A Defence of Idealism

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, English philosophical enquiry was dominated by the Absolute Idealist viewpoint. John and Edward Caird in Glasgow, Thomas Hill Green in Oxford and their immediate followers in one or other of the Universities made a perfectly British compound of the rigorous Idealism of Kant and Hegel and the poetic idealism of Coleridge and Wordsworth. With the birth of the new century, the citadel of idealism found itself attacked from various quarters. Practically the first shot to be fired was “The reputation of Idealism” by George Edward Moore which appeared in Mind in 1903. Since then Idealism ceased to count in serious philosophical circles in England. The surviving Idealists, –F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosan­quet, Julian Webb, Sir Henry Jones, Ellis Mc Taggart and others ­brilliant and estimable as they were, betrayed a residue of uncer­tainty and hesitancy that only increased the doubts of the sincere enquirer. On the other hand, the substitutes for Idealism showed a dangerous tendency to multiply indiscriminately. Philosophical literature became a chaos illumined by rare flashes of lightning. Pragmatism, so typically American, found an English habitation in F.C.S. Schiller. Humanism achieved varying forms in the hands of Irving Babbitt, Ramon Fernandez and T. S. Eliot. Henri Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ saw its English counterparts in Lloyd Morgan’s ‘Emergent evolution’ and Samuel Alexander’s space-time emergents. Realism discovered its sponsors in Bertrand Russell, John Laird and A.N. Whitehead. Even scientists like Sir Oliver Lodge, J.A. Thompson, Julian Huxley, and A.S. Eddington felt the temptation to philosophise too irresistible. Their standpoint was definitely naturalistic, but most of them were wise enough to admit that mere naturalism was not competent to link inferences that could comprehend the whole universe. Grubb Street was not idle either. Wells and Bennett and Rebecca West – along with one-hundred others – vociferously soliloquised like Caliban on Setebos. Strangest of all, General Smuts came forward with his precious ‘Holistic evolution’ and felt convinced that man’s per­plexities have been solved once and for all. One read the latest books on theism, rationalism and atomism; one followed the unedifying discussions in the leading philosophical journals; one was confused, exasperated, reduced to desperation. Whatever was dear or not, one thing seemed to be certain – that Idealism was fighting a losing battle with its rivals in the realm of philosophy. The rivals did not agree among themselves, but it was no matter. They fell upon Idealism with fury and in its ultimate annihilation hoped to find their own salvation. It was a question of the Nazis and the Communists combining to exterminate the Socialists.

Indian philosophy has all along been inspired by the Idealist view of life. Idealism is in our blood. For us the ultimates of thought have constituted the base of the fabric of philosophy. Thought comes first and out of the manifold data of experience builds up the edifice of knowledge. To the Idealist the vision of the mystic and the intuitive perception of the seer are not less valid as experiences, because they are outside the domain of science as it is at present developed. Naturalism is quite an inade­quate view of life since it ignores all the concomitants of what it chooses to call psychical experience. Reason is fairly reliable; intellect is extremely competent, but there are departments of knowledge to which it has no access; intuition, on the other hand, is infallible. The intuitive seer has no need to set forth the why and wherefore of it; he knows with perfect finality. The Idealist who is willing to enthrone the mind is not out to banish intellect or reason or logic or science. They all serve their ends and contribute to the accumulation of knowledge. The affection I feel for a friend is a kind of knowledge to me and I am fully conscious of it; but I cannot mathematically prove it or scientifically demon­strate it. A volume of poetry is to me not the complex assortment of leaves of paper and sweet-smelling leather it appears to be, nor, as a scientist would express it, a few million billion electrons and protons desperately impinging against their neighbours a countless number of times. It is to me rather a treasure of know­ledge – the outcome of the poet’s experiences. Reading the poems,­ –even merely recapitulating their ideas and their rhythms – I see the poet’s rich experiences mapped out before me and it is as though I live them myself. The intenser my appreciation, the more identical will be my experience. Here is a phenomenon which does not come the way of science. But to deny such experience is not merely futile, it is absurd. The Absolute Idealist who makes a casual object the starting point for a chain of intellectual and intuitional deductions which eventually embraces the all and finds a kinship between the invisible electrons and the monstrous proportions of the stars – he is indeed a problem to men like William Archer who would fain express love and poetry and the fugitive outlines of ravishing natural phenomena in terms of the differential calculus. Sankara who was as powerfully intellectual as dozen William Archers, was careful to make intellect the willing slave of intuition, not the terrible Djin in the Arabian Nights, the slave who would kill the master who engendered him. Unfortunately, however, the lesson of Sankara and Ramanuja, Vedanta Desika and Appayya Dikshita, has been lost upon recent generations of Indians. We have been content to repeat, the old formulae, chant the traditional devotional songs, and at best to make a farce of reading the commentaries at the feet of some master. For the rest, philosophy in India has been either lifelessly historical or violently polemical. The Indian Pundit thought that all European philosophers were mimics and as utterly unworthy of his notice; a seventieth commentary on the Brahma Sutras was greater than all Spinoza or Kant. And no doubt the Western Pundit returned the compliment. Sankara was a third-rate Berkeley and it is obvious Ramanuja is an amalgam of Christian thought and Hindu Theology. Thus Idealism seemed to be dead as mutton in Europe no less than in Asia. One wondered if Shaw’s ‘Life Force’ will after all be the converging point for philosophical systems in the future. But it would appear matters are not as gloomy as all that. At any rate in his Hibbert Lectures on “An Idealist View of Life”, now issued in book form* , Professor Sir S. Radhakrishnan has given a new lease of life to Idealism as: a practical creed – and as a philosophical outlook.

