Book Title: World of Philosophy
Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
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"The cult of the subject par excellence, a spiritual discipline of the theoretic reason, a method of cognitive inwardising, the possibility of which, as indeed of any method of realisation, is not ordinarily recognised,"21 A philosophical method implies a sereies of consecutive steps for the realisation of an end. The steps in Krishnachandra's philosophical method correspond to a gradation of subjctive functions, of modes of freedom from the object. We usually identify ourselves with body, our freedom from the perceived object is actually realised only in our bodily consciousness. This bodily consciousness is also imperfectly realised. The next stage of freedom is suggested by the distinction of the perceived object including the body from the ghostly object in the form of the image-idea and meaning which may be all designed “presentation". Consciousness as undissociated from such presentation, but dissociated from the perceived and felt body may be called presentational of psychic subjectivity. The dissociation of the subject or consciousness from this presentation conceived as a kind of object would be the next stage of freedom which may be called non-presentation or spiritual subjectivity. According to Krishnachandra, “The elaboration of these stages of freedom in spiritual psychology would suggest the possibility of a consecutive method of realising the subject as absolute freedom, of retracing the felt positive freedom towards the object into pure intuition of the self."22
In Krishnachandra's philosophy, a great emphasis is put on the subject. He deals elaborately with "the cult of subject" and "the subject as freedom." The cult of the subject involves abstraction from the object. The way to understand the word "subjective is to call it "non-objective." Krishnachandra observes, “The modes of subjectivity are the modes of freeing oneself from the modes of objectivity."23 The cult of the subject involves a feeling of dissociation of the subject from the object. It is a sort of an awareness of the subject as what the object is not. The most important characteristics of subjectivity, therefore, is the subjects awareness of its distinction from the objects.
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There are two basic terms in ontology, e.g., subject and object Subject and object involve each other. Krishnachandra makes it a point that the subject has always an awareness of its distinction from the object The object, at best its defined as "what is meant.” Object has always a “meant content". The awareness of the subject is definitely different from meaning awareness. The meaning awareness involves relation. It is exclusively the function of reason to give meaning awareness. Subject awareness entails withdrawal from the object. It is a sort of "Neo-Vedāntic Conception of Philosophizing." This "cognitive inwardisation" is a sort of consciousness which may be taken here as "intuition". It is not meaning
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