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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
645
· Alternative Absolutes There are three forms of consciousness: knowing, willing, feeling. The relation ("implicative distinction”) between consciousness and its content (i.e., subject and object) is different in each form. In knowing the content is not constituted by consciousness; in willing the content is constituted by consciousness; in feeling the content constitutes “some kind of unity” with consciousness (II 129). Each, consequently, has its own "formulation of the absolute.” For knowing, the absolute is Truth; for willing, it is Freedom;72 for feeling, it is Value. The central thesis of Bhattacharyya's philosophy is that in reflective consciousness "these absolutes or formulations of the absolute" cannot be identified or integrated but are "in a sort of alternation” (II 128).
The content of knowing is not constituted by the knowing. "The particular act of knowing discovers and does not construct the object known." This is epistemological realism, 73 or rather a definition of what knowing means. Knowledge means "that the object known is in some sense independent of it.” The subjectivism of The Subject as Freedom is now recognized as due to a confusion between knowing and willing. This realism, however, has two qualifications: (1) The object may essentially "be constructed by some knowing," although not by the particular act by which we know it. Metaphysical idealism (mayavada) does not imply epistemological subjectivism (drishtisrishtivada);74 we know something insofar as it is independently of the knowing, even if it is only as illusion. (2) What we ordinarily claim to know may be at least partly dependent on the knowing, but if so it is known only "empirically," not truly or absolutely (II 129).
The content of willing is constituted by willing; apart from the willing it is nothing. The willed future, unlike the known future, is not fact but contingency, not what will be but what would be if willed, not already determined but being determined by the willing.
The content of feeling is unified with the feeling. Feeling is consciousness of an imperfect distinction between content and consciousness. It is consciousness of value, which is as much content as consciousness, not both at once but each alternately. We do not know, but we cannot deny, that the value of an object is in it (II 130).
72 Which he also calls "reality” (not to be confused with truth).
73 Realism (that what is known need not be known) cannot be proved, but subjectivism (that what is known is constituted by the knowing) is "plainly opposed to reflective testimony" (II 131).
74 Here Bhattacharyya agrees with the classical non-dualism of Shankara.
