ABSTRACT
Human consciousness, which Emily Dickinson calls “the Brain”, is wider than the sky, deeper than the ocean and weighs as much as God. A neuroscientist, a psychologist, an epistemologist, a meditation-teacher, a phenomenologist, a Yājñavalkya, a Hegel and a William James – all of them study human consciousness. Their styles, approaches, lenses, methods, questions and problems, of course, are very different. K.C. Bhattacharyya had a lifelong interest in psychology, so much so that his nachlass included an unfinished manuscript of a Bengali treatise on psychology (Manovijñān). His earliest work, Studies in Vedāntism, bears the stamp of this interest in the strikingly original chapter: “An Approach through Psychology”. And in his densest and most rewardingly hard-to-read monograph The Subject as Freedom, he distinguishes between empirical, philosophical and spiritual psychology.
This chapter reworks the materials of some of the chapters of The Subject as Freedom, in order to open up new problem spaces for contemporary philosophy of mind centering on:
The meaning of personal pronouns such as “I”, “You” and “We”.
Cognition of absence as distinct from absence of cognition, especially the feeling of wanting and missing a feeling (here I suggest we can claim to discover a new species of knowing: knowing by missing).
The step-by-step climbing up (which turns out, non-trivially, to be digging deeper down) from bodily subjectivity to spiritual subjectivity, through a reflective introspective analysis of the mind.
Comparisons with Abhinavagupta’s theory of grades of subjectivity of consciousness are occasionally suggested, to prepare the ground for a psychology which is at once conceptual and contemplative, analytical and phenomenological, Wittgensteinian and Merleau Pontyan, and yet remains uniquely KCB-ian.