There can possibly be no doubt that, An Idealist View of Life is a landmark in the history of philosophy. It is Professor Radha­krishnan’s most arduous attempt at a contribution to constructive philosophy. No one else in the modern world can claim his profound intimacy with the European as well as the Indian tradition in philosophy. He is that rare phenomenon, “a philosophical bilinguist.” In his now famous volumes on Indian philosophy, he had laid stress on the persistence of certain fundamental characteristics from the remote past down to our own days, minor differentiations in the various systems notwithstanding; with singular force and insinuating eloquence, he had demonstrated the underlying unity in Indian philosophy behind all the apparent diversity. But is that all? Or is all philosophy, Western and Indian, essentially one in its Idealistic approach to problems of life and conduct? In his Hibbert lectures, Professor Radhakrishnan takes into account the thought treasures of all countries and of all times. And he attempts to discern a unifying attitude to life that shall have the sanction of the eminent philosophers of the West and the East, that shall do no violence to our reason nor rudely trick our higher sensibilities. It is true that the East is East and the West is West – in a material sense, that is, which alone could have appealed to Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel-Laureate. But in the pages of An Idealist View of Life, the East and the West have really met, philosophy ought no more to countenance the cleavages of race, creed and colour.

Reading An Idealist View of Life aloud, one feels that here at any rate is philosophy which is not forbidding, which does not overwhelm the reader with a mass of incomprehensible verbiage. One feels, besides, that the lectures are spoken to one in his study, with familiarity, with disarming cordiality. Abstract philoso­phical conceptions are rendered in language that satisfies the mind but intoxicates the senses. (The Times Literary Supplemmt thought that the literary charm of the book is almost its greatest asset.) The transliteration of Sanskrit passages, the occasionally massive foot-notes, and the strings of quoted authorities may well put the most hard-headed Pundit to shame: and yet Professor Radha­krishnan never degenerates to the level of a mere Pundit. In his criticisms of what he calls the modern substitutes for religion–­Naturalism, Agnosticism, Humanism, Behaviourism. Pragmatism. Authoritarianism, and others too numerous to mention – he is specific without being rude, and he shows a capacity for under­standing, though he promptly explains why he could not accept the other points or view. Thus: “Naturalism asks us to endure truth and reverence reality, but we cannot do so if there is a cleft between Man and Nature. Religion, by insisting on an organic connection between the world of Nature and the world of values, delivers us from our isolation and transciency. It, therefore, takes us deeper than intellect and re-establishes the vital relationship already at work between Man and Nature.” (p. 58) No unnecessary varnish distorts the even flow of argument. But though the style is chastened, it is never dull. Ideas are carried out as inevitable sentences and are adjusted in memorable patterns. The whole discourse – part summary, part polemics and part creation – goes winding about and about and when one closes the book one knows that it is an admirable whole, nothing, superfluous, nothing ignored. And soon one must read the book again.

