World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

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systematic analysis of our experience, the Upanişads help us to discover the Self in us by removing the veils which cover Professor R Balasubramanian 2 it and realize that it is no other than Brahman which is said to be the source and support of the world. The teaching of the Upanisads is that Brahman or Atman is the source of the manifested world, that it is immanent in all beings, sentient as well as non-sentient, that humans and other living beings are divine, and that nature is essentially spiritual. The metaphysics of the Upanisads is not descriptive, but transformative. The subject matter of the Upanişads is, therefore, extra-ordinary.
Like the subject matter, the method of inquiry pursued and practised by the Upanişads is extra-ordinary. It is true that they employ the tools of analysis and synthesis which are usually employed in philosophy. What is significant in the case of the Upanisads is that they employ these tools for deconstruction and reconstruction. Though it may appear that deconstruction is a new mode of philosophizing, the truth is that it is not really new. The technique of deconstruction has been used in the past by great masters, both in the East and the West, in their creative writings. Since philosophical thinking does not take place in a vacuum, every creative philosopher has to undo, sometimes partially, sometimes radically, what has been done by his/her predecessors in order to build a new structure. Aristotle has to deconstruct what he inherited from Plato for constructing his philosophical system. Ramanuja has to demolish the solid structure of Advaita for reconstructing his philosophy on the basis of the traditional sources. In recent times Sri Aurobindo, the great mystic-philosopher-poet, created a magnificent philosophy of synthesis known as Integral Philosophy by resorting to deconstruction followed by reconstruction. So is the case with Martin Heidegger in our own times. DECONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION THROUGH STORIES AND DIALOGUES :
To the Upanisadic thinkers, philosophy in an important sense is anthropocentric. It does not follow from this that theocentric and cosmocentric discourses are absent in the Upanişads. Though all the three dimensions of philosophy-anthropocentric, cosmocentric, and theocentric-are found in the Upanişads, the fact remains that philosophy is for the sake of man. God does not need philosophy. Nor do animals and nature require philosophy. But it is only humans who require the benefit of philosophy for the transformation or regeneration of their life, for over-coming the foundational ignorance they suffer from and thereby discovering the Self in them, which is no other than Brahman. Sankara tells us that, owing to the foundational or spiritual ignorance, human beings are engaged in their daily activities purely at the bodily, vital, sensory, and mental levels as if they were no more than the mind-sense-body complex forgetting the spiritual reality in them.2 What is uppermost in our daily life is body-consciousness, and not Self-conscious
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