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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
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leading to a different mountain peak,83 and each peak is an absolute summit. The ways to the Absolute diverge; they coincide only at the starting point of ordinary experience where the non-absolutes mingle in confusion. No absolute can judge or be judged by another, for they are incommensurable. There is no external position from which one can be preferred to another, for they are absolute. They cannot be integrated in a higher synthesis, so far as rational philosophy can attain,84 for they are incompatible. No absolute can claim preference over the others,85 but each, once accepted, rejects the others. They are true alternatives, and "The Absolute" can only be described as their alternation.86
Mention of alternative absolutes sometimes evokes a negative response. This is understandable, in view of the traditional association of absolutism and monism, but its logical ground is questionable. The objection that the Absolute means that there is only one can be dismissed as definition by initial predication. The objection that there can be only one absolute Truth shows ignorance of the doctrine; absolute Truth may be one but there are other absolutes besides Truth. The objection that the Absolute should include everything is pantheism; non-dualist Vedanta seeks the Absolute not by including leverything but by excluding almost everything. The objection that plural absolutes would limit each other and therefore not be absolute is more serious. This is indeed the point. The theory is that absolute Truth, Freedom, and Value, being radically different and incommensurable, do not limit each other. Only partial truth, freedom, and value can be associated with and therefore limit each other. Logical questions, however, involve a consideration of the logic of alternation.
A metaphysics is associated with a logic. The logic justifies the metaphysics, but psychologically and existentially the metaphysics determines the logic; "whether one logical system is better than an
83 A practical corollary is that persons desiring to reach the same goal should follow the same path.
84 "Whether a mystical identity of the absolutes can be reached in the suprareflective consciousness does not concern us. Our problem is to show how reflection demands a specific absolute in each case" (II 128).
85 Choice among them can only be justified psychologically by individual temperament. The ways of knowing, willing, and feeling are for the intellectual, active, and artistic (sattvika, rajasika, tamasika) man respectively (I 173ff). Bhattacharyya himself, his son Kalidas remarked, was "cognitive;" that was the alternative he chose, but he recognized the equal possibility of the others.
86 "There is no sense in speaking of the absolute as the unity of truth, freedom and value. It is each of them, these being only spoken separately but not meant either as separate or as one" (II 116).
