Of all the distinguished thinkers in the modern Indian tradition, few may claim so wide a range of achievement as Radhakrishnan. Not only did he produce a range of philosophical works demonstrating creative thought, depth of scholarship and powers of assimilation which are rarely equalled, but combined this with a career in politics culminating in his appointment as President of India. Moreover, all the facets of his life are informed by breadth of culture, a deep knowledge not only of Indian but also of western thought and institutions, and a willingness to review each in the light of the other. If his own philosophy is a modified version of Advaita Vedanta, with a great and acknowledged debt to Sankara,1 his adherence to it is not to be thought of as an instance of cultural determinism, but a reasoned preference in the light of a thorough awareness of the alternatives. His philosophy, which he came to refer to as the religion of the spirit, is developed in a long series of distinguished works. Nondualism and a reinterpreted doctrine of maya form the basis for a complete system embracing ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, this last culminating in a form of spiritual life lived not in retreat but in service to the world.
The roots of Radhakrishnan’s intellectual cosmopolitanism are to be found in the circumstances of his early life. Born in the town of Tirutani (near Madras) in 1888, Radhakrishnan attended schools run by Christian missionaries until 1908. During school hours he was educated in a Christian setting, whilst his home life was one of traditional Hindu piety. The contrast between the two traditions sparked an interest which never left him, becoming the driving motive for his many essays in comparative thought. The first was the two-volume Indian Philosophy (1923 and 1927) which, despite its title, employs a comparative approach.
By the time this work was published, Radhakrishnan had begun the academic career which was to last until 1962; from 1953 to 1962 he was chancellor of the University of Delhi. From 1946 onwards, senior university posts were combined with diplomatic appointments, e.g. headship of the Indian delegation to UNESCO (1946–1952) and Indian Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1949–1952). His career culminated in Indian politics: he served as Vice-President of India from 1952 to 1962, and President from 1962 to 1967.2
Throughout this period, Radhakrishnan issued a series of major philosophical works. Some are scholarly editions of classics of Hindu and Buddhist thought: The Bhagavad Gita (1948); The Dhammapada (1950); The Principal Upanisads (1953) and The Brahma Sutra (1968). In other works, Radhakrishnan develops his own philosophy and draws out its consequences when applied to the thought and institutions of the West, e.g. The Hindu View of Life (1926); An Idealist View of Life (1932) and Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1939). By common consent, the second of these is regarded as the most complete and accessible statement of Radhakrishnan’s own views. At the end of a long and varied life, during which he had travelled widely and lived in many countries other than India, Radhakrishnan was optimistic about human nature and its future:
There are no fundamental differences among the peoples of the world. They have all the deep human feelings, the craving for justice above all class interests, horror of bloodshed and violence. They are working for a religion which teaches the possibility and the necessity of man’s union with himself, with nature, with his fellow men, and with the Eternal Spirit of which the visible universe is but a manifestation.3
At the philosophical base of Radhakrishnan’s thought lies the metaphysics of Advaita (nondual) Vedanta. Being-as-is or reality is not the phenomenal world of discrete entities in space and time, but a oneness, Supreme, Brahman or Absolute (all these terms are used in Radhakrishnan’s works) to which no conceptual categories apply. Brahman is
non-dual, free from the distinctions of subject and object . . . [it is] before all phenomena, before all time and . . . is equally after all phenomena and all time. Yet it is neither before nor after. It is that which is, real, unhistorical being itself. We cannot think it, enclose it within categories, images and verbal structures.4
The question arises at once as to how the oneness of Brahman, eternal and divisionless, is related to the many, the world of spatio-temporal individuals. Three major answers have been given to this question, and Radhakrishnan follows Sankara in dismissing them all: (1) creation: to say that Brahman created the universe presupposes that Brahman was once alone and then decided (so to speak) to have company, but no reason can be given for such a decision; (2) manifestation: this concept is no help, since it is utterly unclear how the infinite can manifest itself in a finite form; (3) transformation: this view involves a dilemma: either Brahman is wholly transformed into the universe or only a part of Brahman is thus transformed. If the former, then there is no Brahman beyond the universe, and if the latter it follows that Brahman can be partitioned and is not a unity. In Radhakrishnan’s view, the problem of the one and the many in metaphysics and theology is insoluble: ‘The history of philosophy in India as well as in Europe has been one long illustration of the inability of the human mind to solve the mystery of the relation of God to the world.’5 We have the universe of individuals which is not self-sufficient and in some sense rests on Brahman, but the exact nature of the relation between them is a mystery.
Advaitism involves not only the question of the relation of one and many, but also that of the status of the many. Brahman alone is real, and to many thinkers it has seemed to follow that the many (the ordinary world) are unreal, even an illusion (maya) and so unworthy of attention. Radhakrishnan was deeply conscious that nondualism has sometimes been so interpreted as a justification for ignoring the world and its suffering, and this he regarded as morally unacceptable:
That human suffering will be healed, that the whole world will vanish like a pitiful mirage, that all our trouble is of our own making, and that in the world’s finale all people will find that absolute oneness which will suffice for all hearts, compose all resentments and atone for all crimes, seem to many to be pious assumptions. The entranced self-absorption which arms itself with sanctity, involves a cruel indifference to practical life hardly acceptable to average intelligence.6
In Radhakrishnan’s view, the doctrine that the status of the phenomenal world is that of maya (which he accepts) is not to be construed as the view that it is a dismissible illusion. The correct understanding of maya is this:
The world is not a deceptive façade of something underlying it. It is real though imperfect. Since the Supreme is the basis of the world the world cannot be unreal. Maya has a standing in the world of reality . . . In Hindu thought, maya is not so much a veil as the dress of God.7
The world is not merely an illusion, and there is no justification for ignoring it.
The next serious philosophical issue involved in Advaitism arises in the area of epistemology or the theory of knowledge. All ordinary human experience is conceptual in nature, i.e. is organized under the categories in which we ordinarily think. However, Brahman is said to be predicateless, or, in other words, such that in principle no concepts apply to it: concepts presuppose division, and Brahman is a unity. How, then, is any form of awareness of Brahman possible for human beings? Radhakrishnan’s reply is that the assumption on which this objection is based, namely that all human knowledge is derived either from sense-experience or reasoning, is false, since it misses out a third mode of knowing. This third possibility he calls intuition or intuitive apprehension.
Intuition, like sense-experience, is immediate, but it is not conceptual. In intuition, there is no distinction between knower and known, no mediation of the object of experience by any concepts. Rather, it is knowing by fusion of subject and object:
This intuitive knowledge arises from an intimate fusion of the mind with reality. It is knowledge by being and not by senses or symbols. It is awareness of the truth of things by identity. We become one with truth, one with the object of knowledge. The object known is seen not as an object outside the self, but as a part of the self.8
The example of intuitive apprehension most frequently given is self-awareness. We are aware of our self, as we are aware of emotions like love or anger, not by any process of inference but by being it. Radhakrishnan contends that everything known by sense-experience or the use of reason can in principle be known by intuition. Since intuitive grasp of an object is complete, intuitive knowledge of that object cannot grow: it is final, unlike other forms of knowledge which can be added to. It is not to be confused with imagination, since intuition is direct awareness of reality, and so always coheres with truths derived from sense-experience or reason. (Radhakrishnan assumes, in accordance with Advaitist metaphysics, that there is no contradiction in reality, and so that all truths are compatible.) Whilst this is so, because of its nonconceptual nature, the findings of intuition can be uttered only obliquely in linguistic terms: the vocabulary of intuition is that of myth and art, not science. Again, no intuitive finding can be doubted: all carry a feeling of absolute finality and satisfaction.9 Where the object (so to speak) of this mode of knowing is Brahman, what Radhakrishnan calls intuition coincides precisely with what is usually termed mystical experience.10
His analysis of mystical experience follows the classic Advaitist line. He begins by distinguishing the empirical self or ego from what he calls the true subject – in traditional Hindu terminology, this is the distinction between the jivatman and the atman. The empirical self is the subject of psychology, the congeries of thoughts, emotions and sensations of which we are aware by introspection. The true subject, by contrast, cannot be introspected, since it is the precondition for introspection. It is what Kant termed the ‘Ich denke’ (‘I think’), that in virtue of which a given experience is mine and not anyone else’s, the precondition of self-conscious experience. It is studied in metaphysics, not psychology. This true subject Radhakrishnan identifies with spirit: it is ‘the simple, selfsubsistent, universal spirit which cannot be directly presented as the object . . . While the empirical self includes all and has nothing outside to limit it.’11 If the true self has no limit, then it is identical with Brahman, ‘the Universal Self active in every ego even as it is the universal source of all things’.12 Brahman and atman are one and the same.
This view that human nature is tripartite, involving not only body and mind but also atman or spirit, is one of the key presuppositions of the law of karma. This law states that we will reap what we sow and entails that the universe is ultimately just. Our actions build our character which in turn influences further decisions as to action: every decision we take is morally significant because every decision shapes our destiny. This doctrine is not compatible with the view that human nature is limited to mind and body:
If man were a mere object of study in physiology, if he were a mere mind described by psychology, his conduct would be governed by the law of necessity . . . [but] There is in us the Eternal different from the limited chain of causes and effects in the phenomenal world.13
Body and mind are subject to causal laws, but the atman is not.
It may be objected to the law of karma that it is false to the facts: that the wicked often prosper at the expense of the good. This difficulty is accommodated by the doctrine of reincarnation: we will inevitably reap what we sow, if not in this life then in a future one. Not to accept the hypothesis of reincarnation, Radhakrishnan argues, would mean accepting a meaningless element in an otherwise orderly cosmos: ‘In an ordered world, sudden embodiment of conscious life would be meaningless and inconsequential. It would be a violation of the rhythm of nature, an effect without a cause, a fragmentary present without a past.’14 However, the doctrine of reincarnation is in turn open to a powerful objection: why do we not remember our past lives? Of what benefit is it to us to suffer if we do not know why we are suffering? If we are not aware that our present suffering is retribution, how will it help us avoid misdeeds in the future? Radhakrishnan replies that we do not ordinarily conclude from the fact that we have forgotten many experiences that it was not we who had them. Personal identity does not depend on memory of individual events. Rather, our past shapes us by forming dispositions, and it is these that are carried over between incarnations. What is reborn is not the same personality, but the results of experience: we take with us our character.15
The views set out above have far-reaching consequences, notably in ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. In ethical theory or meta-ethics, Radhakrishnan’s metaphysics and epistemology leave him little choice but to accept a form of intuitionism, i.e. the view that our awareness of what is good or what it is right or dutiful to do is not furnished by deductions from moral principles, but by (in his special sense of the term) intuition: ‘In our ethical life . . . intuitive insight is essential for the highest reaches . . . Mere mechanical observance of rules or imitation of models will not take us far. The art of life is not a rehearsal of stale parts.’16 Those in touch with the reality of Brahman rarely have need of moral rules, and often appear unconventional to the mass of humanity, lacking this insight and forced to rely on moral codes.
