Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
1888-1975 · Modern Indian Thought · Prominent
Radhakrishnan held a chair at Oxford before serving as India's first Vice-President and its second President. He restated Advaita Vedanta, the teaching that reality is one thing without a second, as a mystical experience lying under every faith: the religions differ in form and meet in that direct encounter. Critics answer that this flattens differences the faiths themselves treat as real.
Signature
The position Radhakrishnan is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain
- Theology
- Pantheism / Panentheism
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- leans Realism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Inherent (96 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Radhakrishnan refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Pantheism / Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Representative Democracy / One World Order
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Union with God
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Karmic Balance
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Idealism / Non-Dual Awareness
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue / Natural Law
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Karmic Causation
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation
What is the origin of reality? - Authority
- Sacred Tradition / Wisdom
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Sacred Speech
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Apophatic Pointer
What is the status of paradox? - Death
- Reincarnation / Union with the One
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Virtue to Cultivate / Path to the Divine
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- All Beings
What is your primary bond and loyalty?