A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c8.3

c8.3

2. If we look at the history of philosophic thought, we shall see that there are various ways in which the problem of Ultimate Reality has been approached. The three chief types of approach are the Cosmological, the Theological, and the Psychological. Dr. Caird has said, that, by the very constitution of man's mind, there have been only three ways of thinking open to man: "He can look outward upon the world around him; he can look inward upon the Self within him; and he can look upward to the God above him, to the Being who unites the outward and inward worlds, and who manifests himself in both."¹ According to him, the consciousness of objects is prior in time to self-consciousness, and the consciousness of both subject and object is prior to the consciousness of God. As he also elsewhere expresses it: "Man looks outward before he looks inward, and he looks inward before he looks upward."² The question arises: Is this account of the development of the consciousness of Reality ultimately valid? Is it necessary that man must look at the outside world before he looks within, and must he always look within before he can look up to God? The solutions which the history of philosophy gives to this problem are not exactly as Caird would have them. The Cartesian solution does not start by saying that the outside world is real. For Descartes, the Self is the primary reality, self-consciousness the primary fact of existence, and introspection the start of the real philosophical process. From the Self, says Descartes, we arrive at the conception of God, who is the cause of the Self, and whom we must therefore regard as more perfect than the Self. Finally, it is from God that we arrive at the world which we started by negating, by regarding as the creation of a deceptive evil spirit. On the other hand, to the God-intoxicated philosopher, Spinoza, neither the Self nor the world is the primary reality. To him, God is the be-all and the end-all of all things, the alpha and the omega of existence. From God philosophy starts, and in God philosophy ends. The manner of approach of the Upanishadic philosophers to the problem of ultimate reality was neither the Cartesian nor the Spinozistic one. The Upanishadic philosophers regarded the Self as the ultimate existence and subordinated the World and God to the Self. The Self, to them, is more real than either the World or God. It is only ultimately that they identify the Self with God, and thus bridge over the gulf that exists between the theological and psychological approaches to Reality. They start, no doubt, by looking out into the world, but they find that the solution of the ultimate problem cannot come from the world without : it is necessary for us, they say, to go back to the psychololgical category. Then they try another experiment : they go by the theological approach to the problem of reality, but they find that also to be wanting. Finally, they try the psychological approach, and arrive at the solution of the problem of ultimate existence. We thus see that the problem of ultimate Reality to the Upanishadic philosophers is a cosmo-theo-psychological problem : finding both the cosmological and theological approaches deficient, they take recourse to the psychological approach and arrive at the conception of the Self, which they call the Ātman. We shall proceed to show at length in this chapter how the Upanishadic philosophers regarded the cosmological and theological approaches as only ancillary, and the psychological approach as the only true approach to the ultimate solution.