Saturday 26 September 2020

Who's Afraid of Immanuel Kant

"The only addition, properly so called– and that only in the method of proof– which I have made in the present edition, consists of a new refutation of psychological idealism, and a strict demonstration– the only one possible, as I believe– of the objective reality of external intuition. However harmless idealism may be considered– although in reality it is not so– in regard to the essential ends of metaphysics, it must still remain a scandal to philosophy and to the general human reason to be obliged to assume, as an article of mere belief, the existence of things external to ourselves (from which, yet, we derive the whole material of cognition for the internal sense), and not to be able to oppose a satisfactory proof to any one who may call it in question. ("from introduction to 'The Critique of Pure Reason')


To do this he has to admit to an internal dualism in which a permanent self is a subject that is conscious of its representations.  Something has to be there to log the changes and to keep an eye on the shop.  The objection that arises from this the classical one.  You are only immediately aware of what is presented to your mind.  That there is a corresponding external reality is an inference based on animal faith.  Kant rejects this.  I am aware of the reality of the changes in my self over time.  It is a real intuition as real as I am myself and is therefore a type of inner representation that is connected to a reality.

"This consciousness of my existence in time is, therefore, identical with  ,the consciousness of a relation to something external to me, and it is, therefore, experience, not fiction, sense, not imagination, which inseparably connects the external with my internal sense." (from introduction to 'The Critique of Pure Reason")


To which I might demur and in doing so hobble my reading but I will resist that and enjoy the monumental ambition of a thinker who is regarded as the most important of the early modern philosophers according to a poll top of the philosophers


Kant 421/Hume:232      Kant443 / Descartes 201  (ranked)

So numero uno but here's the thing:  I have a suspicion  (a hedged conviction) that of all those that voted a good number have never read 'The Critique of Pure Reason' through.  As diligent students it would not have benefited them and when safeky graduated seem too historical.  I spent a few weeks on it in a state of genial befuddlement

Thursday 24 September 2020

Make Arrangements with Yourself

Reading Samuel Johnson’s poem reminded me of the enigmatic lines of Neil Young which may refer in an oblique way to hire purchase agreements/arrangements whereby when you have paid half the price of a vehicle you can sell it back, being young enough to sell or keep on paying until you own it as a metaphor for contemplating dropping out.

loosened from the minor’s tether,

free to mortgage or to sell,

Wild as wind, and light as feather

,Bid the slaves of thrift farewell 

(from: To Sir John Lade on his coming of age by Samuel Johnson)



Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself


when you're old enough to repay but young enough to sell


(from Tell Me Why by Neil Young)



Woodie knows it isn’t easy:

You gotta walk that lonesome valley,

You gotta walk it by yourself,

Nobody here can walk it for you,

You gotta walk it by yourself.

(from Lonesome Valley by Woodie Guthrie)

Tuesday 22 September 2020

Philip Goff on Panpsychism and the Moral Order


 Philip Goff swimming against a strong current of subjectivism in moral judgment has written on Panpsychism’s  inherentist position in the online magazine <i>Nautilus</i>

knowing universe


I driving in my new tomato coloured Datsun begin to notice how many of them are around.

Goff writes:

<blockquote>This is where panpsychism can help. On a non-panpsychist form of the container view, Reality is a general form of being, which can manifest as either mental or non-mental entities. On a panpsychist version of the container view, Reality can be thought of as pure, undifferentiated consciousness, while particular manifestations of Reality are specific forms of that pure and undifferentiated consciousness.</blockquote>


This version of panpsychism seems to me very like the Advaita Vedanta view in which individual realities are forms of limitation (upadhis) of pure consciousness.  The mind/body of the individual consciousness is also an upadhi and can receive inputs from ‘external’ reality as mental modifications (vritti) which are ‘true’ to the external because they are in the same substratum.  In this way the paradox of idealism and scepticism about the external world are obviated.  This ties into the concept of Dharma and rta or the order of reality.


Though often represented as subjective idealism Advaita is thoroughly realistic.  We can have a non-numerical identity between the inner and the outer which is corrigible because there is always something more to know.

