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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
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Be that as it may, K. C. Bhattacharyya interpreted Jain non-absolutism in the sense of alternation, statements each valid apart from the others but not in conjunction with each other. The attitude of alternation had always characterized his thought. It is found in his earliest works. It was fostered in his student days by uncertainty concerning Kant, Hegel, and Vedanta; sometimes he felt that Vedanta goes beyond Kant, sometimes that Kant goes beyond Vedanta. When he read the Prameya Kamala Martanda, he discovered in, or read into, Jain logic a systematic formulation of this attitude, and composed his paper on anekanta. At the first meeting of the Indian Philosophical Congress in 1925, the year the paper was published, G. Hanumanta Rao of Mysore presented a paper "The Jaina Instrumental Theory of Knowledge,” in which he said: "Its [Jainism's great defect lies in the fact that it yields to the temptation of an easy compromise without overcoming the contradictions inherent in the opposed standpoints in a higher synthesis.”70 Bhattacharyya, who was present at this meeting to read his own paper “Shankara's Doctrine of Maya" and may be presumed to have heard Rao's paper, would have agreed with this interpretation, similar to his own interpretation of Jain logic as alternation without integration, but for him this was its 'merit, not its defect. The concept of alternation developed in his own paper remained latent during his second phase, but emerged to dominate the thought of his third phase. It was in his interpretation of nonabsolutism that he found the clue for comprehending the Absolute in a way at once more subtle and more profound than that given by the notions of Indefinite or Subject.
Consciousness and Content The basic work of the third phase and final statement of Bhattacharyya's search for the Absolute is his Presidential Address at the 1933 meeting of the Indian Philosophical Congress, published in 1934,71 entitled “The Concept of the Absolute and its Alternative Forms." I say final, not definitive, as he never suggested, and I believe never supposed, that any philosophical statement is definitive. The Presidential Address, however, provided an appropriate occasion
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70 Proceedings of the First Indian Philosophical Congress, 1925 (Calcutta: Calcutta Philosophical Society, 1927), 133.
71 In the Philosophical Quarterly edited by G. R. Malkani and published by the Indian Institute of Philosophy at Amalner, India's leading philosophical periodical from its beginning in 1925 to its cessation in 1966, which first published seven of K. C. Bhattacharyya's articles.