The lack of spiritual note in most of the substitutes for religion is what makes them unacceptable to Professor Radhakrishnan. They are too much taken up with the earth crust. None of them “shows an adequate appreciation of the natural profundity of the human soul” (P. 82) On the one hand, there is the practical inefficiency of Religion: for, “by postulating a perfect God who is responsible for the government of the universe, religion seems to take away the edge from ethical striving.” (p. 41) On the other hand, the proposed substitutes for Religion are found to be thoroughly disappointing, Could it be that philosophy too may be able to find a way out of this spiritual impasse? Professor Radhakrishnan answers in the affirmative: “It is the function of philosophy to provide us with a spiritual rallying centre, a synoptic vision, as Plato loved to call it, a Samanvaya, as the Hindu thinkers put it, a philosophy which will serve as a spiritual con­cordat, which will free the spirit of religion from the disintegration of doubt and make the warfare of creeds and sects a thing of the past.” (p. 83) The aim of philosophy thus interpreted, it is plain that its duty is to “find out whether the convictions of the religious seers fit in with the tested laws and principles of the universe.” (p. 85) What exists in its intrinsic fulness is only spiritual and the ultimates of the nature of reality could be sooner com­pehended a priori by a process of metaphysical reflection than by simple scientific experiment. Religious or spiritual experience, though it has not the mathematical primness of a chemical equation, has nevertheless its significant affirmations. These the great sages and seers of the world have known and they had never thought it necessary to question their validity. Professor Radhakrishnan enumerates these several affirmations: there is a mode of con­sciousness which unlike the perceptual. Imaginative or intellectual, carries with it, “self-evidence and completeness”; “the experience is not of the nature of a mere conjecture or creation, it is grapsed as a discovery or a revelation; God is the symbol in, which religion cognises the Absolute of philosophy; the intuitive realisation of the one-ness of the self and the universe is the beginning of real knowledge. The question arises whether intuitive, knowledge is irrational. Professor Radhakrishnan is emphatic on that point: intuition is not a non-rational process; “it is only non-conceptual. We have throughout life the intuitive and intellectual sides at work ... Intuition is neither abstract thought and analysis nor formless darkness and primitive sentience. It is wisdom, the nous of which Aristotle speaks, the all-pervading Intelligence of Dante.” (p. 153)

Some of the most moving passages in the book are contained in the chapter, “The spirit in Man,” in which the author pursues an inquiry into the causes of man’s artistic achievements. Aesthetic truths, poetic truths are apprehended not by scientific genius but by man’s intuitive consciousness. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is an edifice of beauty nurtured in a dream. The mystics and the great artists arrive at the stage of knowing, without going through the laborious bother of learning. The Alwars, the Acharyas, the Saiva-Samayacharyas and the other god-intoxicated souls who have gone before us but have left us an opulent legacy of song were the heralds of the Infinite, the first fruits of the future man.....They are the new ‘energents’, the beginnings of a new human species, the ‘sports’ in the biological expression in whom a qualita­tively new type is awakened.” (p. 209) Still it may be asked whether the certainty of God which Intuitive knowledge affirms is consistent with the general character of the physical world. If the constructive philosopher could prove that this is the case, then what was merely intuitive discovery become a logically self-sufficient fact. And this is what Professor Radhakrishnan proceeds to do in the succeeding chapters. Analysing the basic characteristics of the physical world we arrive at the primary electrons and protons beyond which analysis cannot go at present. One notices also the inter-dependence between every organism and its environment. Though science is valuable in explaining and interpreting the causal aspects of events, it finds itself up against a Chinese wall when it tackles the creative side. Why matter should exist at all’, and why should the primaries be two, electrons and protons, and not any other number? Sainer is silent on these questions.

In the two last chapters of the book, “Human personality and its Destiny and “Ultimate Reality.” Professor Radhakrishnan’s conclusions crystallise. What is human progress? “Human progress lies in an increasing awareness of the universal working in man. Through the exploring of Nature, the striving after wisdom and the seeking of God, the individual struggles to achieve a harmony between himself and his environment. He finds his goodness in what is more than himself.” While explaining the Hindu theory of Karma, Professor Radhakrishnan compares life to a game of bridge and develops the simile with consummate art: “The cards in the game are given to us. We do not select them. They are traced to past Karma, but we are free to make any call as we think fit and lead any suit. Only we are limited by the rules of the game. We are more free when we start the game than later on when the game has developed and our choices become restricted. But till the very end there is always a choice.....Even though we may not like the way in which the cards are shuffled, we like the game and we want to play......The great souls find profound peace in the conciousness that the stately order of the world, now lovely and luminous, now dark and terrible, in which man finds his duty and destiny, cannot be subdued to known aims. It seems to have a purpose of its own of which we are ignorant....Misfortune is not fate but providence.” (pp. 279-80) Answering the question why spiritual Universalism is a lower description of the Universe than ethical individualism or mathematical equation, Professor Radhakrishnan argues that though our knowledge may be clearer when the Universe is approached from the other views of life, yet “it is this mysterious, unclear and inarticulate knowledge (of the world as spirit) that brings us closest to reality.” (p. 311)

