharyya, but the psychological act of willing does not seem to have any place, at least any neat place, in the system.
(2) A still more basic difficulty is the identification of truth with freedom. Since consciousness of the false is consciousness of the subjective, we attain subjectivity or freedom, and ultimately absolute freedom, by progressive rejection of the false or illusory in favor of the true or real. The method is cognitive; the end, freedom, is presumably truth. That the truth shall make you free is a venerable principle, but is it really so? Does not devotion to truth require rather the sacrifice of freedom? Is not the first princple of scientific method to accept whatever evidence and logic show to be true regardless of what we may will? That truth is freedom is at best a paradox.
(3) A third difficulty may be suggested by the question, "Why assume the subjective attitude?" Granted it leads to freedom, is freedom an end which justifies the subjective attitude as a means, or is the subjective attitude somehow right in itself, with freedom a happy consequence justified by rather than justifying the means? Cannot a case also be made for the objective attitude ?
Bhattacharyya does not discuss, or even raise, these difficulties. They are solved, however, by the concept of alternative forms of the Absolute which characterizes the third phase of his thought.
THIRD PHASE: THE ABSOLUTE AS ALTERNATION
In his third phase K. C. Bhattacharyya defines the Absolute as Alternation, in a departure from the Upanishadic tradition. The logical category of alternation, frequently appearing in his earlier works, is now applied to the Absolute itself. This is his most original contribution to philosophical thought.
57 These words are used in a way the opposite of what one might expect: "as knowledge deepens, there is a regress to prior presuppositions, the felt body etc., up to feeling" (II 75).
