ABSTRACT
D.P. Chattopadhyaya’s (DPC’s) chapter aims to cover the concept of freedom in K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB). “Unlike most of the contemporary approaches to freedom”, DPC suggests, “KCB’s approach is not mainly social, ethical or aesthetic. … His concept of freedom is basically ontological or metaphysical. Its dimensions range from the physical via the somatological and the psychological to the psychical and the spiritual. … [H]e describes the disclosive process of freedom in the world, in our relation to the world of objects, within the contexts of psychological and psychical subjectivity, and beyond them”. DPC identifies a conversation in KCB’s writings between three approaches or systems of freedom: the Vedāntic, Kantian and phenomenological approaches. He discusses these three trajectories and their amalgamation in KCB. DPC further depicts KCB’s phenomenological process of inwardization toward the subject as freedom. He touches on the role of the body in this process, and explains that “our body-feeling starts getting resolved into psychic feeling. This is a sort of anti-projective or regressive ‘withdrawal’ of consciousness within a deeper layer of itself. The feeling of detachment or disengagement from the object, in this case from the body, provides us the ‘first’ or an inarticulate taste of freedom”.
