Swami Vivekananda
1863-1902 · Modern Indian Thought · Prominent
Vivekananda was a nineteenth-century Indian monk and the chief disciple of Ramakrishna. He put Vedanta, the teaching that one reality underlies everything, in front of Chicago's Parliament of Religions in 1893, telling the hall every faith climbs toward it. He sorted Hindu practice into four routes, knowledge, devotion, work and meditation, and founded the Ramakrishna Mission, which ties prayer to social service.
Signature
The position Vivekananda is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity
- Beginning of Things
- Emanation / Mind-Only
Positions on the 3 axes the sources answer
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
17 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Vivekananda 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
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
- Non-Dual Awareness / Idealism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue / Relational
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Karmic Causation
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation / Mind-Only
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Cyclical Return
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Sacred Tradition / Charismatic Authority
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Union with the One / Karmic Cycle
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Innate Good
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Humanity / The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?