Mystical Intuition as an Instrument of Indian Philosophy

Abstract

The specificity of Indian epistemic culture is the inclusion of mystical intuition among cognitive abilities, and the absence of the concept of reason as the highest cognitive ability. In Indian traditional religio-philosophical texts intuition, often referred to as mystical experience, was used by default. In the philosophical works of Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950), its epistemological status is revealed and substantiated. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the concept of mystical intuition and its relationship with the mind in his book “The Life Divine”. The reason for referring to intuition’s legacy was the opportunity to explicate, with the help of explanations by A. Ghosh, the implicit grounds for the prevalence of mystical intuition over logical operations of thinking, similar to the rational methods of Western philosophy. The thinker’s epistemological ideas are inscribed in his system of Integral Vedanta, which is an intercultural phenomenon that unites Western and Indian traditions of philosophizing. The author of the article draws attention to the biographical determinants of Aurobindo’s intercultural philosophical synthesis and to his choice of concepts claiming the status of intercultural values. These determinants are related to Aurobindo’s Western education in England, his turn from Western values to classical Hindu culture after returning to his homeland, his participation in the struggle for independence of Motherland, his departure from politics and immersion in the spiritual practices of yoga, which inspired him to create philosophical works. The methodological framework of the article includes methods of linguistic and semantic analysis of similar terms of European and Indian philosophy, and a comparative method of reducing them to uniformity in order to establish meaningful similarities and differences; a method of reconstructing the historicophilosophical context of the problem under study; a biographical method allowing to demonstrate the influence of the events of his life on his philosophy. The result of the study was the conclusion that the philosopher’s epistemological ideas are innovative, since he uses Western terminology at his discretion and introduces new contents into the concepts of Vedanta.