Sunday 30 August 2020

J.N. Findlay and the Non-Apprehension of Existence (anupalabadhi)


I’m reading J.N. Findlay’s The Discipline of the Cave his Gifford Lectures of 1965 and enjoying it. He lays about him with vigorous eloquence the timid orthodoxy of the day namely ‘ordinary language’ and ‘analysis’. Here he defends what the Vedantin would call anupalabadhi or the non-apprehension of existence as a valid means of knowledge.


 There can, it may be argued, be no negative facts: this does not prove that Mother Hubbard and her dog did not encounter a most distressing negative phenomenon when they opened the cupboard, which admits neither of metaphysical nor psychological reduction. Heidegger's withers are unwrung by all those sunny analyses which prove that nothing, or the total absence of anything, is not a genuine object, and that it is not therefore possible to feel dread in the face of it. Nothing or the total absence of anything is a genuine object of contemplation and of varied emotional attitudes—much of the exquisite culture of Japan, for instance, seems to be built around it—and it is much more certain that this is so than that some piece of analysis is a correct one. 

Thursday 27 August 2020

Dharmakirti, an Idealist?


Professor Birgit Kellner in her discussion of the idealism of Dharmakirti, and if indeed he was one offers this citation from his Pramanavarttika in which, at least to my mind, he appears to be one and virtually ready to be snagged by the crozier of Bishop Berkeley.

If cognition has the form of the object, what evidence is there for the external object?39 If cognition is without the form of the object, how could
it be an experience of that object?
If cognition’s having the nature of awareness is not conditioned by resemblance, then that nature of awareness is established of the cognition
just from cognition itself (svata eva). What is then contributed by an external object?
(from: dharmakirti idealism

This does not seem so far away from the position that Shankaracarya impugns in Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya II.ii.28.


Monday 24 August 2020

Kumarila and Vitanda in Slokavartika


Vitanda, a cavilling and captious style of argument is of little use against the bulwark of Idealism which in its various forms has been defended by some very big brains. They have held fast to the Holmsian line - "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”. What, they ask, are we immediately aware of? Ok. Well then, and don’t wimp out with talk of the mediate, the representation or indeed seeing through the data to something or other. Kumarila might demur and point out the road blocks or all the mental operations that are not open to the idealist. You can’t draw an inference from the external object that doesn’t exist. You can’t included it in a line of reasoning because it is an unsupported unknown and thus cannot have a place and a value. All this and more he argues at length against the Sunyavada Buddhist and incidentally displays the tendency of expatiation to obscure rather than clarify.

Vitanda does not offer an exposition of the personally held metaphysics and it is this alone that can create a doubt in the opponent's mind. You have to be able to incorporate that strong central observation, account for it and move to a new synthesis. The big flash must be shaded out by a bigger one.

Crazy ideas coming from philosophers are generally preceded by an intuition that they experience as a eureka moment whereby a field of thought becomes crystallised and an intelligible pattern is discerned. This flash is like the M.I.B.s but it destroys not the memory of ever having seen aliens but the fibrillating antennae of the illative sense. Conclusions are missed that ought to be obvious and the reductio ad gibbering folly follows not. No, our philosopher receiving the spark from heaven remains complacent.

more anon.



Tuesday 18 August 2020

Thought for the Day


When you look at something long enough it can seem strange and uncanny. I asked myself what do we think with? What are thoughts anyway? The thoughts of this boy were long long thoughts to alter Houseman’s line a little. How long is a thought? Can we apply a temporal character to a thought or a series of thoughts. At 6 a.m. I woke suddenly and thought ‘I am going to court today’. Cerebral activity is taking place of course but does that give a time stamp to the consciousness?

Are thoughts images? Can we think in images? Could we imagine a series of images representing a logical sequence or an imagistic syllogism. The Imagists thought so. A haiku creates evanescent clarity, or a thought that is momentary but also abides as a continuing mood.

Normally we imagine that we think with subvocal half sentences and phrases of the sort that Joyce tried to capture in Ulysses. Language at its most abstract is founded on the concrete. The word ‘character’ has an interesting etymology coming from the Greek ‘kharassein’ sharpen, furrow, scratch, engrave probably from a base meaning ‘scratch’. I’m inclined to think that this may be related to the craftsman’s scribe or gauge defining width or thickness. The block or board thus defined limits what what can be done with it. It’s a fixed given, or a character.





