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RADHAKRISHNAN AS AN INTERPRETER
OF THE WEST

[Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born on 5 September 1888, and died in 1975.]

WHEN WE TALK OF THE EAST and the West, we are easily reminded of Rudyard Kipling's famous (or is it infamous) lines:

“Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet.
Till earth and sky stand pres­ently
at God’s great judgement seat;�

But most people seem to stop with these two lines, which are obvi­ously in keeping with the reputed jin­goism of a poet of the Empire, who deserves better at the hands of his Indian readers. For they are largely un­aware of the following few lines, which provide the corrective and show him in a better light:

“But there is neither East nor West.
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
when two strong men stand face to face,
though they come from the ends of the earth!�

(The Ballad of East and West)

Let alone the strong men com­ing from the ends of the earth facing each other. What about ordinary men and women, from the centre and the circumference, and all other parts of the earth in our own day, on the threshold of a new century?         
Anyway, what exactly do we mean by the terms “East� and “West�? Do we mean the geographical “East� and “West�? In which case, they can only be relative and not absolute England, France and Ger­many are the “West� in relation toRussia and the other countries of Eastern Europe. Russia is the “West� in relation to India and China; and India is “the West� in relation to Burma. And what was the “Middle East� (from the European angle) is now “West Asia�. Europe is, in fact, no longer the continent (which it was, in relation to England, the British Isles), but a peninsular projection of the land mass known as Asia.

The geographical factor may no longer be that important, when the world has almost become a global vil­lage because of the undreamt of ad­vancement of science and technology, of transport and communications. Then, do we mean the cultural West or the philosophical West? Even these cannot be put in water-tight compartments.

There were, and still are, some poets and writers from the distant West, who tend to romanticise the ex­otic East, with its sentimental associa­tions. Here too, good old Kipling seems to come in with his flair for pictur­esque fancy. He says in his poem “Mandalay.�

“Ship me somewhere east of Suez
where the best is like the worst,
where there ain’t no Ten Commandments
an� a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple bells are calling;
an it’s there that I would be ....
By the old Moulmein pagoda,
looking lazy at the sea.�

Radhakrishnan’s comment on these lines is worth noting. “Of course, the temple bells mean to the Burman the exact opposite of what they mean to Kipling: be still, not to raise a thirst�.

The traditional antithetical stereotypes of the “spiritual� East, with the accent on Tradition and the “materialist� West, with the distinction of “modernity� may no longer be as relevant or meaningful now, as they used to be.

Before going into the subject of Radhakrishnan’s interpretation of the West and its thought pattern and value system, it would be useful to take note of his own understanding of and introduction to these terms. He says: “When we take a long view of history, we will find that there is not an Eastern view which is different from the Western view of life. There is not much truth in the pseudo-science of national or continental psychology which affirms that all Easterners are this and all Westerners are that. The history of any people is slightly more complicated than these sweeping statements would suggest. As a matter of fact, Eastern and Western people had common beginnings and deve­loped from them relatively independent views and acquired certain features which marked them from each other. Today both of them are tackling the same problem, the reconciliation of the values of mind with those of spirit. The tension between the two consti­tutes the meaning and purpose of his­tory. Whether in the East or in the West, we have unresolved contradic­tions and attempts to solve them, to learn from each other and adapt the inheritance of the past to new and ever changing conditions and reshape it into a new and living pattern.........�

After making it clear that geo­graphical areas are not cultural or anthropological entities, Radhakrishnan observes that what is known as “Western Culture� derives its values and institutions from Greece, Rome and Palestine.

He it is who was the author of the brilliant epigram that European or Western culture was a product of Greek thought, Roman Law and Christian religion. Expatiating on it, he said that while Greece gave critical spirit, methods of observation and po­litical concepts, Rome contributed secular laws and principles of organi­sation and Palestine imparted to it monotheism and the concept of man as a moral being, subject to the com­mandments of God. To the result that thought, action and faith are the three component elements of the Western tradition.

Though for the Greeks of the fifth century BC, East or Asia meant Persia and West or Europe meant the Hellenic world, some similarities in ideas and images suggest that the ancient Greeks and Vedic Indians must have been in some kind of communi­cation with each other. Areas of agree­ment are noted between the teaching of the Upanishads on the nature of reality and the Eleatic doctrine, be­tween the Samkhya teaching and the views of Empedocles (of Etna) and Anaxagoras. These conclusions might have been reached independently by the Greeks as well as the Indians. Even more so between the ideas of Plato and the insights of the Upa­nishadic seers. In Phaedo, Plato gives a vivid account of the life eternal and the Philosophia perennis:

“When the soul returns into it­self and reflects, it passes into another region, the region of that which is pure and everlasting, immortal and un­changeable; and feeling itself kindred thereto, it dwells there under its own control and has rest from its wander­ings, and is constant and one with it­self as are the objects with which it deals�.

It was in Plato that the myotic tradition, based on the orphic view that the soul is immortal, finds its full expression. It had also enriched the thought of pythagoras. Even Socrates was probably aware of the supernatu­ral world and felt himself a member of the heavenly city. The world might kill but it has not the last word.

