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.
4 comments:
That MIB metaphor is quite something! Also: I like that I had to consult the dictionary for three words in such a short post (cavilling, captious, and illative).
Hi Yohan:
Not too dazzled I hope. Idealism is that philosophic Freddy that can’t be killed. Bernard Kastrup is visited by him in his dreams or in the mind at large. Now there’s some cognitive candle power that has taken a wrong turn. In the early 20th.C. Bertrand Russell thought he’d killed it but it’s a stubborn revenant.
There's a joke that I think is attributed to Richard Rorty: every generation someone claims to have come up with an alternative to both materialism and idealism, and it always turns out to be idealism. Perhaps it's some kind of boundary condition of dialectical thinking. :)
Bergson’s theory in Matter and Memory tries to bridge the gap between Realism/Materialism and Idealism with what he calls images. They act as ready made responses by the person to their environment. The brain in his view is an organ of action and not a receptacle for consciousness. All that has happened to us is present and ready to be utilised in analogous situations. Each time I read that book I get more out of it. It seems to push me past my understanding.
Advaita is a very misunderstood philosophy which sails between the Scylla and the Charybdis holding to the reality of the object as upadhi/form of limitation and the vritti/mental modification at the same time. There exists between them a non-numerical identity.
But as you say Idealism comes back. It’s a soft bed.
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