The Paradox of Being Human

From the Jacket:

The main tenor of The Paradox of Being Human is philosophical aimed at empowering man to look upon the transcendental as the primordial essence of the human. An attempt is made here to develop the Samkhya and the Vedanta schools where the essence of Indian Philosophy is verbalized. Man is paradoxical - he is here in the world and yet not consumed by the fact of worldliness. The paradox is not arbitrary - it is woven within the very structure of human consciousness. The paradox is that man is worldly and otherworldly a the same time - it is objective and the subjective or, as Sartre puts it, the en-soi and pour-soi, are two facets of the same humanness. They are to be justified vis-à-vis the ultimate Being in which man is anchored. The intensification of the subjective is thus an opening into the ontology of Being which is perennial to our metaphysical source.

Ramakant Sinari, Professor Emeritus and former Professor and Chairman of the Department of the Humanities and Social Science, IIT Mumbai, was earlier a Fullbright-Smithmunddt Scholar in the USA. He has studied under the guidance of Marvin Farber, a British Council grantee and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy in USA. The author has several papers to his credit as also books The Structure of Indian Thought, Reason in Existentialism, and The Concept of Man in Philosophy (Ed.). Presently Professor Sinari is a visiting Professor of Consciousness Studies at the Bhaktivedanta Institute, Mumbai.

Preface

As a professor of phenomenological philosophy lecturing in various universities and centres of learning, and as a professor of Consciousness Studies at the Bhaktivedanta Institute in Mumbai, I have come to see the tilt towards the integrations between phenomenology and naturalism which I learnt and appreciated years ago when I heard Marvin Farber and other professors in the University of Pennsylvania and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Some of them happen to be Professor William Fontaine, Professor Elizabeth Flower, Professor Dale Riepe and Professor Rollo Handy, who awakened tremendous insight in me in the domain of this integration.

Back at home, Professor Ravi Gomatam, the present Director of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, is a pioneering philosopher at the Consciousness Studies Center whom I admire not only for his ardent endeavour to get the Consciousness Studies and physical sciences married but also for his insightful work of building the methodology of modern science and transcendentalism. Dr Gomatam shows how phenomenology as a study of subjectvity and physicalist view regarding human consciousness could be integrated. Such an integration was taught to me initially by Professor Marvin Farber.

Something novel has been attempted by me in this book. The book has for its main focus human reality. It tries to indicate that there is an ambiguity at the root of the phenomenon of being human. The ambiguity arises from the fact that although man can be studied empirically, as physical sciences do, the meaning given by man to his own existence cannot be studied objectively. In this sense, man is in the world and yet he does not totally belong to the world.

There have been many experts in philosophy (particularly, Professor D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Professor R. Balasubramanian, Professor Daya Krishna, Professor Bhuvan Chandel, Swami Lokeswarananda, Professor Prabhat Misra, Professor B.D. Nag Chaudhuri and Professors on the Editorial Board of Dialectics and Humanism) whom I would like to express my thankfulness for their prompt readiness to allow me to use my writings in the works published by them.

Lastly, I must say that the present book would not have seen the light of the day had not the Indian Council of Philosophical Research given me very handsomely a grant and its extremely efficient Director (P&R), Dr. Mercy Helen, had not given me constant encouragement to ply through the material to complete it. I am indebted to the ICPR for all this that they have done to me. I lastly, am grateful to Dr. Amita Sakhalkar for her having taken pains to go through the typescript and prepared the Index of the book. Despite Dr. Amita's meticulousness many mistakes have crept into the script and the Index. I am solely responsible for these mistakes.