An Idealist View of Life

The Hibbert Lectures by the philosopher who taught Indian thought at Oxford and later became President of India. Its argument is that the modern substitutes for religion cannot do religion's work, and that a restated Advaita can.

Date: 1932
Author: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Region: British India and Oxford
Language: English

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Lectures
Method: Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
Years back to what it answers: 25 years

Made its author the interpreter of Indian philosophy to the English-speaking world, and is now criticised for the interpretation it made standard.

What the book says

A defence of religion conducted by examining the alternatives on offer and finding each of them a substitute rather than a replacement. Radhakrishnan opens with the observation that his age has lost its religion and acquired several things that do the same work badly. Naturalism explains the universe without remainder and cannot account for the mind doing the explaining. Pragmatism makes truth a matter of what works and leaves no way to say that a working belief is false. Various forms of humanism keep the ethics and discard the ground it stood on. What he offers instead is intuition - not feeling or irrationality but a mode of knowing, integral and immediate, of which intellectual and sensory knowledge are partial expressions, and whose evidence is the testimony of those who have practised it in every tradition. The metaphysics that follows is Advaita restated for a modern audience: a single reality of which the world is a real expression rather than an illusion, and a self whose realisation of identity with it is the goal both of religion and of the philosophical enterprise.

What it argues

That intuition is a form of knowledge and that a philosophy which excludes it has excluded the evidence bearing on the questions it most wants answered. Radhakrishnan is careful to distinguish this from anti-intellectualism: intuition on his account includes and completes reason rather than opposing it, and its deliverances are subject to criticism, coherence and the accumulated testimony of practitioners across traditions. The metaphysics is Advaita with one significant modification. Where Śaṅkara's world is finally unreal, Radhakrishnan wants a universe that is a genuine expression of the absolute rather than an appearance to be seen through, so that history, ethics and the individual life retain weight. The religious conclusion is universalist: the traditions are different approaches to one reality, and their differences are of expression rather than of object.

What it answered

James on truth, the naturalism of his period, and the various humanisms offered as replacements for religion - each of which gets a lecture. Underneath is a different answer: to the assumption, general in British academic life when he arrived, that India had produced religion and mysticism but not philosophy. Radhakrishnan's whole career was an argument against that, conducted by presenting the Indian material in the vocabulary of the philosophy faculties he was addressing.

How it argues

By survey and by comparison, in fluent English addressed to a British audience with no Sanskrit. Radhakrishnan's method is to state a modern position, show what it cannot account for, and offer the Indian material as supplying it - and the persuasive force comes largely from the range, since he moves between Plotinus, Śaṅkara, Bergson, the Upanishads and contemporary physics with equal fluency. The prose is elegant and the argument is more assertive than demonstrative at the crucial points.

The moment

Radhakrishnan held the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford from 1936 and was the first Indian to hold a chair there, having already been vice-chancellor of two Indian universities. He went on to be ambassador to the Soviet Union, vice-president and then President of India from 1962 to 1967. His birthday is Teachers' Day in India. He is the only person in this section to have held a head of state's office.

How it travelled

As the standard interpretation, and then as the thing to be argued against. For two generations Radhakrishnan's presentation of Indian philosophy as fundamentally spiritual, unified and Advaita-centred was what English readers received; his translations and his Indian Philosophy were the entry point for almost everyone. Since the 1980s that account has been criticised sharply - for flattening the enormous diversity of Indian traditions into a single spiritual essence, for privileging Vedanta over the logical, materialist and Buddhist schools, and for framing India in terms designed to answer a colonial charge and therefore accepting its terms.

The strongest objection

That the defence of Indian philosophy accepted the charge it was answering. Told that India had spirituality but not rigorous thought, Radhakrishnan replied by presenting a unified spiritual philosophy - which conceded the characterisation and left out precisely the material that would have refuted it: the Nyāya logicians, the Cārvāka materialists, the Buddhist epistemologists, the fierce technical disputes between schools that are as rigorous as anything in Europe. The result was a picture of Indian thought as essentially mystical that has taken decades to dislodge and that his critics argue was shaped more by his British audience than by his sources. The internal objection is separate: the appeal to intuition as a source of knowledge needs a way of adjudicating between conflicting intuitions, and the book does not supply one.

Why read it

As a document rather than as an argument. The lectures on the substitutes for religion are the sharpest, and the whole is unusually readable for its period. Anyone wanting Indian philosophy should go to the primary texts and to more recent scholarship; anyone wanting to understand how Indian philosophy reached the West should read this.

Where to read it

First printed: 1932
First in English: 1932
Digitised: Partial

The second edition of 1937 revises the text. Radhakrishnan's Indian Philosophy (1923-27) and his translations of the Upanishads, the Gita and the Brahma Sutra are the works through which most English readers encountered Indian thought for two generations.

Written in English. In copyright in some jurisdictions.

Where it stands

Historical as philosophy and important as a historical fact. The specific arguments are little discussed; the influence on how Indian thought was received in the West is enormous and is now studied as a case of how a tradition presents itself under colonial conditions.

On quoting this book

Contested

Whether his Advaita is Śaṅkara's or a modernised version with the illusoriness removed is argued by specialists, and the modification is substantial. Whether the universalism is a genuine philosophical position or a diplomatic one is questioned. Allegations of unattributed borrowing from another scholar's work, made during his career and revived since, are part of the record and are disputed. And the postcolonial criticism of his whole enterprise is now the standard frame for reading him, which is itself a reception worth being aware of rather than adopting whole.