According to Radhakrishnan’s way of understanding, Socrates per­haps accepted the Orphic view that the soul is immortal and that happi­ness means the achieving of immortal­ity by renunciation of the world, and that all men are brothers, whatever their conditions be.

But by and large, what distin­guished the Greeks as a whole was their faith in the power of human rea­son, with a tendency to give rational justification for their religious and ethical views. Restructuring the field of human thought, with their dialectical minds, they chose to substitute the rational for the real and the scientific for the metaphysical.

While Greek Logos reflected an awareness of proportion, harmony and measure, which found, expression in Greek art and aesthetics, rationalism, humanism, and civic virtues charac­terised their personal philosophy and political organisation.

Alexander the Great commands the admiration of Radhakrishnan not by the magnitude of his military cam­paigns but by the wide horizons of his mind, especially his lofty aspirations � for the brotherhood of man and the marriage of East and West in a world religion which would include in itself the best of all faiths. His prayer for peace, that all men should live to­gether. In unity of mind and heart (homo-nota) has a futuristic ring.

Whether Christianity is an Eastern religion in terms of geographical origin or a Western religion in terms of later growth and ultimate develop­ment. Radhakrishnan feels that by the time of Jesus, the Jews knew some­thing of the doctrines and practices of the Hindus.

The temptations of Jesus remind us of the temptations of Nachiketa by Yama (in the Kathopnishad) and those of Gautama the Buddha by Mara. The life and teaching of Jesus, with its element of divine incarnation rationalised by Greek logos, and the ascetic note, and the mystic under­tone; so distinctive, cannot be re­garded as only a natural development of Jewish and Greek ideas.

Noticing a similarity in the pat­tern of development of many religions, of the East and the West, Radhakrish­nan thinks that Christianity could not have won its way, if it had not found an echo in the religious teachings and beliefs of the time. He concludes that Christianity developed in the same world and breathed the same air as Alexandrian Judaism, Gnoticism and Neo-Platonism.

The growth of authoritarianism, along with the power of the church, was, in due course, accompanied by the primacy of conformism and intol­erance of heresy and dissent. While Gibbon talks in general of the high place of intolerance among the mono­theistic and proselytising religion, Christianity, which has since learnt its lessons was no model of tolerance in the middle ages, when heretics were burnt at the stake. Nor was Hinduism, for that matter, in the sectarian feuds within its own fold, in the medieval period.

Islam, in its early days, was not so intolerant, as it became later, ad­mitting that the Jews and the Chris­tians had received a partial revelation. Steven Runciman, an authority on �The Crusades� writes:

“Seen in the perspective of history, the whole crusading movement was a vast fiasco... The savage intolerance shown by the crusaders was answered by growing intolerance among the Muslims.�

The basis of the medieval intellectual achievement was the recon­quest of human thought. Humanism, the rise of the natural sciences, the discovery of the new world and the Reformation were some of the chief re­sults of the Renaissance. The interests and passions of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, predominantly religious, led to the loss of universal loyalty arid the rise of the spirit of na­tionalism which had infected the whole world.

The Protestant Reformation en­couraged the scientific temper in the study of nature as well as the attain­ment of religious ends. Greater changes in all the sciences took place in the period between the 15th and 17th centuries than in the millennium before. During the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, English science was mainly experimental, while French science was theoretical. The philosophical idealism of Germany, especially of Fichte and Hegel, led to the abandonment of a sense of mystery and in­creased confidence in human reason. The 19th century may be treated as the first century of the scientific age, and its thinkers accepted the unity of the natural order and treated man as part of that order, subject to laws and limitations.

There has been a change or a falling off in the status of philosophy. While the task of science is accepted as that of giving information about the universe, the function of philosophy is recognised only as analysis and clarifi­cation, at best, not systematic account or sustained interpretation of the uni­verse. But the contrast between Greece and Galilee, between mind and spirit remains unresolved.

Strangely enough, Western dominance sowed the seeds of its own disintegration; and the impact of Western culture on Asian society has become the basis of Asian nationalism and solidarity. The rise of new powers in Asia � China, India, Pakistan, etc., is seen to be the most important event of the Second World War. The advance of technology is another.

Talking of East-West relations now, the reference is no longer to the Orient and the Occident in religion or philosophy, or culture, not Asia and Europe in power politics, but the po­litical-ideological East and political ­ideological West of Europe itself, with America thrown in, with the latter. Communism may be identified with Eastern Europe, but its pedigree can be traced to Plato and the New Testa­ment, Recordo and Adam Smith as well as Hegel, Marx, Engels and Lenin. (These remarks were made long before the disintegration of Soviet Union and the reverses of communism.)

