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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
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tion, because they involve modes of negation (unrelatedness, negation of the emergent, indifference of being and non-being) unintelligible to the logic of understanding. Value is unity, that is, indetermination, not identity (II 117), of content and consciousness. This is the absolute for feeling (II 141).
The Absolute is "what is free from the implicational dualism of content and consciousness." There is an absolute for knowing, an absolute for willing, and an absolute for feeling. We cannot say that there are three absolutes or that there is only one; "the absolute is not a known content, about which alone the question 'one or many' has meaning" (II 141). Each is absolute; they are "understood together but not as together" (II 142). The Absolute is either truth or freedom or value, but not all. It is an alternation of truth, freedom," and value (II 143).
I will oversimplify still further the subtle and detailed argument" of the Presidential Address by restating it in my own words.18 Philosophy is rational analysis of experience, which is consciousness of some content. There are three conscious functions because there are three ways in which consciousness and content can be related. Content may determine consciousness: this is knowing. Consciousness may determine content: this is willing. Both may determine each other: this is feeling, as in the appreciation of beauty, which is neither purely objective nor purely subjective but a union of the two. Knowing is truth; willing is freedom; feeling is value. Ordinary experience is a confused mixture of the three, but each function can be purged of the accretions of the others and so become pure or absolute. We purge our knowing of its non-cognitive (volitional or emotional) accretions by rejecting its subjective elements" (in accordance with
75 The indefinite article, a concession to idiom, does not mean that the "absolutes" are members of a class; the definite article would be more precise but might wrongly suggest one absolute with three functions.
76 Bhattacharyya also calls this (unhappily, I think) reality (II 142), meaning (I take it) the concrete Self not limited by its conscious contents.
77 For example: "In one direction their [the absolutes'] identity and difference are alike meaningless and in another direction their identity is intelligible though not assertable. Truth is unrelated to value, value to reality and reality to truth while value may be truth, reality value and truth reality" (II 143).
78 Based on instruction by Bhattacharyya's student Professor T. R. V. Murti, to whom I am indebted for my introduction to this doctrine. This paragraph is condensed from my "Contemporary Vedanta Philosophy," Rev. of Met., 9 (1955-56), 665-69.
79 These would include such pseudo-cognitive elements as forms of intuition
