INDIA's TRUE VOICE: a Critique of Oriental Philosophy
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
INDIA’S TRUE VOICE: A CRITIQUE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY 1 INDIA'S TRUE VOICE: A Critique of Oriental Philosophy By Alvin Boyd Kuhn Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com INDIA’S TRUE VOICE: A CRITIQUE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY 2 INDIA'S TRUE VOICE A Critique of Oriental Philosophy "My brethren, remain faithful to the earth with all the force of your love! Let your great love and your knowledge be in accord with the meaning of the earth. Let not your virtue fly far from terrestrial things and beat its wings against the eternal walls. Bring back towards the earth the virtue which goes astray--yea, towards the flesh and towards life; that it may give a meaning to the earth, a human meaning . ."--Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra Alvin Boyd Kuhn TO ALL THOSE WHO WOULD CHOOSE KNOWLEDGE OF THE MEANING OF LIFE IN PREFERENCE TO ITS NEGATION THIS VOLUME IS SINCERELY DEDICATED Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com INDIA’S TRUE VOICE: A CRITIQUE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY 3 PROLOGUE One of the most widely disseminated systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of existence that direpted him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully conditioned experience. The implication of this postulate is unmistakably apparent: that like Adam and Eve in Paradise he should never have abandoned, by forfeit of its terms of blessedness, the primal Edenic state, but somehow should have repressed the insensate desire for conscious existence, the initial offense against the benison of non-existence. The world of the middle twentieth century is dangerously divided between the two great sectors of East and West. At the moment of writing the schism is marked by a differentiation in the philosophies of economics, government, politics and other elements in less conspicuous degree. It is a challenging question, however, whether the fundamental cause of cleavage between Orient and Occident is not still and always the difference in the profoundest conceptions entertained in the realm of mental and spiritual philosophy. Always in human history it has been the case that surface conditions, physical, economic, material, stand conspicuously forward in the public eye and appear to be the big issues pressing for solution. So they come to be regarded as the prime factors of causation. Generally, however, their ostensible importance reflects a superficial and shallow envisagement of the actualities. For, on deeper scrutiny, they will mostly be seen to be themselves only the manifestations, the outcropping symptoms of more deeply underrunning strata of ideological conceptions. Out of the heart--and it should be added--out of the mind, are the issues of life. Thought is now recognized to be the primal creative energy in the cosmos. Thought, mind, gives the initial propulsion, and also sets the mold, as Plato so sagaciously set forth in his scheme of the archetypal v ideaforms, for the shape of things to come in the creation. Therefore, it is in all likelihood true that the great wall of division between East and West is still constructed of the great stones of philosophical ideality, with their psychological coefficients. It seems hardly beyond dispute that the preamble enunciated in the first paragraph of this Prologue, stating the primary postulate of the Hindu philosophy, carves out in the sharpest possible outlines the central, the basic and the critical difference between the thought structure of Orient and Occident. And looking at that keystone proposition in the philosophical edifice of Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com INDIA’S TRUE VOICE: A CRITIQUE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY 4 Eastern reflection, it is a grave question whether the West is not warranted in regarding it, from the standpoint of its own generally affirmative evaluation of life, as a baleful menace and outright peril to its future security and welfare. The West postulates the supreme value of the life lived here by units of conscious being in physical bodies: the East denies it. It needs no particular depth or perspicacity of mind to perceive in this situation the essential irreconcilability of the two views, or modes of thought, and likewise to discern the precariousness in the impact of the two ideologies, the sensitive rawness in the enterprise of furthering coexistence or the interblending of the two. When two hemispheres of the world, hitherto in long isolation from each other, are now suddenly thrown into close association, the possibility of their harmonious reciprocation of differing modes and codes of motivation for life conduct will inevitably be difficult in proportion to the depth of the abyss between the contrary views. The meeting of the East and West is one of the gigantic world phenomena of the present epoch in human history, and it promises to become not only a most engaging problem confronting the philosophic mind, but as well the most grimly challenging and practically critical task for the world's statesmanship. It is indeed fraught with the ominously intense and vital issues of historical destiny for the entire world. It sharply, then, behooves the philosophical acumen of the West, in particular, to examine the principles, in Greek terms, the fundamental archai, of the Eastern ideology, with a view to evaluating it as sound and salutary in its impact on the West's own affirmative emphasis on life's value, or as perilous to its way of thought and life. The ideologies of the two hemispheres of the world are now vi and will be increasingly in clash. Whether the conflict is to be controlled and directed with wisdom adequate to softening the impact and effecting an eventual rapprochement toward harminization and synthesis, is a question and a problem pregnant with the portent of destiny. The Orient, India in particular, has contrived to spread abroad the legend of the East's consummate achievements of the highest and purest spiritual systems in the world. Yet when the West looks at these systems and finds them so negative to its own estimate of positive value, so lagging in the drive for aggressive activity, it is taken aback and made hesitant to counterbalance the inflow of Indian philosophy in its counsels and its motivations. It sees that the difference in ideological modes complicates every effort on its part to work together with the East toward desirable ends by hitching it in a team with a horse that will not pull when it pulls. The East--as witness India's invariable posture of neutrality on practically every matter calling for vigorous and often necessarily risky action--clamps a brake on aggessive policy. There must be times and situations in which only swift positive action can stave off disaster and save the day. The East's inherent committal to indecision and passivism thus becomes, from the West's point of view, a constant and dangerous liability. Two influences are at work to delay the recognition of the West's peril from the infusion of Eastern thought codes into its psychic life. The first is the West's general obsession by the common religious tradition or persuasion of the sanctity, amounting almost to immunity from Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com INDIA’S TRUE VOICE: A CRITIQUE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY 5 critique, of anything labeled and rated in the category of "spiritual." Its own religious tradition has rendered it obsequiously deferential to the name and psychic implications of "spirituality." The appellative disarms suspicion or distrust. It becomes a freely accepted passport to any interest or movement flaunting its shibboleth. However slow and reluctant the average citizen of the West may be to accord welcome to Eastern ideas, he is not likely to apprehend danger from systems whose chief characterization has been broadcast as "spiritual." The second is the want, so far, of more studied acquaintance of Western people, both lay and academic, with the true nature, bent and import, and therefore the real potential for harm, of the Hindu philosophies. In spite of extensive delving into the East's religious vii literature, Western study has not been penetrating enough to catch the full force of the realization of the ultimate destructive potential lurking in its pervasive negativism. It is not clearly seen that the final outcome of this philosophy is the destruction of man. Since man's drive for existence is predicated as the cause of the misery of existence, the logic of Eastern thought demands that he still his craving for life and desperately strive to ceave to live. He is insistently urged to break the chain of causation of life's woes and bring them to an end--by ending himself. To live involves the conscious entity in dolorous and unending woes. Therefore the constant burden of Hindu philosophical lucubration is a seeking of ways to "kill out" with fell intensity of purpose, all the manifestations of the consciousness of life possible to and through man's organic equipment of body and brain, all his sensations, feelings, thoughts, and hush their raucous cacophony of a consciousness dialectically rated as false. The motive for such a crushing of the outward cognitions of existence is asserted to be that the inner core of being of the unit life may relapse into the condition of causeless and consciousless being, undisturbed by the outer turmoil and strains of living.