The Subject as Freedom

A short, dense treatise by K. C. Bhattacharya, often regarded as one of the most important works of academic philosophy written in colonial India. Drawing on Vedānta, Sāṃkhya and Kant, it asks what the knowing subject is, given that it can never be fully turned into an object of knowledge. The subject is not a thing we know but something we are; it is meant or symbolised by the word 'I' rather than described. Bhattacharya argues that subjectivity comes in grades, and that each grade is a further freedom from identification with some object. At the level of bodily subjectivity we are the body as felt from within, not the body as perceived. Psychic subjectivity, the level of images and thought, frees us further from the body. Spiritual subjectivity, which includes feeling and introspection, is a self-awareness that stands apart from its mental states. The goal is a freedom in which the subject is realised fully as subject, a philosophical counterpart to the Vedāntic idea of liberation.

It is a key work of modern Indian philosophy, offering an original account of selfhood that brings Vedānta into conversation with Kant on the limits of self-knowledge.