I have seen panpsychism traduced as an abdication of reason or a new madness.

This purported newness is the result of an ignorance of the history of ideas.  Panpsychism is probably the most ancient philosophy there is.

Sunday 20 September 2020

Gavaya: Very like a cow Kumarila

I feel like the detective that turns on his way out the door and says: - There’s one thing that bothering me. Why choose a complex illustration for the upamana pramana if all you had in mind was plain similarity? Why the tuppence coloured cow and gavaya, and the knowledgeable forester etc, etc. Why not offer what everyone can understand eg. a similar design, a similar fate, a similar frock, a book with a similar theme etc. If not, why not? 

 My tentative sense of these ready to hand examples is that they involve unitary instances. One hammer is much like any other qua hammer even though there are many kinds with specialised functions; ball pein, cross pein, claw etc.

 Kumarila in Slokavarttika dismisses the idea of ‘twins’ as an exemplar of similarity because there we see that they are. (22/3 pg.226 Jha trans.) The moment you utter the word ‘twin’ you admit similarity, it is not something that you might discover about twins or peas.
In a case where we have the recognition of a single class as belonging to the principle objects themselves (and not to the parts), there we have a notion (of identity) such as “this is that very thing”; and where there is difference, there we have the notion of Similarity only.
When the person roaming in the forest sees a strange animal, he perceives the beast. At one and the same time he is aware of its ‘cowness’and that it is a gavaya. That is the upamana. To put it portentously we are moving towards a scientifically actionable knowledge of genus and species. 


Saturday 19 September 2020

The Batchelors by Muriel Spark

I always relish the moment when I know that I am going to enjoy a novel. Muriel Spark can supply piquant phrases wholesale. Two bachelors meet while shopping on a Saturday morning. They are Martin Bowles barrister of thirty five and Ronald Bridges curator of a small museum of handwriting in the City of London. He has become an expert handwriting witness and at age thirty-seven would appear to be settling into bachelorhood in a serious way. The novel was published in 1960 when a man that age unmarried would be regarded as a dodgy property by any woman and probably needing extensive renovation. They pull into a cafe for an espresso and continue to discuss prices and availability.
‘At a price,’ said Ronald. ‘At a price,’ Martin said. ‘What bacon do you get?’ ‘I make do with streaky. I grudge breakfasts,’ said Ronald. ‘Same here.’ Your hand’s never out of your pocket,’ Ronald said before Martin could say it. A small narrow-built man came in the door and joined the girl, smiling at her with a sweet, spiritual expression.
This man is Patrick Seton who is recognised by Martin as a man whose hand is continuously in the pockets of others. (I know you planted that association Muriel) He will be the prosecuting council in a case coming up -
‘What for?’ ‘Fraudulent conversion and possibly other charges. Somebody in my chambers defended Seton ages ago. Not that it did either any good. Let’s go.’
In those opening pages we meet the moral poles of this novel, Bridges and Seton. The former is a decent chap who suffers from grand mal epilepsy and Catholicism as the mileu that he moves in would judge as double affliction.
Ronald was used to hearing his hostesses over the years come out with this statement, and had devised various ways of coping with it, according to his mood and to his idea of the hostess’s intentions. If the intelligence seemed to be high and Ronald was in a suitable mood, he replied ‘I’m anti-Protestant’ —which he was not; but it sometimes served to shock them into a sense of their indiscretion. On one occasion where the woman was a real bitch, he had walked out. Sometimes he said ‘Oh, are you? How peculiar.’ Sometimes he allowed that the woman was merely trying to start up a religious argument, and he would then attempt to explain where he stood with his religion. Or again, he might say, ‘Then you’ve received Catholic instruction?’ and, on hearing that this was not so, would comment, ‘Then how can you be anti something you don’t know about? ‘Which annoyed them; so that Ronald felt uncharitable.
Seton is a nasty conman and a trance medium who occasionally picks up some real information from the beyond at seances run by a group called The Wider Infinity within which an esoteric splinter group functions as The Interior Spiral. Seton has robbed a widow of £2000 and is trying to pass it off as a gift by forging a letter urging the promotion of the great work. Bridges will be examining this letter and acting for the prosecution during the forthcoming trial. Its a plot rich novel with many amusing scenes and situations. Seton as a developing psychopath comes to contemplate murder as the release into the great beyond. That is convincingly Crippenesque. Fun too:
‘He pees in the sink,’ said Walter, ‘not that I hold that against him.’ ‘He doesn’t!’ said Chloe.(barmaid) ‘True,’ said Walter. ‘It’s nothing. We bachelors all pee in sinks and wash-basins.’ ‘I don’t,’ said Matthew. ‘You’re young yet,’ Walter said. ‘Filthy beasts, the lot of you,’ Chloe said, laughing towards one face and another as she leant over the bar.
A good novel, living out its life in the space of a week with a fine sense of moral balance and evil.

