Contemporary Indian Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Phule emphasized Truth as the essence of dharma.

Jotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth-Seekers) in 1873 and set out a universal religion of truth in his Sarvajanik Satya Dharma. He rejected caste, priestly mediation and the scriptures used to justify inequality, holding that true religion consists in truth, equality and service of fellow beings under one Creator.

Devotion is the emphasis of the bhakti saints, and goodness and beauty are not the aspects his writing makes central; the very names of his society and of his book point to truth.

Answer: C

For Radhakrishnan the Absolute is pure consciousness, pure freedom and infinite possibility.

In An Idealist View of Life, Radhakrishnan describes the Absolute in these three terms. Of its infinite possibilities one, the actual world, is being realised; seen in relation to that world, the Absolute is God, the creative spirit working it out. The Absolute itself is never exhausted by any one world.

'Infinite' alone is incomplete as the third term, 'infinite descriptions' confuses being with our ways of speaking of it, and 'end of possibles' reverses the idea, since the Absolute is the source of possibilities, not their termination.

Answer: B

The statement is attributed to Swami Vivekananda.

Vivekananda taught that philosophy and religion need each other: religion must be rational, or it degenerates into superstition and dogma, and philosophy must be lived, or it becomes a dry intellectualism without spiritual realisation. The aphorism 'Religion without philosophy runs into superstition; philosophy without religion becomes dry atheism' sums up that teaching and is commonly quoted from him.

Radhakrishnan, Aurobindo and Tagore all wrote on the unity of reason and spirit, but this aphorism, with its warning about superstition on one side and dry atheism on the other, is the one quoted from Vivekananda.

Answer: B

The statement can be attributed to Sri Aurobindo.

In The Life Divine Aurobindo treats intuition as a higher faculty than reason: it brings sudden illuminations from a plane of knowledge beyond the mind, which reason can then examine and organise. He describes intuition as bringing to man brilliant messages from the Unknown that are the beginning of his higher knowledge, and the further evolution he foresees leads from mind through intuition to supermind.

Radhakrishnan also valued intuition, but as integral insight rather than in this language, and the quotation is not Vivekananda's or Tagore's.

Answer: A

The speaker is Mohammad Iqbal.

The sentence 'Politics have their roots in the spiritual life of man' comes from Iqbal's Presidential Address to the All-India Muslim Conference at Lahore in 1932, where he argued that Islam is a society and not a matter of private opinion alone. It fits his larger view, stated in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, that the Qur'an unites religion and state, ethics and politics.

Gandhi, Aurobindo and Vivekananda also tied public life to the spiritual, which is why the options are tempting, but the quoted wording is Iqbal's.

Answer: B

For Radhakrishnan the Absolute has to be of the nature of spirit alone.

Radhakrishnan's idealism holds that ultimate reality is spirit: the Absolute is pure consciousness and freedom, and matter, life and mind are stages in which spirit progressively manifests itself in the world. The material world is real as a manifestation of spirit, but it is not a second, independent constituent of the Absolute.

So the Absolute is not materially real, it is not a void as in some readings of Buddhism, and it is not a dual nature of matter and spirit, which would make matter as ultimate as spirit.

Answer: C

For Jiddu Krishnamurti freedom is pure observation.

Krishnamurti held that freedom is not the exercise of choice: choice arises from confusion and is conditioned by memory, desire and the past. Freedom is a state of choiceless awareness, in which one observes what is, without the observer's judgments and conclusions, and that pure observation itself brings about understanding.

'Exercising choice without any preconceptions' still makes freedom a matter of choosing, which he rejects. He also insisted that the self is understood only in relationship, so knowing the self in isolation from relation is the opposite of his view, and 'free response to nature' is not his formula.

Answer: A

For Vivekananda, religion is being and becoming.

Vivekananda repeatedly said that religion is not talk, doctrine or belief but realisation: 'Religion is being and becoming.' Its essence is the manifestation of the divinity already within, a transformation of the whole person, not the acceptance of a creed.

Hearing, acknowledging and listening are the passive, intellectual stages that Vivekananda contrasted with realisation. Hearing scripture (shravana) is only a beginning; religion in his sense is complete only when one becomes what one has heard about.

Answer: A

The thinker is K.C. Bhattacharyya.

In The Subject as Freedom, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya traces the subject through stages of progressive freedom from the object: bodily, psychic and spiritual subjectivity. At the limit he speaks of the possibility of a consciousness that denies even the 'I', the subject freeing itself from every objective trace, including the felt individuality of the ego.

Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan all speak of transcending the ego in spiritual realisation, but the phenomenological analysis of the consciousness of the denial of 'I' is Bhattacharyya's distinctive contribution.

Answer: D

The statement not true of Iqbal's God is God is irrelational.

In The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal describes God as the Ultimate Ego: a creative, dynamic life that is both immanent in the world and transcendent of it. God is a person who responds to prayer and is related to finite egos, which grow by drawing closer to Him.

An irrelational Absolute, without relation to the world, is closer to the Advaitic Brahman or Bradley's Absolute, which Iqbal rejects. So immanence, transcendence and creative dynamism are all true of Iqbal's God; only irrelationality is not.