Friday 14 August 2020

Karma, Janma and Apurva in the Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya of Shankaracarya


If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which will grow and which will not
Speak them to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours, nor your fate.
(Banquo addressing the Weird Sisters Macbeth Act 1 Scene III)

The concept of karma/janma, of desserts and birth is well established in the religious systems of India. In Vedanta in particular the metaphysical underpinning of the doctrine is given close study. The satkaryavada theory of the non-difference between cause and effect is an important theory first introduced by the Sankhya. If interested there is no reason to repeat myself. Like the detectorist said - check it out! enter ‘satkaryavada in the search box.
satkaryavada
I
Naturally the attraction of puzzle cases that appear to explode this theory are examined by Shankaracarya in his Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya. We can accept the flow of the universe and the causal process which is timely or immediate -

But it does not stand to reason that fruits can come at some future time from actions which get destroyed the next moment; because something cannot come out of nothing.
(Bhb. III.ii.38)

What is in question here is the efficacy of ritual. Nothing seems to come of it. Is it a waste of good ghee?

Vedantin:That too does not remove the difficulty; for there can be no such thing as a result till the agent of the act comes to possess it, inasmuch as any happiness or sorrow experienced by any soul at any time is recognised in the world to be such a result relatively to that very time. ..........Again if it be maintained that though the result may not issue just after the action, it can issue (in the future) out of the unseen potency emerging out of the act, that too is unjustifiable, for potency, which is inert like stocks and stones, cannot act unless stimulated by some conscious agent. Besides, such an unseen potency lacks any valid proof.

Shankara means here by potency and act material causation. Unseen potency cannot work like milk being turned into curds. No causal path can be discerned for it. Therefore its efficacy can only be accepted on the basis of faith in divine energy.

In Bhb. III.ii.40 Shankara in his account of the Mimansaka maintains that they accept the ‘unseen potency’ idea. This is referred to as apurva or the unprecedented in the special sense of an occurence that has no immediately preceding cause.

Mimamsaka: If the Vedic authority is accepted, one has to think in the way that would justify the kind of relation between action and the result of action that is mentioned in the Vedas. Unless the action, while undergoing destruction, produces some unseen potency, it cannot produce its result after an interval. Hence the inference to be drawn is that there is such a thing called unseen potency which may be either some subtle state of the action itself or some previous (seed) state of the result. In this way the position stated earlier becomes logical. But the theory that God ordains the results is illogical. For one uniform cause cannot produce variegated results; that will lead to partiality and cruelty on God’s part and the performance of action will be useless. Hence the conclusion is that results are produced by virtuous deeds alone.

Is this conflict an aporia generated by the accepted efficacy of ritual. Shankara does not admit this impasse:

And God’s bestowing of results consists precisely in His creating the creatures according to individual merits. The defects of the impossibility of the emergence of variegated results from the very same cause, and so on, do not arise since God acts by taking into account the efforts made by his creatures (Bhb. III.ii.41)





Wednesday 5 August 2020

The Last Days of Immanuel Kant based on De Quincey's essay


The Last Days of Immanuel Kant the movie is on youtube with english subtitles.
last days
as you probably know.
It’s good and and the element of slapstick is mild and kind. I particularly liked the moment when his discharged manservant came back to him for a reference and Kant had to try hard to find a truth not altogether damming. If you first read the De Quincey translation and amalgamation of various accounts of his last days the events portrayed in the film will be clearer.
De Quincey last days

Amusingly De Quincey offers a simple of his own for the stomach problems of the philosopher:

[Footnote: For Kant’s particular complaint, as described by other biographers, a quarter of a grain of opium, every twelve hours, would have been the best remedy, perhaps a perfect remedy.] 




Monday 3 August 2020

Mrs Humphry Ward meets Karen


May I suggest the verb karenise for the action of altering the usages of the past in a way which corresponds with present enlightened practice. Look up Wikipedia for a biography of Mrs Humphry Ward and you will be presented with an entry entitled Mary Augusta Ward. She made her name as a best selling author under her formal married name of Mrs Humphry Ward. Her philanthropic work was carried out under that title. It might be viewed as her chattel name but this formal appellation was commonplace until quite recently. Let the lady be called what she chose to live and work under.