Clearing the Ground for Theory: Sankara

 

Why do we accept that the world is directly knowable?  Because it is the natural thing to do.  It is the default position that obviates all the deeper mysteries that Idealism brings in its train.  Does the object that is not known blink out of existence, like the book in the cupboard, or the six penny bit dropped on the top of Mount Everest.  That red barn, is it a facade or does it have depth?

Yes real enough for government work, in this case the navigator in  the world.  What about that fellow, this pilgrim, this apparently continuous entity that plots and plans, feels remorse and hunger, and doubt?  On what do we base that sense of self-identity?  Hume’s question was a good one - How does a series of conscious states become conscious of itself as a series?  Is ‘it just does’ a good answer or can memory be applied as a binding, bundling force that integrates?  Seems unsatisfactory to hold that memory can create its own subject.

What then are we left with -  deeper mysteries, conundrums or the beginning of a necessary clearing of the ground?  Shankaracarya thought so.  He begins in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras with the aporia of perception.  How does that out there come to be in some sense in here and at the same time we are certain that the ‘inner’ account is a true one  within the technical boundaries of the capacity for error?

In the XVIII chapter of ‘Upadesa Sahasri’Sankara reviews the various theories of self-identity and agency.  Who is conscious, what is conscious?  Take the use of ‘I’ in sentences as a base line of reality.  Avoid the fata morgana of the Buddhist scholiasts of the void, the Sunyavadins.  Work with what you are given not as an apparently given.  Move from sensation to reason and get to the bottom of things.

Theory has as its etymology ‘theoros’ Gk. spectator.  Wittgenstein said if I remember correctly - ‘don’t think look and see’.  Start there with the ground cleared of engaging mysteries.

Faith and Belief

 Books fall down from the shelf, not really, but occasionally get plucked from where they have been hiding.  The Way of Transcendence by Alistair Kee left to me by a friend and never consciously opened was there lurking.  Kere (1937 - 2011) was a radical theologian  and in his Introduction promotes the idea that the modern man bereft of the beliefs which inform the NT might have faith in Jesus Christ as the Way but be without belief in the divinity.  His epistemological underpinning for this dichotomy seems to be belief requires evidence, justified true belief, Humean assurance and so forth.  To make Christianity more palatable it must be trimmed of such like fat as Virgin Birth, miracles, Son of God etc.  Of course this is absurd.  For instance is it intelligible to believe in the evidence of your senses?  Where does belief come into that?  George Moore was thought to have made a profound statement when he said “Its raining outside and I don’t believe it”.  That latter expression was the catch phrase of a sitcom grumpy old man when confronted by the anomalous that did not accord with expectation.  It does not cohere, it is incongruent,  

Anyway if belief is a world viewish stock that you are born into, are you stuck with it?  Can you achieve it?  Can you test it?  When Jesus said ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you’ was He offering a verbal placebo?  People have gotten down on their knees and tried it and lo they received an answer.  A personal belief has been established that is counter to rational scrutiny.   De profundis clamavi ad te domine is not the same as the knock on the door of the deserted mansion in Walter de la Mare’s poem:

The Listeners

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grass

Of the forest's ferny floor;

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

"Is there anybody there?" he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

"Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word," he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Cousinage in 'Lucretia' by Lord Bulwer-Lytton

 Well there it is again.  All this talk of Pakistanis and cousin marriage and the cost to the health service forgetting of course that it was a commonplace phenomenon in Victorian times.  Women were sheltered in the respectable upper classes and in the big families of that time brothers and sisters and their offspring mingled frequently considering it acceptable. After all Albert and Victoria were first cousins.  To blend the fortunes of the clan was considered prudent consolidation.

In the novel by Lord Bulwer-Lytton Lucretia set in the beginning of the 19th.century there is an extraordinary amount of cousinage dangereux voisinage.  Lytton spends chapter 1 unravelling it. Lucretia the presumptive heir is being suggested to Vernon by Sir Miles as a wife.  They are first cousins.

“There is many an earl with a less fortune than the conjoined estates of Vernon Grange and Laughton Hall.”

Vernon the exhausted rake, with only a few years of life left in him at the age of 40 is keen on another, a Mary.

Lucretia the proud and imperious beauty, has set her cap at Mainwaring, a talented man of the merchant class whom Sir Miles would dismiss as a spouse for the noble family.  He after all ejected his sister who married someone of a lower order after her first husband the father of Lucretia died.  That union produced a daughter called Susan, the half sister.  Staying with Susan in the house of a kindly parson is Ardworth the recently graduated with a plain degree from Oxford. He is the son of the sister of Susan’s father.  Another first cousin. 

Maiwaring likes Susan but without a fortune and a profession was unable to declare his love and therefore moved away from  her neighbourhood.  It was Lucretia who declared her readiness to be the bride of Mainwaring and she is suggesting that Sir Miles will in any case die soon having had several strokes already.  There is a suggestion of the Borgias in this lassie.

That’s the first chapter and Lytton sets it out in a genial, rambling, easy, brachiating through the family tree sort of way as an expert creator of scenes and settings.  Its not in the least painful to take in and the elements of enjoyable smooth melodrama which by degrees engage you in permutations of your own.   

I am going to read this book a chapter at a time and if I ever finish it I’ll let you know.  

Desmon Fennell: Heresy / About Being Normal

 

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey, than others, and detected faults and follies, which escape vulgar observation. And the pleasure of wantoning in common topicks is so tempting to a writer, that he cannot easily resign it; a train of sentiments generally received enables him to shine without labour, and to conquer without a contest. It is so easy to laugh at the folly of him who lives only in idea, refuses immediate ease for distant pleasures, and, instead of enjoying the blessings of life, lets life glide away in preparations to enjoy them; it affords such opportunities of triumphant exultation, to exemplify the uncertainty of the human state, to rouse mortals from their dream, and inform them of the silent celerity of time,  that we may believe authors willing rather to transmit than examine so advantageous a principle, and more inclined to pursue a track so smooth and so flowery, than attentively to consider whether it leads to truth.

(from The Rambler by Samuel Johnson no.2 March 2nd. 1749)

Heresy is a collection of articles nailed to the door of the Church of Reason which is located in the mythical domain of Dublin 4.  Fennell considers himself to have been cancelled avant la lettre by the minions and myrmidons of this statelet but if you check his Wikipedia page many a scribbler and intellectual manque would be pleased for such cancellation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Fennell

If you read the proem to that article you will see that the animus toward him still survives in the carrels of the liberal mind.  Fintan O’Toole the accepted public intellectual does not get an advisory.  Norms, normal normalling.  Anyway my point is that D.F. published a lot of book, taught in many institutions of higher learning, appeared on national television frequently and was generally a figure on the intellectual landscape.  The problem for him was that he wanted to be a public intellectual discussing the great ideas with his peers, if such there be, the great ideas that would revitalise the nation and help it find its soul.  The nation for him was a core concept, not just the citizens granted by paper fiat.D.F.  would probably not accept Bloom as part of the Irish nation being a second generation blow in.

“Do you know what a nation is”, says John Wyse.

“A nation is the same people living in the same place,” says Bloom. “Or also living in different places”

The present dilution of the concept and the practice of a sovereign independent nation is the salient feature of our modern European predicament.  Bizarrely opposing this has become the attribute of the right wing, nay the 'far right’. Fennell wrote about the collapse in morale of the white nations leading to extinction.  No one wants to breed into a senseless civilisation with norms cobbled together by liberals:

a dying breed

State sponsored abortion he saw as the massacre of the innocent by moral imbeciles...."simultaneously soaking millions of women and thousands of men in debilitating, personal guilt, so that they become incapable of resisting, or even protesting against, the use of their taxes and of the profits on their consumption to prepare the general massacre of mankind.”  Our present drifting into the serious danger of atomic warfare is indicative of the connection to the death wish.  Genocide, abortion, euthanasia are the commonplace phenomena of the 21st. century.  Fennell’s last book About Being Normal covers the whole range of his oeuvre with extracts from all his major publications with autobiographical notes.  It is available free to read on archive.org

About Being Normal

That book is a fine summation of his life’s work and the consistent swimming against the tide of liberal hegemony.  He could be wrongheaded too.  His diatribe against the ‘famous Seamus’ Heaney is excerpted.  A silly escapade.

Death has been good to Desmond.  His ideas that were stifled by virtual suppression are now current among thinking ‘au contraire’ people. Worth reading.

Consciousness and Remorse

 “It matters little whether the intuition of being resemble the innate gift of an imperial intelligence serenely relying upon its limpid strength and upon the cooperation of a pure and delicate flesh, and of a vivid and perfectly balanced sensibility, as seems to have been the case for Thomas Aquinas; whether, alternatively, it spring unexpectedly like a kind of natural grace at the sight of a blade of grass or a windmill, or at the sudden perception of the reality of the self; whether it proceed from the implacability with which the being of things independent of ourselves becomes abruptly evident to us, suddenly casting our own being back upon its solitude and its frailty; whether I make my way towards it by inner experience of duration, or of anguish, or of certain moral realities which transcend the flow of time—these alternatives, I repeat, are of slight moment.”   (From Existence and the Existent by Jacques Maritain)

First note and put aside for the moment the likeness to the focus on ‘I AM’,  the sadhana of Nisargadatta Maharaj. I ask what does intuition mean in this case?  Is it a sort of immediate knowledge without going through the normal reasoning process, ‘he just knew in that instant’, sort of thing?

‘I AM’ is always there, always cleansed of the past, a pure presence that pervades my present condition, simply illuminating it.  This ‘I AM’ is not my present mental state but the immediacy of my awareness of it demonstrates the self luminous cognition of my contemporary mental contents.  It is as though those states were to flow through it.  Past and present are given now and in every awareness memory shines through.

How are we to get free and live in consciousness as such leaving remorse behind. (Remorse from re-mordere -  re-bite )  Can the past break away and be rendered toothless?

Asparsa Yoga & The Mind going out to the Object of Perception

 Mandukya Karika of Gaudapad IV.26

“Consciousness has no contact with objects; so also it has certainly no contact with appearances of objects.  For according to the reasons adduced, an object has no existence, and an illusory object is not separate from the awareness.”

Here Gaudapada is taking the view as only Pure Consciousness exists in reality and there is nothing but it any division in it suggested by the fact of perception is not ultimately true.  He puts it thus:

“From the standpoint of reality, that is to say, of ultimate Reality. For unlike the existence of a buffalo independently of a horse, a jar does not exist apart from clay, after being recognised as clay that it really is, nor does a cloth exist apart from the yarns, nor the yarns apart from the fibres.  Thus if the reality is pursued successively till words and notions cease, we do not perceive any external occasion for knowledge.”
(Sankara’s commentary on G.K. IV.25)

In that extreme reduction Gaudapada differs from Sankara who held to different levels of discourse that could be separated.  It is important to not that in his Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya he started out with the natural and inevitable Subject Object division given in experience.  Nevertheless in some discussions of Advaita it is forgotten that conceptual categories alter as the analysis of perception progresses.

Take for example the esoteric conception of perception as the mind going out to the object and taking its form.  The reasoning behind it is that superimposition must be taking place where the object is and as the object is ‘out there’ that’s where the superimposition must be happening.  Here the mingling of two levels is patent.  You have the material and the immaterial, the object and the knowledge of the object.  The knowledge is the immaterial factor.  Recollect that the apparent impossibility of the mingling of the material and the immaterial or the extended and the un- extended is the aporia that launched the preamble discussion to the B.S.Bh.  Recollect too that ‘the immaterial is indivisible’ (Aristotle) and ask yourself what sense is there to the spatial metaphor of the mind going out to anything.  In knowledge there is no distance as it were,  the blending of the upadhis of the mind and the object does not take place in any sort of container.  The vritti or mental modification is the precipitate in the mind of the subject superimposed there and creating the illusion of a permanent self.  

Indeed though Gaudapada’s rigourous approach may be excessive we ought still to alter our categories as our analysis deepens.

Fusion Anomaly

 The channel Fusion Anomaly is still going strong.  Nodes are constantly morphing. Click on the barely visible yellow scratch at mid bottom of your screen.  Dwell on the red orbs, they are but portals. Expect nothing, recieve everything:

fusionanomaly.net

wondrous information

The Mind as Inert (Jada) in Vedanta

 A point I've made before. Here I put it in a compressed form as a reply to a youtube video sketching some differences between Eastern and Western philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWcHlB7mG2w&t=251s

A  good succinct talk, thank you.

Another major difference in my view is that the mind is inert or unconscious or to put it another way the mind is really the body pervaded by pure consciousness and limiting that pure consciousness or expressing that pure consciousness according to its structure.  The impersonal pure consciousness is rendered personal by pervading the individual entity.  Instead of the body/mind problem you have bodymind.  This is the metaphysics behind the Yogic symbolism of the Cakras or centres of awareness throughout the body.  The whole body is minded so to speak.

Introducing Mr.Arabin - Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

 I’m re-reading ‘Barchester Towers’ by Anthony Trollope  and checking back through my posts I see that I dropped a short note on it about 10 years ago.  He finished it in 1856 and it follows ‘The Warden’ the first in the series about the clerical life around the cathedral city of Barchester.   The spry playfulness that infuses this early novel has the spring of his genius in it.  His addressing of the reader does not interpose the breaching of the pact of disbelief but is just an invitation  to refresh our imagination or to begin again with a cleansed eye to look on the  capers of Barchester clerics and their innocent lapses into worldliness.

