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.