What then is the nature of the “ultimate reality”? Certain conclusions emerge. The world is an ordered whole and not an incongruent patchwork quilt; what exists relative to all else and individual existents strive towards greater cohesion with their sur­roundings; motion, neither irregular nor intermittent, is of the essence of existence; the changes that follow have a purpose which forge an increasing harmony and an ineffable radiance of joy; and “finally the supreme type of experience, to which the mystics alone have the key, transcends the axes of human reference and is so all embracing that it is meaningless to locate people who have reached the capacity for such untranslatable experience as anything apart from the wheel of cosmic process. The ideology of God, too, assumes a rational interpretation: He need be no anthropomorphic symbol, nor is it necessary to give him his conge to save ourselves on the face of reason. “The ultimate creative energy of the world is one and not many, for nature is too closely knit to be viewed as a scene of conflict between two or more powers. The first principle of the Universe possesses unity, consciousness and priority of existence.” (p. 332) “The process of the world is an emergence, but not of the type suggested by Alexander. It is an emergence under the guidance of God who is immanent in the process, though the goal is transcendent to it.” (p. 339) And lastly: “God, though immanent, is not identical with the world until the very end. Throughout the process there is an unrealised residium in God; but it vanishes when we reach the end; when the reign is absolute, the kingdom comes.” (p. 340)

We are now at the heart of the enquiry – the heart in which is implicit the whole. How is one to define the relation between the God of religion and the Absolute of philosophy? Professor Radhakrishnan is precise in his answer: “While thy Abosolute is pure conciousness and pure freedom and infinite possibility, it appears to be God from the point of view of the one specific possibility which has become actualised. While God, is organically bound up with the Universe, the Absolute is not ... The Absolute is the foundation and prices of all actuality and possibility.” (p. 343) Then he goes on to explain how the Indian figure of lila “makes the creation of the Universe an act of playfulness. Play is generally the expression of ideal possibilities. It is its own end and its own continuous reward. The Absolute mind has a perfect realm of ideal being, and is free creativity as well. Though the creation of the world is an accident in the never-ending activity of the Absolute, it satisfies a deep want in God. The world is as indispensable to God as God is to the world.” (p. 344) And then the whole argument rounds off with this clinching and convincing:

“God is the Absolute from the human end, when we limit down the Absolute to its relation with the actual possibility, the Absolute appears as supreme wisdom, love and goodness. The eternal becomes the first and last......As creator and saviour, God is transcendent to the true process, even as realisation is transcendent to progress. This internal transcendence of God to the true process gives meaning to the distinctions of value and makes struggle and effort real. We call the supreme the Absolute when we view it apart from the Cosmos, God in relation to the cosmos. The Absolute is the precosmic nature of God and God is the Absolute from the cosmic point of view.” (p. 345)

            An Idealist view of Life, the trend of whose main argument I have tried to summarise above, must be a splendid tonic to the vast body of cynicism-ridden youths in transitional India. The book has been hailed with a chorus of felicitations by persons of the eminence of J. H. Muirhead and William Ralph Inge. Of the intensity of Professor Radhakrishnan convictions and the persisting glow and glaring vitality of his strife it is surely banal to speak at this time of the day. That is a part of the public opinion of the cultured world. The antics or some of the Academic Councillors of the Madras University are really beneath one’s notice. Other books by Professor Radhakrishnan, admirable and extraordinarily competent as they were had more scholastic than human interest. Even The Hindu View of Life was but a glorious, slight thing. For the first time Professor Radhakrishnan has given us in An Idealist view of Life a book which is meant for all, and which is likely to save many, many souls from being ship-wrecked on the futilities of cynicism. Indians are eternally indebted to the Hibbert Trustees for having given in opportunity to Professor Radha­krishnan to integrate his conclusions and formulate his message.

So then, thanks to the timely intervention of the Indian philo­sopher, the Absolute idealist attitude still remains. The Universe is not blind destiny: life is not futile, nor religion is a meaning, it has value. There is ever concrete creative activity. The Absolute is all inclusive and therefore full of rush and tumult and impulsion. The idealist does not picture a static Universe which is rather all ­exclusive. Ideas are supreme and are always with us. The idealist view of life leaves nothing to conjecture; it learns everything at first hand, nor waits for an acceptance of it till a string of syllogisms passes its judgment. On the validity of intuitional experiences and the eternal attributes of thought. Absolute Idealism raises its philosophical structure. And in the delectable halls and arches and domes and stairs no less than in the totality of grandeur and symmetry in this exquisite edifice of Absolute Idealism, now renovated and polished by the devotion and genius of Professor Radhakrishnan, one sees the splendours and the fascinations and the infinities suggested as yet dimly by the following lines from The Excursion:

To every form of being is assigned,
An active principle: – howe’er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the Stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air,
Unfolded still the more, more visible,
The more we know; and yet is reverenced least,
And least respected in the human Mind
Its most apparent home.

* ‘An Idealist View of Life,’ Hibbert Lectures 1929, by S. Radha­krishnan, George Allen and Unwin.