The Semetic religions are treated together by Radhakrishnan � Judaism, Christianity and Islam. While recognising the partial validity of the first two, the last regards itself as realizing per­fectly what they realize only in part and imperfectly. He observes:

“Militant and inelastic, Islam frames the same dogmas, prescribes the same laws, upholds the same con­stitution and enforces the same cus­toms. It borrowed its idea of Messiah from Judaism, its dogmatism and as­ceticism from Christianity, its philoso­phy from Greece and its mysticism from India and Alexandria�.

He also feels that the dogma­tism of Islam is toned down in India. He wrote these words in the early ’Fif­ties, when fundamentalism had not received the impetus that it has since, from the unearned affluence of the oil ­rich Arab world.

As a resourceful interpreter and a radical optimist. Radhakrishnan ob­served in the chapter on “The Meeting of Religions� (from Eastern Religions and Western Thought):

“Owing to a cross-fertilization of ideas and insights, behind which lie centuries of racial and cultural tradi­tion and earnest endeavour, a great unification is taking place in the deeper fabric of men’s thoughts. Un­consciously, perhaps, respect for other points of view, appreciation of the treasures of other cultures, confidence in one another’s unselfish motives are growing. We are slowly realizing that believers with different opinions and convictions are necessary for others to work out the larger synthesis, which alone can give the spiritual basis to a world brought together into infinite oneness by man’s mechanical ingenuity.�

After coming to this conclusion, Radhakrishnan draws attention to the brief statements, quoted in Basil Mathews� Road, to the City of God:

“We give religious systems sepa­rate names, but they are not separate: they are not closed globules. They merge in the universal human faith in the divine being�.

Non-Hindu and Western think­ers might be justified in seeing here a typically Hindu philosophical ap­proach to religious belief, finding ex­pression in the Rig Vedic maxim:

(The truth, or the essence, is one; only wise men speak of it differently)

They might be tempted to ask the question � If truth is one, why then should wise men, if indeed they are wise, speak of it differently? Are they all really wise or otherwise?

Commenting on Radhakrish­nan’s conception of the relation be­tween Eastern and Western cultural values, Professor F.S.C. Northrop writes that Radhakrishnan’s tolerant attitude towards cultures, doctrines and religions other than his own does not have the ‘quite world-centred rather than Hindu oriental culture­-centered basis that he assumes. It is instead a consequence of applying to the rest of the world the standards de­fined by the epistemology and specific philosophy of oriental culture.

He points out that in Western science and philosophy, there are doc­trines which are real contradictories. To accept Einstein’s physics entails a rejection of certain assumptions in Newton’s physics. Similarly, to accept Newton’s physics entails a rejection of certain doctrines of Aristotelian physics.

He argues that the new scientific method of the West is that of indirectly verified, deductively formulated, theory where the postulates of the deductively formulated theory, refer not to the en­tities and relations given inductively with immediacy, but to theoretically designated, directly unobservable, en­tities and relations.

Professor Northrop says in con­temporary Mathematical Physics there are at present at least two theories � ­the one termed “Relativity Theory�, the other “Quantum mechanics�, which are mutually contradictory.

There are certain directly-inspectible facts for which only the rela­tivity theory accounts. There are other immediate data explained only by Quantum mechanics.

Neither theory, therefore, is ca­pable of taking care of all the facts.

Competent mathematical physi­cists like Einstein and Dirac know that in such a situation, the only solution is the construction of a new theory which takes care of both sets of facts without contradiction, e.g. Einstein’s Unified Field Theory.

The other method is to drop the basic assumptions of both of the pres­ent theories and introduce thoroughly novel assumptions which, without logical contradiction, account for all the facts explained by the present mu­tually contradictory theories.

            To which Radhakrishnan replies:

“Even if Northrop’s view is cor­rect, scientific hypotheses are arrived at by a process of trial and error and cannot, therefore, be regarded as possessing absoluteness or finality. Free­dom from the spirit of dogmatism is the characteristic of the scientific tem­per. Northrop himself cites how, in mathematical physics, we are adopting two contradictory hypotheses, the Relativity theory and Quantum me­chanics. From Northrop’s argument it follows when propositionalised conceptions turn out to be self-contradictory, then ideological conflict is the result�.

The believer in a dogma must burn the heretic. It is essential that proportional forms must be treated as working hypotheses and not as final truths. The periods when proportional forms were treated as of absolute au­thority were not the ages of progress, said Radhakrishnan.

In Kant’s words, perceptions without conceptions are blind and conceptions without perceptions are empty. It is a question of more and less, and not of either or, Therefore, it is possible, as Northrop hopes, to achieve a truly world society in which the two sets of values derived from the two modes of knowing can be recon­ciled.

To strive for a peaceful settle­ment is not to appease. Democracy be­lieves in freedom of the spirit, in the principle of toleration, which is not ex­clusively Indian. History will hold us responsible if we throw the world into flames in our fanatic zeal for our way of life.

In conclusion, Radhakrishnan says: “Whether we like it or not, we live in one world and require to be educated in a common conception of human purpose and destiny.� We need according to him, not merely a closer contact between East and West but a closer union, a meeting of minds and a union of hearts. He is confident that the separation of the East and West is over and the history of the new world, the one world, has begun.