Among
the contemporary interpreters and exemplars of
He
is the best speaker of our generation and century. In his eventful life, he
held with distinction and great honour great
positions in academic and public life of
Dr
Joad gives us a graphic account of the impression he
made on the Western audience as a speaker, some twenty years ago, in his book Counter
attack from the East (The Philosophy of Radhakrishnan).
He is the most gifted of our philosophical writers. In every speech
and every page of his writing, we see the undiminished vigour
of his thought, the arresting originality and the amazing sweep and range of
ideas. An expositor, he has the genius to explain clearly the most abstract and
difficult problems of philosophy and metaphysics in a most lucid manner.
“He has made righteousness readable.” The distinguishing characteristics of,
his dynamic idealism are a deep spiritual note, a catholic outlook, a quick
appreciation of the eternal values of all cultures and religions and an
abiding, confident optimism as to the future of human civilisation.
Radhakrishnan’s idealism discloses the influence of Sankara, Hegel, Plato and the doctrines of different
philosophers of evolution. In the construction and exposition of his system he
has met the criticism of philosophical concepts by modern Physics and Biology.
His idealism differs in some respects from Sankara’s
and from other Western parallels. His is essentially Upanishadic
idealism in its comprehensiveness. He accepts the monistic and theistic stands
of the Upanishads and does not subordinate the one to the other.”
The
central philosophical category in his idealism is the primacy of the spirit,
and its manifestation in matter, life, mind and self. The spirit is not a
homogeneous, non-composite entity like the Brahman of Sankara.
It is not the substance of Hegel. It is dynamic energy, not immobility.
It is something real in life, and by itself “we know it, we cannot explain it.
It is felt everywhere, though seen nowhere.” It is not physical body or the
vital organism, or the mind or the will, but something which underlies them all
and sustains them. It is the basis and background of our being, the
universality that cannot be reduced to this or to that formula.”
The
spirit with its characteristics–creativity, order, change
and progress–is present at all the levels of existence in an ascending series,
each representing a higher level than what precedes it. It is the presence of
the Spirit that is responsible for the development of matter into life, of life
into consciousness to self-consciousness. The development in evolution is not
merely continuous, but also marks the emergence of new levels. Man is not
naturally selected but is spiritually elected. Reality is a general unity or
continuity, running through different levels. The Spirit is not only imminent
but also transcendent.
The
Spirit is the Absolute. It has infinite possibilities present to it. The one
actual manifestation of it is the world. The Absolute is not exhausted in the
world. Other aspects of the Absolute are God and Souls. Creation is a free act.
The Absolute is in no way dependent on the world. It cannot add or take away
anything from the premises, as Spinoza would have us
believe. The Absolute is the ground of the world and it is so only in the sense
that the possibility of the Absolute is the logical process of the world. The
world could not be but for this possibility in the Absolute.” Here we see the
strong influence of Sankara’s Vavarta-vada,
in Radhakrishnan’s idealism.
God
is the Absolute viewed in the cosmic context. He is the Absolute in the empiric
dress. God does not amuse himself watching the universe and the drama of life.
He is organic with the world and He endures as along as the world lasts. Time,
God and the world are coeval. The world is relatively real. There is no dualism
of God and the world in his system. God is not the mere appearance of the
Absolute but is the very Absolute in the world
context. When all the souls attain the conscious realisation
of unity with the Spirit, God and the world lapse into the Absolute.
The
human self is conceived by Radhakrishnan as an organised whole and not as a fallen creature born in sin.
Man and spirit are akin to each other. Man and Spirit are consubstantial.
Through ceremonial purity and ethical perfection man acquires the necessary
merit for spiritual realisation. Spiritual experience
is realised fully in religious intuition.
The
concept of intuition is central to Radhakrishnan’s
idealism. Intuition is wisdom transcendent, it is different from intellectual
knowledge, yet not discontinuous with it. It is not contra-intellectual but
trans-intellectual. It is not an instinct. “It is not a shadowy sentiment or
pathological fancy fit for cranks and dancing derisives.”
It is not fancy or make-believe, but a bonafide
discovery of Reality. It is the response of the whole man to
reality. Intellect, emotion and will are fragmentary aspects and intuition is
their totality. Great scientific inventions, literary productions, artistic
achievements and moral reforms are touched by the Spirit and rooted in
intuition.” “We discover by intuition and explain by Logic.” Spiritual
intuition is another name for mystical experience.
Radhakrishnan
affirms that the future religion of the world is the religion of the mystics.
He calls it the Spiritual Religion, and its two characteristics are: it
is scientific and humanistic. In his “Eastern Religion and
Western Thought” he gives the more glorious account of the perennial philosophy
of the mystics and their history in the East and the West in some 150 pages.
His massive erudition, theological scholarship, and thorough documentation of
the facts and theories of mysticism leaves one supremely satisfied. He sums up
there, the role and characteristics of mysticism.
He
holds that religions today have to face science on one front and humanism on
the other. The religion of the Upanishadic mystics
that we find substantiated in the Gita does
not permit us to fly from social agonies. In his Kamala Lectures on “Religion
and Society,” he has described as to how religion should spread the
gospel of humanism and eliminate the gap between irresponsible wealth and human
misery. It does not seek to explain social injustice in terms of God’s will.
After some eighteen months stay in Russia, as India’s Ambassador at Moscow, he
declared in one of his speeches, that if religion fails to stress the humanist
elements, militant atheism will be the alternative to dishonest religion.”
“Religion has no secrets which absolve us from living.” It is not quiescent,
but combative. It starts with the individual, but it must end in a
fellowship. When the mystics refer to the kingdom of God they mean the entire world
community. He suggests that all the political ills, economic confusions and
psychical anxieties of our age can be set right by the power of the Spirit, a
power which will help us to discipline our passions of greed and selfishness
and organise the world which is at one with us in
desire.
Dr
Radhakrishnan’s interpretation of Buddhism reconciles
it with Advaita Vedanta. He has consistently
maintained in his British Academy Lecture on Gautama
the Buddha and other writings that Buddhism is not nihilism and Buddha is no
agnostic. Buddha, by no possible means, could have preached an arid rationalism
to his sixth century B. C. pupils and enjoyed at the same time the great
spiritual popularity he had. To regard Buddha as a rationalist and an agnogtic is to mistake his stature. Radhakrishnan’s
faithful and free English translations of the Bhagavad
Gita, The Dhammapada and
the translations of Upanishads, the representative religious classics of the
two systems, give us a clear idea of the unity of their moral and spiritual
outlook.
Radhakrishnan’s
idealism gives us a balanced and true picture of the relation between the
individual and the society. Two very different conceptions of human life are
struggling for the mastery of the world. Extreme individualism, on the one
hand, regards the society as a means for the individual’s well-being.
Collectivisms of East and West do not care for the individual but aim at
producing an efficient society and not the true individual with power and
freedom to pursue his aims. Radhakrishnan states that
the individual and the society, each considered apart from the other, is an
empty attraction. The real individual needs the society to grow to his best
stature. The society and the individual are not antithetical to each other.
They are inseparable.
In
the famous Library of Living Philosophy Series, edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp, a volume is devoted to the philosophy of Radhakrishnan. He takes his right place in that series of the
great philosophers of our age, e.g., Whitehead, Moore, Santayana,
Einstein and Dewey. Prof. Heinemann in his presidential address at the
International Philosophical Congress in America, 1921, mentioned Radhakrishnan as a representative idealist along with Bosanquent. His influence on modern Indian thought and
education is of the foremost importance. He represents the best in the West and
East.