Monday 14 September 2020

Kumarila Bhatta on Upamana in Slokavarttika

Bhatta in his Slokavarttika hunts the gavaya out of his forest home into the broad pasture of rational discourse. I mean by that his very full treatment of the pramana known as upamana or analogy/comparison. The view that he controverts is that the Naiyayika school which does not allow that upamana is a pramana. In this note I want to focus on what his positive thesis is.
The fact of "Similarity" (or Resemblance) being a positive entity, however, cannot be denied ; inasmuch as according to them, there exists (or Resemblance) being a positive inasmuch as it consists of the presence, in one class of objects, of such an arrangement (or conglomeration) of constituent parts as is common to another class of objects.
. (18: pg.225) It is not just the discovery of likeness in constituent parts that makes upamana a basic valid means of knowledge, what matters is the identification of what draws together any number of classes which I understand as the discovery of their genus.
And Similarity differs from the {classes) in that it rests upon a conglomeration of classes whereas the classes appear also severally among objects of Sense-perception.
Here Bhatta is disputing the claim that Similarity/Upamana is merely a matter of sense perception or what is termed extraordinary perception which descries similarity or universals in the sensory data pur sang. Ganganatha Jha the translator of this work offers a clarificatory footnote to the discussion whether Upamana might not be a case of inference. Similarity is 'in the cow' and naturally the cow is not present to sense perception in the classical example.
It is the similarity, in the cow, of the gavaya, that is the true object of Analogy ; whereas that which is perceived by the eye is the similarity as located in the gavaya ; and the latter could not give rise to any Inference that would bring about any idea of the similarity in the cow.
(fn.44/45 )

Tuesday 8 September 2020

Story Time


Once you start telling stories your control over how they will be understood is over. Now you might take the precaution of explaining what the story means and guide the interpretation that way. Nevertheless if you are in a living tradition your propaedeutic precautions will not still contrary voices. Barry Lam’s story on Daily Nous about the man who wants to upgrade his sound system can be taken as a parable of indiscernible difference, the sorites paradox that might drive him back to his sub optimal buzzy speakers.
copper wire

However as anyone who has ever tried to sell anything that isn’t rubbish, a good product at a very reasonable price; if it isn’t selling your best strategy is to put up the price. It’s the sleight of the invisible hand. Buy the magic wire, you idiot.

Sunday 6 September 2020

Musing


Duration is your own personal gravity. It is enhanced by meditation which can turn half an hour into five minutes. That extra twenty five minutes which some might say was lost time is available for poetry. For mystics it can stand for a lifetime. Time passes through them.

Thursday 3 September 2020

Idealism as a Hungry Hypothesis


We know that Advaita Vedanta is not Idealist and yet it sometimes is described as such. A reason for this apart from a general lack of knowledge about its history of rejection of Idealism is loose talk of ‘It’s all consciousness’ without a sense of how that fits in with a realist ontology. This creates confusion and allows the committed Western Idealist to suppose that he has found a home in the East. Josiah Royce, Timothy Sprigge and recently Bernardo Kastrup consider Advaita to have an affinity with their own Idealisms.

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself as proper nourishment, and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.
(Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy)