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

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Page 53
________________ K. C. BHATTACHARYYA 663 (How cool is the breeze !) and this in turn to expression of feeling of feeling (How I enjoy the cool breeze !). In feeling of feeling the value is completely freed from the object and becomes absolute (II 291). Coordinate with the value of a known content is that of a willed content (II 285). Willing as such is not value (II 293); to say, "We should act thus," is only an imperative. But to exclaim, "How we should act thus !” is to feel the sacredness of the ought (II 292). Sacredness is the holiness of an impersonal will felt to be embodied in the object, as beauty is an impersonal joy embodied in it (II 293). The value of an act depends on the moral value of the ideal impersonal willing which determines it, and the judgment on it is aesthetic relative to the judgment on that ideal willing (II 294). What is eternally willed is goodness or freedom (II 295), which is felt "as negation of the objectivity of the subject and yet as its constitutive reality” (II 297). Feeling or valuation is thus a process intermediate between knowing and willing (II 298). This distinction between value of a known object and value of a willed act suggests an answer to the question raised above whether absolute feeling should not be called Love rather than Value. The content of feeling in general is value, but it has alternative modes. The value of known object is beauty; that of willed act is love. We might say that love is the subjective, beauty the objective, aspect of that value which is felt by union of subject and object, and that absolute Value is an alternation of absolute Beauty and absolute Love.116 CONCLUSION A fourth phase of K. C. Bhattacharyya's thought is constituted by speculations between his final retirement in 1937 and his death in 1949. With failing eyesight but unfailing mind, he developed especially the abstract logical aspect of the dialectic of alternation. These speculations survive, probably not permanently, in a mass of written fragments, never edited (I x), and in the recollections, never reduced to writing, of conversations with his sons Gopinath, the edi 116 Analogous distinctions between Truth as reflection of outer reality or assertion of inner reality and Freedom as detachment or creation might generate a system of six alternative forms of the Absolute, three objective and three subjective.

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