Wednesday 20 April 2022

Moby Dick and Vedanta

 

It’s interesting to see a Vedantic note in Melville’s analysis of Ahab’s soul loss.  The sinking back into atman/soul that occurs in deep sleep in which mental modifications/vritti subside being overcome by tamas/torpour is referenced.  Normally this is a state of quasi bliss without perturbation but not for Ahab:

For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.

Ahab is possessed, his nature riven by an all consuming purpose.

In his compendium of whale lore and legend Melville missed this sutra from the Bhradaranyaka Upanisad  IV.iii.18:

As a great fish swims alternately to both the banks (of a river), eastern and western, so does this infinite being move in both these states, the dream and waking states.

The whale as  infinite being, the emptiness that devours worlds and inanition made visible.

Tuesday 19 April 2022

Amiel's Journal

 

Amiel’s spirit oscillates between rapture and dejection and having the thinker’s mental review of all perspectives finds multiple viewpoints a delamination of motive.  How is one to act when the moral instinct is weakened.  To act now at once.  Can we say that the good man has no interest in ethics?

“We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious, intelligent and moral action. At bottom this is nothing more than the proposition of Hegel: [“What is rational is real; and what is real is rational;”] but it had never seemed to me more evident, more palpable. Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind.”

Indeed, just so.  Amiel seems to me at his best when his heart grasps a truth that is free from the oppression of the apodeictic.

December 2, 1851.—Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new—thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being—do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to any one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence and night.

Looking coldly at the phenomenon of Jacobinism, a perennial fallacy that confuses the nature of equity he writes:

“The modern leveler, after having done away with conventional inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and historical injustice, goes still farther, and rebels against the inequalities of merit, capacity, and virtue. Beginning with a just principle, he develops it into an unjust one. Inequality may be as true and as just as equality: it depends upon what you mean by it. But this is precisely what nobody cares to find out. All passions dread the light, and the modern zeal for equality is a disguised hatred which tries to pass itself off as love.

 

 

Liberty, equality—bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice, and justice toward the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.”

 

 

Amiel’s Journal, available on gutenberg.org , reminds me of Woody Allen’s quip about the boy who failed a philosophy exam because he was caught looking into another boy’s soul.

Thursday 14 April 2022

Fowler on Irony

 

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing  shall hear and shall not understand and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of that more and of the outsiders incomprehension.

1.      Socratic  irony was a profession of ignorance.  What Socrates represented as an ignorance and a weakness in himself was in fact a non-committal attitude towards any dogma, however accepted or imposing, that had not been carried back to and shown to be based on first principles.  The two parties in his audience were, first, the dogmatists moved by pity or contempt to enlighten this ignorance, and secondly, those who knew their Socrates and set themselves to watch the familiar game in which learning should be turned out by simplicity.

2.      The double audience is essential also to what is called dramatic irony i.e. the irony of the Greek drama. That drama had the peculiarity of providing the double audience – one party in the secret and the other not- in a special manner.  The facts of most Greek plays were not a matter of invention, but were part of every Athenian child’s store of legend; all the spectators, that is, were in the secret beforehand of what would happen.  But the characters Pentheus and Oedipus and the rest, were in the dark; one of them might utter words that to him and his companions on the stage were of trifling import, but to those who hearing could understand were pregnant with the coming doom.  The surface meaning for the dramatis personae, and the underlying one for the spectators; the dramatist working his effect by irony. (from Fowler’s Modern English Usage)

 

 

Tuesday 12 April 2022

David Bentley Hart and Jacques Maritain on Natural and Supernatural

 The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine (essay from 'You are Gods' by David Bentley Hart.

D.B.H. begins by finding in the natural order what might be considered to be propaduetic to the divine.  In the Platonic and Aristotelian onto-epistemology there is a surpassing of the apparent division between subject and object.  It is in this that he comes close to the non-duality of Advaita Vedanta which he admits as an influence which guides him past the Natural/Supernatural dyad beloved by the Thomist manualists that he impugns with all the scintillating nay coruscating invective that he commands.  All good fun until someone loses an eye.

Jacques Maritain in his ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ :


“To admit in any degree whatsoever, even in simplest inchoative form, a genuine experience of the depths of God's being on the natural level would necessarily mean either to confuse our natural intellectuality (specified by being in general) with our intellectuality as it flows from grace and is specified by the Divine Essence itself; or to confuse the presence of God's immensity (whereby God is present in all things in virtue of his created efficiency) with His holy indwelling (whereby He is present in a special way, as object, in souls that are in the state of grace); or, again, to muddle up in the same hybrid concept, the wisdom of the natural order (metaphysical wisdom), and the infused gift of wisdom; or, finally, to attribute to the natural love of God what belongs exclusively to supernatural charity.”

As I mentioned Hart finds an entry point into complete realisation of the divine through experience.  ‘There is no other door to that awareness’ (Sankara)

In WWF terms regard me as the midget compadre that runs into the ring and kicks the referee on the shin.