The libertarianism which is part of Radhakrishnan’s interpretation of the law of karma is also used by him in his response to the problem of evil, his answer to the question why Brahman or God has permitted the existence of evil in the universe. Evil is permitted by God because it can be excised from the universe only if human beings are denied freedom of the will. We are made in the image of God insofar as we are creative, and
While animals are creatures we are creaturecreators. There is no animal delinquency. Evil is not passivity but activity. Without creative freedom man cannot produce either a paradise or desolation on earth. God permits evil because he does not interfere with human choice.17
The themes of intuition and creativity lead Radhakrishnan to an interest in aesthetics, where they combine with his metaphysics in an analysis of the nature of artistic creativity and of what works of art can do for us. Creativity is a form of intuition, and so is characterized by oneness of artist and subject-matter:
In poetic experience we have knowledge by being as distinct from knowledge by knowing. The mind grasps the object in its wholeness, clasps it to its bosom, suffuses it with its own spirit, and becomes one with it.18
It follows further that the outcomes of artistic creation, works of art, are not vehicles for pleasure but for the profoundest of truths:
Art as the disclosure of the deeper reality of things is a form of knowledge . . . [the artist] discerns within the visible world something more real than its outward appearance, some idea or form of the true, the good and the beautiful, which is more akin to the spirit itself than to the visible things . . . Poetic truth is a discovery, not a creation.19
The artist is akin to the mystic and the seer: the beauty manifested in art is the beauty of reality revealed, not a confection invented by the artist’s imagination.
The intuition involved in artistic creativity or in the moral life is a pale reflection of the ultimate form of this experience, mystical union or direct apprehension of Brahman. It is this experience, Radhakrishnan argues, which underlies all religion: ‘Religion means conscious union with the Divine in the universe, with love as its chief means.’20 Such experience has no connection with adherence to a specific set of dogmas or religious practices. The great figures in the history of religion do not enforce belief or ritual, but seek to bring about a change of heart: ‘They invite the soul to its lonely pilgrimage and give it absolute freedom in the faith that a free adaptation of the divine into oneself is the essential condition of spiritual life.’21 This belief leads Radhakrishnan to advocate religious toleration in a very generous form, an attitude he associates particularly with Hinduism.22
Whatever the rites and beliefs involved, the goal of all religious practice is the same: release (S: moksa), which is the same as eternal life. Release is not a mode of being which will be had after death in a special place or heaven. It consists in the transformation of the inner life which occurs after mystic union with the one. It is not the destruction of the world but the shaking free from the false view of it which is avidya. It is an egoless mode of existence, and utterly satisfying: ‘Release is not a state after death but the supreme status of being in which spirit knows itself to be superior to birth and death, unconditioned by its manifestations, able to assume forms at its pleasure.’23 Such a state can be achieved via many routes during life24 and those who attain it are said to be jivan-mukti (free while living). Those who have achieved this peak of spiritual development work for the goal of the ultimate release of all (sarva-mukti). When this condition has been achieved, the cosmic process ceases, and the universe lapses back into Brahman.
Radhakrishnan’s philosophy is by no means free from difficulties. Some are those of Advaitism in general – the problem of finding a way to characterize the relation of one and many, or of finding a reason for the manifestation of Brahman as the universe – while others are peculiar to his version of it, e.g. the assumed identity of the Kantian ‘I think’ with atman. Its virtues, however, are very considerable: comprehensiveness, seriousness, sincerity and a basis of formidable learning. There can be no doubt that this system deserves its honoured place in modern Indian thought.
The titles of works most frequently cited are abbreviated as follows: BS = The Brahma Sutra; ERWT = Eastern Religions and Western Thought; HVL = The Hindu View of Life; IP = Indian Philosophy; IVL = An Idealist View of Life; PU = The Principal Upanisads.
1 He writes of Sankara, transliterated by him as Samkara, as follows: ‘Samkara’s system is unmatched for its metaphysical depth and power . . . It is a great example of monistic idealism which it is difficult to meet with an absolutely conclusive metaphysical refutation . . . Even those who do not agree with his general attitude to life will not be reluctant to allow him a place among the immortals.’ IP, II, pp. 657–658).
2 During his life, Radhakrishnan refused all requests to write autobiographical statements. There is now, however, an excellent biography by his son: Sarvepalli Gopal, Radhakrishnan: A Biography, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1989.
3 ‘The religion of the spirit and the world’s needs’, repr. in Whit Burnett (ed.), This Is My Philosophy, London, Allen & Unwin, 1958, p. 366. This piece was first printed in P.A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, New York, Tudor Publishing Co., 1952.
