English
We are not introduced here to a haphazard collection of opinions and random state¬ ments, but to an all-embracing world-view of that great Individual, the Grand Etre of Humanity. This is not, however, within the easy reach of a European side-view of Humanity,—such as we have, for example, in Windelband who announces under the palpable influence of a characteristic idolum tribus —that the ‘History of Philosophy is the process in which European humanity has em¬ bodied in scientific conception its views of the world and its judgments of life.’t It might, however, be pleaded in defence that the two epithets ‘European’ * Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 18-14. t A History of Philosophy, p. 9. THE CULTURAL VALUE OP THE VEDANTA 375 and ‘scientific’ are mutually convertible terms, and, as such, in a statement of fact, there can be no insinuation of an invidious distinction within Humanity. But, then, the alleged fact may not itself be an accredited fact, and it may eventually turn out to be a discredited fact. The equation in question, arbitrary as it is, is still open to question, and one can pertinently ask : ‘ Who shall arbitrate?’ Now, it is in the recognition of a tertium quid — the cultural factor—that there is provided a bulwark against the aberrations of a panlogism and indivi¬ dualism in the reading of the views of the world. Uniting, as it does, the complementary half-truths in these one-sided methods, it has the efficacy of stressing the all-important truth that the develop¬ ment of philosophy is not the only aim of the world- process but a part of the universal aim operative therein. Viewed in this light, the individual philosopher appears to be as much the product as the creator of the age he lives in, and thus is justified the claim both of the logical and the alogical factor. As shaping forces in the history of civilisation, these world-views are to be regarded not so much as doctrines or results of reflection, as postulates or vital reactions. On that understanding the ‘Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the architecture of the Middle Ages ; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe’s poetry and the music of Beethoven. ’* * Falckenberg, History of Philosophy (Eng. Trans.), Introduction. 976 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA Accordingly, misled essentially are those who swear by a ‘disinterested intellectual curiosity’ as the sole inspirer of philosophic pursuits, and charge Indian philosophy with a betrayal of intellectual trust so f$r as it represents philosophical activities in an instrumental relation to Moksha or redemption from all the miseries of existence as the highest good (tnwgwn:) of man. Indeed, subserviency to interests, other than strictly theoretical, must needs be judged a serious disqualification on the part of a philosophical inquirer. But, then, a true philo¬ sophy, as Bradley reminds us so often, cannot, with¬ out shamefully abandoning the charge committed to its care, make an apotheosis of the purely theo¬ retical impulse. It is called upon to justify every side of human nature, and thus to substantiate the pledge initially held out. Well might those that espouse the forlorn cause of Indian philosophy, and of Vedanta in particular claim, in the language of Samkara, that this is its very individuality, or pecu¬ liar excellence, if you please ( BW1 W qgw i if ’ wft *srf *&rcrraT*Tfi: awwam i ; that all the values of life, theoretical or practical are grounded in one consummate value All the systems of Indian philosophy, whatever their respective persuasions, acknowledge the supremacy of one such intrinsic value, and present the whole set of values in a graded hierarchy terminating in the Supreme. Without such a systematisation or co-ordination of the values, a philosophical system forfeits its title to that appellation. Indeed, for better or for worse, system-building has ever been THE CULTURAL VALUE OP THE VEDANTA in the blood of Indian thinkers, and as a rule Indian philosophy has been either a system or nothing at all. After all, it is quite in the fitness of things that the logical Idea, along with the passion for a theoretical consistency and disinterested intellectual curiosity, should be acclaimed the sovereign master in the realm of intellectual achievements. While it is proper to insist on the virtues of a disinterested intellectual curiosity or love of truth for its own sake, it is well to remember that it can easily be overdone, or made a fetish of. This ‘ disinterested intellectual curiosity,’ be it further remembered, v is itself an interest, akin to the Platonic tpas, and, unless provided with safeguards, it is too apt to degenerate into an obsession. Nowhere doe3 this fixation reveal itself in a more unalloyed and concen¬ trated form than in ‘ a free man’s worship ’ which, according to Mr. Bertrand Bussell, should draw its inspiration from what he terms, with the force of an epigram, * the gospel of unyielding despair.’ Now, whatever we may choose to think of its merits as a philosophical dissertation, there is no gainsay¬ ing the point that it is destined to rank, by the sheer force of its ‘austere beauty’ and stylistic charm, if not, also, in respect of its philosophic depth or vigour, as one of the masterpieces of Eng¬ lish literature, and, as surely, as one of the philoso¬ phical classics of our age. These, combined with the contagious passion for passionlessness,—an emotional frigidity or apathy, as the very quintes¬ sence of Stoic wisdom—account for the hypnotic spell cast on every reader of this philosophical essay. 48 378 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA But the discerning and self-possessed student can hardly fail to notice that the passion for disinter¬ ested intellectual curiosity and a standardised theo¬ retical consistency appears in excelsis and is, so to speak, running riot here. We may or may not subscribe to Bradley’s contention that the demand for theoretical consistency, which mutilates the substance of religion, starts from error in principle and leads, in the result to practical discord or sterility.* But there is absolutely no justification for that sorry exhibition, and that in the name of intellectual probity and scientific disinterestedness, of that spirit of bravado and ‘sham heroism’ that lie on the surface of the ‘ gospel of unyielding despair.’ There is evidently more wisdom in the sage counsel: “Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then despair!” The emancipation of the intellect from ‘desire,’ its ‘last prison-house,’ is, admittedly, a salutary advice so far as it goes, but one has to see that it dees not go too far, and end by throwing away the babe along with the bath. A relentless rejection of all petty, private interests, and the cultivation of a temper of judicial neutrality, must undoubtedly be put in the forefront as being an essential pre-requisite of the pursuit of truth; for these alone have the efficacy of purifying the. intellect, and predisposing it in such a way to make it a fit recipient of truth. But in carrying out this purificatory rite, one stands in danger of making a holocaust of the abiding or permanent interests, in * Eaaaya on Truth and Reality, p. 482. THE CULTURAL VALUE OP THE VEDINTA a word, the values, along with the changing or ephe¬ meral interests of life, and thus carrying the process beyond the saturation-point of a total indifferentism.. There is surely no heroism in renouncing things which a man has no right to renounce; nor is there any moral grandeur—and, if there be one got up, it is a fictitious one—about a martyrdom that is as gratuitous as it is foolhardy. “ It is vain,” as Kant reminds us, ‘‘to profess indifference to those ques¬ tions to which the mind of man can never really be indifferent.” Indeed, there is such a thing as * os¬ tentatious poverty’—the classic prototype of which we have in the meeting of Diogenes, the Cynic, with Plato, the intellectual aristocrat. When, the nil admirari cynic visited Plato in the latter’s house, he is said to have ealled out to the latter to the fol¬ lowing effect: ‘‘Look here, Plato; thus do I tread on your carpet.” ‘‘But not without pride” was the smart reply of the other, who is reported to have followed it up with the remark : ‘ ‘I see into your pride through the holes in your jacket.” Now, whose was the victory?—Of the aggressive, world- renouncing cynic, or of the unostentatious philoso¬ pher-king? The verdict of history has not left it a dubious issue. The anecdote is, however, not without a moral for us. If we care to read between the lines of ‘a free man’s worship’—without allow¬ ing ourselves to be carried away by its insidious rhetoric—we should detect in it a morbid passion for passionlessness, a sentimental yearning for mar¬ tyrdom for its own sake which has neither sanity nor seemliness about it. ‘But if martyrdom is to 380 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA be proclaimed as a gospel for man, it must be more than courageous; it must be in the best sense wise and profitable.’* Such is the inevitable response to Mr. Russell’s delusive gospel of renunciation that ‘for man.it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day;.proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but un¬ yielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of uncon¬ scious power.