Hart begins as Aristotle does with the sense of wonder. Out of that comes inquiry.  I may as well admit that he sends me to the dictionary betimes.  What’s chiasmus?  The general drift seems to be the repetition of the general in the particular or something.  Anyways he begins with an advaitic note by a laying out of the aporetic:

“We are accustomed, here in modernity’s evening twilight, to conceive of our knowledge of the world principally as a regime of representation, according to which sensory intuitions are transformed into symbolic images by some kind of neurological and perceptual metabolism, and then subjected to whatever formal conceptual determinations our transcendental apperception and apparatus of perception might permit....

Knowledge, then, consists in no more than a kind of cognitive allegory of and logical deduction about Being, because Being in itself possesses an occult adversity or resistance to being known....

The more rational assumption, however, is that so implausible a liaison between absolutely incommensurable spheres of reality is impossible, and that in fact mind and world must belong to one another from the first, as flowing from and continuously participating in a single source that is at once ontological and gnoseological, and in which the ontological and the gnoseological are one and the same.”

Here Hart is moving towards an epistemology that is like that of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’.  He calls it perceptuality/perceptability.  What we know is the object itself as it is by virtue of the mental modification/vritti or in Thomist terms the ‘conversio ad phantasmata’(?).

“Only in the transcendence of form over the formed—whether the latter be a material substrate or the intentionality of the mind—can there be a place of true indistinction between the being of an object and the knowledge of that object. Only in form—only in the informing cause of both an object’s finite existence and the act of understanding that takes that object in— can the secret and most primordial impulse of all philosophy realize its end.”

Maritain denies the knowledge of God via connaturality to those wholly dependent on the natural order.  Though that experience by mystics of Islam and Vedanta may be sublime it suffers from the  disability of being stuck in the natural domain. 

“There are Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and other schools of mystics. But the mystical experience to which they lay claim does not proceed from theological faith. There must, therefore, be a natural mystical experience.”

Hart counters the two tier view on which this judgment is based.  The first sentences of this citation is an objection:

“Surely the temporal is, from the perspective of the finite, contingent. But, from the perspective of the eternal life of God, God’s manifestation of himself to himself is never without his manifestation in creation, and so creation is eternally present within the eternal act whereby God is God.”

Where Hart causes the complaint ‘but this is pantheism’ arises from utterances like this:

“ Our being in God and God’s being in us are both also and more originally God’s being as God”

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Pantheism is an all-purpose dismissal which is never analysed.  Is it the atheistic pantheism of Hegel or Spinoza or something else maybe a doctrine that the world is divine.  To follow that through logically it would mean the Cosmos was uncreated which is very like the ‘ajativada’ of Gaudapada (unborn).  Hart uses a Trinitarian perspective, whereby the Cosmos is an emanation from the boundless creativity of the Father.  There is nothing necessary about creation but the connection is through the unity of being.

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Hart’s essay is of course ‘per speculum in aenigmate’.  The ambhibological words which swim in two oceans are used to advance his speculations.  Deep meditations here and natation outside the flags.

Tuesday 5 April 2022

I AM realisation

 Further to the ‘I AM’ inquiry which Nisargadatta was instructed in by his guru I find that there is a universal aspect to this realisation.  Jacques Maritain in his book ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ mentions a couple.

One who is very near to us one day gave us the following testimony of such a knowledge: “Before receiving the faith,” that person (his wife Raissa ?) told us “it often happened that by a sudden intuition I experienced the reality of my own being, of the deepest, first principle that placed me outside nothingness.  It was a powerful intuition and its violence often frightened me; that intuition gave me, for the first time, knowledge of a metaphysical absolute”

Maritain in a footnote to this witness:

In Jean-Paul’s autobiography mention is made of a like intuition:

“ One morning, while I was still a child, I was standing on the threshold of my house and looked to the left, towards the wood-shed, when suddenly the idea came to me out of the sky like a bolt from the blue:I am an I  and from that moment it never left me; my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever.”

Lord Alfred Tennyson :

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?

Monday 4 April 2022

The Furniture of the Mind and I AM.

The Self cannot be accepted or rejected by Itself or by others, nor does It accept or reject anyone else.  This is right knowledge.  (#83, Chap.XVII Right Knowledge from Upadesa Sahasri of Shankaracarya)

We move the furniture of the mind about looking for maximum effect.  A touch of Existential anomie with a soupçon of the Quinean and the mystic plangency of the curlew’s pipe at dusk.  To keep adding to the philosophical palette until your temperament is perfectly at rest is the aim that misses the Self that never stops saying ‘I am’.

The Sense of "I am(Consciousness)

My teacher told me to hold on to the sense 'I am' tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am -- unbound.

I simply followed (my teacher's) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared -- myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.

(Nisargadatta Maharaj)