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THE PHILOSOPHY OF DUTY
“The road of excess," writes William Blake, "lcads to the palace of wisdom.” 18 Only when pressed to excess does anything generate its opposite. And so we find that in India, where the pattern of identification with the social roles is carried to such an extreme that the whole content of the collective unconscious is emptied into the sphere of action during the first half of the individual's lifetime, when the period of the first two āśramas has been sulfilled a violent countermovement in the psyche transports the individual to the extreme of the vilicr pole, and hc rests, anonymous as ever, but in the antarctic, now, of absolute non-identilication. We all, in the West as well as in the Orient, have to identify, if we are to participate at all in the life of our society, the course of history, and the general work of the world. Onc has always to be something--student, father, mother, engineer. But in the Hindu system respect for this necessity has been carricd to such excess that the whole of lile has become petrified in a rigid icon based on principle; beyond that, outside the social frame, is the void of the unmanifesi, to which one can pass when the lesson of the first hall of life has been learned--the lesson of the gods; and to which one then passes automatically, compulsively, as though driven by the whole weight of a counterdrive of commensurate reaction. “I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and ncither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” 19 Only because all has been given is the individual free to enter at last into the sphere beyond possession and belief.
We all have to identify ourselves with something and "belong" --but cannot and should not try to seck fulfillment in this attitude. For the recognition of distinctions between things, the differentiation of this from that, which is implicit in and basic to this natural effort, pertains to the sphere of mere appearance, the realm of birth and death (sarnsära). India's popular deifica
18 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell." 19 Revelation 3: 15-16.
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |