Saturday 6 August 2022

The non-grasbable Self in Kena Up., Meister Eckhart and Markus Gabriel

 

According to Meister Eckhart, then, we thinkers of thoughts are categorically distinct from any object we could ever perceive or think of.  With this basic line of thought, which I have here extended to the topic of the brain, Meister Eckhart discovered the topic of the radical non-objectivity of the self......

What Meister Eckhart is saying amounts to the claim that the self cannot be strictly identical with any object that it perceives. The self only falls under laws it gives to itself; it cannot be strictly determined by the objects it perceives.

(from ‘I am not a Brain’ by Markus Gabriel)

Browsing in the book I came across that observation.  My last post note on the Kena Upanishad would be a demurral. 

Self Knowledge 

  Kena is tentatively 500 B.C.  and Shankara 8th.Cent. A.D.  Professor Gabriel of Bonn University takes, as his book title suggests, a non-naturalist stance or at least not a linear functionalist one.  An interesting book written I surmise for the intelligent general reader, the igger as distinct from the iggerent (Mayo pronunciation)  My father was told the story of the man whose son was a student priest in Maynooth.  The son would not eat at the same table as his father and ‘I wouldn’t blame him’ says your man, ‘he was the iggernest man in Kilasser’.

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