The Family of Hindu ‘Visions’ as Cultural Entities

Abstract

A circumstance of no small importance impeded Western philosophers from acknowledging Indian speculations as genuine philosophy. That is closedness of the sphere of knowledge. All problems can be solved and all paradoxes avoided in a confined universe. Time can be discounted as needless in the closed world and one may even assert that, if Indian philosophy exists it must have not only answers to the questions the Western philosophers were ever preoccupied with but to all questions conceivable as a matter of philosophical interest. Well, then Indian philosophical wordings are fit for every case and at any time. The very thought of this kind is unbearable for the Western philosophical mind. And not just for the one who follows the tradition of historicism and gets disturbed with the scandalous impossibility to intersperse the fabric of the history of philosophy with fragments of such a universal body. Specialists in logical and linguistic analysis are not ready to consider the consequences of this acknowledgement which means that their activity is devoid of any sense save a ritual one. They are ready to become extinct rather than to proceed with their problems and be aware of the irrationality of this pursuit. Phenomenologists also cannot be expected to acknowledge it for, if it is true then the program of a new philosophical synthesis which they propound, would unavoidably lead to the same results as those already available in the Indian stock. Hence, they did not pave the ways of consciousness but were carried by currents of the unconscious, and phenomenology is simply untenable. By their different reasons, all consistent philosophers of the west cannot take activity in a closed sphere of knowledge for a philosophical one.