4 BS, pp. 118 and 176, cf. PU, pp. 52 sqq; IVL, pp. 271 sqq.; ERWT, pp. 20 sqq.
5 HVL, p. 49; cf. IVL, pp. 140 sqq; BS, p. 150; ERWT, pp. 90 sqq.
6 IP, II, p. 657. cf. ERWT, ch. iii, esp. pp. 84 sqq.
7 BS, pp. 156–157. Consonantly with this interpretation of maya, Radhakrishnan construes avidya not as intellectual ignorance but as spiritual blindness, lack of awareness of the reality of spirit, of. BS, p. 21.
8 IVL, p. 109.
9 IVL, pp. 101–112, cf. BS, pp. 105 sqq.
10 cf. BS, pp. 109 sqq.
11 IVL, p. 215.
12 BS, p. 147, cf. PU, pp. 77–78.
13 BS, p. 195.
14 BS, p. 190, cf. IVL, pp. 227 sqq.
15 cf. BS, pp. 190–207; PU, pp. 113–117; IVL, pp. 227–239.
16 IVL, p. 155.
17 BS, p. 155.
18 IVL, p. 145.
19 IVL, p. 152. This interpretation of the artist as penetrative to the truth of things often forms part of philosophies incorporating a one and a many, e.g. most of the English Romantic poets accepted a very similar set of views, cf. C.M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press., 1950.
20 IVL, p. 161.
21 ibid., cf. HVL, pp. 6–7.
22 cf. e.g. BS, p. 170; HVL, pp. 28 sqq; ERWT, ch. viii.
23 BS, p. 215, cf. PU, pp. 117–131; IVL, pp. 97–99. This idea is not peculiar to the Hindu tradition. There are very close parallels in Buddhist literature, and the Sufi mystics of Islam also write of release in a similar way, e.g. Farid al-din ‘Attar (1119–1230?): ‘Whoever leaves this world behind him passes away from mortality, he attains to immortality. If thou dost desire to reach this abode of immortality . . . divest thyself first of self’ (F.C. Happold, Mysticism, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p. 258).
24 Radhakrishnan adopts a traditional analysis (as does e.g. Vivekananda) of different paths to release: by work (karma); devotion (bhakti); or meditation (dhyana); cf. BS, pp. 151–183.
The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, 1918
The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, 1920
Indian Philosophy, 2 vols, 1923 and 1927
The Hindu View of Life, 1926
An Idealist View of Life, 1932
Gautama – The Buddha, 1938
Eastern Religions and Western Thought, 1939
Religion and Society, 1947
The Bhagavad Gita, 1948
The Dhammapada, 1950
The Principal Upanisads, 1953
The Brahma Sutra, 1968
Badarayana, Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo
Bowra, C.M., The Romantic Imagination, London, Oxford University Press, 1950
Burnett, W. (ed.), This is My Philosophy, London, Allen & Unwin, 1958
Gopal, S., Radhakrishnan: A Biography, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1989
Happold, F.C., Mysticism, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970
Radhakrishnan, S., Indian Philosophy, Vol. I and Vol. II, London, Allen & Unwin, 1923 and 1927
Radhakrishnan, S., Eastern Religions and Western Thought, 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1940; 1st edn, 1939
Radhakrishnan, S., The Bhagavad Gita, 2nd edn, London, Allen & Unwin, 1949
Radhakrishnan, S., The Principal Upanisads, London, Allen & Unwin, 1952, repr. 1969
Radhakrishnan, S., The Brahma Sutra (of Badarayana), London, Allen & Unwin, 1960
Radhakrishnan, S., The Dhammapada, Madras, Oxford University Press, 1966; 1st edn, 1950
Radhakrishnan, S., The Hindu View of Life, London, Allen & Unwin, 1971; 1st edn, 1926
Radhakrishnan, S., An Idealist View of Life, London, Allen & Unwin, 1988; a reprint of the 2nd edn, 1937; 1st edn 1932
Schilpp, P.A. (ed.), The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, New York, Tudor Publishing Co., 1952