Contemporary Indian Philosophy I: Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Iqbal, Tagore, K. C. Bhattacharyya and Radhakrishnan

In The Life Divine (1939–40), Aurobindo holds that Saccidānanda has involved itself in matter, and that evolution is the progressive release of what was involved: matter, life, mind and beyond. Evolution has therefore not ended with mind. Between ordinary mind and the supermind lie the higher mind, the illumined mind, intuition and the overmind. The supermind is the truth-consciousness, the link between Saccidānanda above and the lower triple world of mind, life and matter below; its descent will transform human nature and establish a divine life on earth.

Integral Yoga (pūrṇa yoga), set out in The Synthesis of Yoga, combines the paths of knowledge, devotion and works with a tantric emphasis on transforming nature. Its aim is not escape from the world into a featureless Absolute but the transformation of the whole being, body, life and mind, through a triple transformation: psychic (the inmost soul comes forward), spiritual (the consciousness opens to the higher planes) and supramental. Aurobindo criticised Śaṅkara's Advaita as "the refusal of the ascetic" and materialism as "the denial of the materialist", and offered his philosophy as reconciling the two.

• Self (khudi): in the Persian poem Asrār-i-Khudī (The Secrets of the Self, 1915) and the lectures The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930, enlarged 1934), the self is real, not an illusion to be dissolved. Life is the strengthening of the self through desire, striving and creative action; weakness, self-negation and quietism are what destroy it.
• God: God is the Ultimate Ego, the most unique individual, from whom all egos proceed. The relation is not absorption but a relation of finite ego to infinite Ego, in which the finite self grows by assimilating divine attributes while remaining itself.
• Man and superman: the goal of the self's development is the perfect man (insān-i-kāmil, mard-i-mo'min), who is God's vicegerent on earth. Iqbal knew Nietzsche's Übermensch and admired its energy, but his perfect man joins power to love and faith and is realised within religion, not against it.
• Intellect and intuition: the Reconstruction treats intuition (the "heart", associated with ʿishq, love) as a higher mode of the same intellect, not its opposite; thought and intuition "spring from the same root and complement each other". Religious experience is a source of knowledge to be examined critically, like other experience.

• The Religion of Man (Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, 1930): the divine is realised in and through humanity, in "the Supreme Person" or "Man the Eternal" that each individual reaches beyond himself to touch. What marks human beings is a "surplus" beyond biological need, expressed in art, love and moral ideals; religion is the realisation of this universal humanity.
• Ideas on education: Tagore founded a school at Santiniketan in 1901 and the Visva-Bharati university in 1921 ("where the world makes a home in a single nest"). Education should be in harmony with nature, in freedom rather than confinement, through creative activity and the arts, and in the mother tongue; his satire "The Parrot's Training" mocks schooling that stuffs a bird with pages until it dies.
• Concept of nationalism: in Nationalism (1917) Tagore criticised the Western nation-state as "the organised self-interest of a whole people", a machine of commerce and politics that sacrifices the moral and spiritual person. India's problem is social, not political, and its ideal is the unity of diverse peoples within a larger humanity, not an imitation of aggressive nationalism.

Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya (1875–1949) is the most technical of the group. His lecture "Swaraj in Ideas" (given during the freedom movement and published only in 1954, after his death) diagnoses a "slavery of the spirit": educated Indians had taken on Western ideas without assimilating them, and a genuine swaraj requires thinking for oneself, accepting foreign ideas only after they have been judged in one's own terms. "The Concept of Philosophy" (1936) distinguishes grades of theoretic consciousness: empirical thought (science, about facts), and three grades of philosophy, pure objective thought (philosophy of the object), spiritual thought (philosophy of the subject) and transcendental thought (philosophy of truth). Philosophy is not a body of knowledge of facts but the elaboration of beliefs that are "speakable" without being facts.

In The Subject as Freedom (1930) Bhattacharyya argues that the subject, the "I", cannot be known as an object, yet it is not nothing: it is known by progressively freeing itself from identification with what is objective. He traces grades of subjectivity: bodily subjectivity (the felt body), psychic subjectivity (image, idea and feeling) and spiritual subjectivity, each a stage of freedom from the object. On māyā, in his essay on Advaita, he treats it as the "indefinite", neither real nor unreal, whose being is not affirmable nor deniable, and reads Advaita as a spiritual discipline rather than a dogma.

• Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), intellect and intuition: intellect analyses and gives discursive, partial knowledge; intuition is "integral insight", immediate and whole, the source of creative work in science, art and religion. Intuition does not contradict intellect but completes it, and intellect must test and express what intuition sees.
• An Idealist View of Life (Hibbert Lectures, 1929; published 1932): against naturalism and scepticism, the universe expresses a spiritual purpose and values are real; religious experience, which Radhakrishnan finds essentially the same across traditions, is the ground of this idealism.
• Universal religion and the Hindu view of life: The Hindu View of Life (Upton Lectures, 1926) presents Hinduism as a way of life rather than a fixed creed, tolerant because it values experience over dogma; the religion of the future will be a "religion of the spirit" that respects all traditions as paths to the same reality.