Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Editor's Preface
- I Science and Spirituality: East and West
- II Coming to Terms with Science: Some Change Agents
- CHAPTER 3 Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan and the Modernization of South Asian Muslims
- CHAPTER 4 Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose: Looking beyond the Idiom
- CHAPTER 5 Sri Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya on Science and Spirituality
- CHAPTER 6 Chaos, Complexity and Emergence Mechanisms: Spiritual Evolution in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin
- CHAPTER 7 Science, Spirituality and Swaraj: Towards a New Aesthetics of Ethical Existence
- III Building Bridges: Evolution, Consciousness and Healing
- IV Science and Spirituality: Culture, Society and Gender
CHAPTER 5 - Sri Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya on Science and Spirituality
from II - Coming to Terms with Science: Some Change Agents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Editor's Preface
- I Science and Spirituality: East and West
- II Coming to Terms with Science: Some Change Agents
- CHAPTER 3 Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan and the Modernization of South Asian Muslims
- CHAPTER 4 Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose: Looking beyond the Idiom
- CHAPTER 5 Sri Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya on Science and Spirituality
- CHAPTER 6 Chaos, Complexity and Emergence Mechanisms: Spiritual Evolution in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin
- CHAPTER 7 Science, Spirituality and Swaraj: Towards a New Aesthetics of Ethical Existence
- III Building Bridges: Evolution, Consciousness and Healing
- IV Science and Spirituality: Culture, Society and Gender
Summary
The antagonistic relationship between modern science, understood as materialism, and religion, or spiritualism, existing in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provided a challenging background to the contemporary Indian thinkers. Some of them passively accepted this dichotomy; some were ignorant of it; some either accepted materialism or spiritualism; and some thinkers tried to negotiate this antagonism between matter and spirit. A long braid of thinkers beginning from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya to Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and S Radhakrishnan attempted to make some significant changes though working within the Oriental categories rightly explicated by Edward Said. Inserting into this dichotomy their political programme of making a case for Indian independence, they maintained that materialism (available in plenty in the West) is important but it alone cannot suffice. Spirit (the spiritualism that is available in the East, particular in India) needs to be added to it. Some aspects of this formulation fall outside the Saidian formulation. That is, though they worked within the parameters of Orientalism, the modifications they had implemented (some of them at least) fell outside it – particularly their attempt at converting what was dichotomous into continuous. My paper will discuss these various aspects involved in the modificatory nature of this relation. To dispel the impression that all Indian thinkers have embarked on this convergence, I will discuss a counterinstance available in the writings of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, who repudiated contemporary Indian philosophers' attempt at making the continuous relation between matter and spirit without necessarily endorsing the antagonistic relation as available in the West.
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- Science, Spirituality and the Modernisation of India , pp. 96 - 114Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009
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