Book Title: Search For Absolute In Neo Vedanta
Author(s): George B Burch
Publisher: George B Burch

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Page 46
________________ 656 BURCH the Self, as classical non-dualism teaches, Brahman or absolute Truth is definable as what Self is not. To be spoken at all, even symbolically, an entity must be somehow distinct, and so distinguished from something, but the Absolute has nothing outside itself from which to be distinguished. It can be distinguished only from alternative forms of itself. Truth is the Absolute, but the Absolute is not necessarily Truth. It may be Truth, or it may be what Truth is not, or it may be their indeterminate togethernessabsolute Truth, Freedom or Value (II 116). The theory of alternative forms of the Absolute is not a paradoxical accretion to the theory of the Absolute but is what makes possible any theory of the Absolute at all. Absolute Willing The process of willing which leads to the Absolute as Freedom has its fullest systematic presentation in the book The Subject as Freedom already analyzed. This book, however, was written before Bhattacharryya had formulated the doctrine of the alternative forms of the Absolute. Knowing and willing are not clearly distinguished, and absolute Subject as absolute Freedom seems to be also absolute Truth. Still, if read with care, the book is not inconsistent with the later doctrine, which may even be said to be implicit in it. His final doctrine might be formulated: the Subject as Freedom, the Objec(101 as Truth, their Unity 102 as Love. In The Subject as Freedom the dialectic is rigorous pursuit of the subjective attitude. In "The Concept of Philosophy” it is rather different: the first step is from perceivable fact to self-subsistent object; the second step is from objectivity to subjectivity; the third step is from subjectivity to Truth. The individual subject or self known in introspection is the antepenultimate stage in the former work, the penultimate in the latter. In the former this is transcended in favor of the larger, non-individual, subject; the greater 1, and this in turn in favor of Freedom itself as what subjectivity is. In the latter it is transcended in favor of Truth, the absolute object, more fundamental than facts or universals but opposed to the subject, defined indeed as what the subject I is not. The two concepts of the Absolute are not only different but opposed. In the article absolute Truth is Being: "the absolute as transcending the enjoyed reality of religion is positive being (truth) or positive non 101 Or, at any rate, the non-ego, if the word object is taken to involve reference to subject (1 151). 102 Or, as he would put it, their indeterminate togetherness.

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