Mr. Arabin was tempted by the Scarlet Woman of Rome having been led astray by the charismatic John Henry Newman.  In the end he did not succumb to her gaudy blandishments but for a time he wobbled on the tightrope that spanned the Tiber.  As a fellow of Lazarus a college of Oxford he would have lost his place as no longer subscribing to the 39 Articles and therefore a dubious influence on the young minds in his charge.  A tight spot indeed.  Here Trollope plays the part of the unreliable narrator moving between addressing the reader to make a plea and simultaneously leaving it quite open for us to doubt the proffered interpretation.  Arabin  is promoted as an  unworldly, mystical, poetical sort of man of a high church type. 

Though great things were expected of him by his tutor when an undergraduate somehow in his last years in Balliol that furnace of Scholarment he became something of a controversialist the downfall of many a promising student. 

“He had occupied himself too much with High Church matters and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with High Churchmanship to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first.”

As related by Trollope with a wink what bothered Arabin more than anything was the idea that he balked at Rome because he was afraid of losing his fellowship and all that it implied in status, emolument and learned society.  However in a stroke of rationalization he turns this remaining within the Church Established by law into the harder, steeper path.

“He paused and stood silent for awhile, thinking of the time when he had so nearly sacrificed all he had, his powers of mind, his free agency, the fresh running waters of his mind's fountain, his very inner self, for an easy path in which no fighting would be needed;”

This inner recollection takes place during his first conversation with Mrs.Bold the beautiful widow with £1000 a year.  We have also been told about Arabin’s wistful incipient longing for a more gracious, genteel, domestic, life.  He is after all forty years old.  We feel that Trollope may fix him up.

The sense of IAM (3)

 

“Then what am I” Q asks:

Impossible to say. Knowledge is built on what is already known.  You brachiate from tree to tree as it were.  Self realization is not something you can get to know because you already know it.  It cannot be separated out from any state of the mind.  It is known with every state of awareness. “Pratibodha videtam” (known with every state of consciousness) says Sankara in a commentary on Kena Upanisad.

As Maharaj says:

You are nothing perceivable or imaginable.  Yet without you (i.e. true self) there can be neither perception nor imagination.  You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting, the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.  Can there be perception without you?”

M.  is adopting the saksin approach to this problem where the pure consciousness that pervades all things is poured so to speak, into the mould of a separate entity, the jiva, the person.  Pure consciousness has taken this form of limitation/upadhi.  Indeed a salient difference in Vedanta is the regarding of brain-body as inert (jada) only becoming conscious as it is pervaded by pure consciousness.  This citta (consciousness) in that form acts as a witness (saksin).

But says Q: Is not this ‘I am’ also an experience?

As M. has been saying- what gives you the core of the experience of identity is this pure consciousness at any one time but the mistake is take the common factor to be an embodied experience.

“Memory creates the illusion of continuity.  In reality each experience has its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the common factor at the root of all experiencer-experience relations.  Identity and continuity are not the same.   Just as each flower has its own colour, but all colours are caused by the same light, so do many experiencers appear in the undivided and indivisible awareness, each separate in memory, identical in essence."

How is this supreme awareness to be got?  Essentially what M. says is that you must ‘let it come to you’.  Practice.  You will not become isolated locked in an esoteric delusion, the erosion of separateness will be steady.  The ‘I AM’ practice makes you stick  to the moment and not be carried along.

The Sense of 'I AM' (2)

Our  friend Q, the questioner, reverts to a Humean position.

“I am always somebody with its memories and habits.  I know no other ‘I am’.”

How does a conscious state become conscious of itself as a series, asks Hume, and proceeds not to give a very satisfactory answer.  By implication Maharaj would say to him, ‘perhaps you ought to ask someone who knows the answer  to that conundrum.’  It is after all very important to discover whether you are the body or something else. “Or maybe nothing at all?”  If you could resolve that then you would cease to worry about a great many things that now bother you, namely, friends, health, fortune etc.

This attitude is so outside the scope of the mind of friend Q that he does not see these benefits and in a way he is right.  Going on this adventure into viveka/discrimination on the basis of supposed benefit is a poor approach.  M. implies this by reverting to a recommendation to an open minded practice of ‘I AM’.

“When the mind stays in the ‘I am’, without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalized but can be experienced.  All you need to do is try and try again.  After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it - body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc.  All these self-identifications are misleading,  Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.”

More later:

The Sense of 'I am' as answered by Nisargadatta

 

As  I was saying in my previous post a mistake is a take  by which I mean that the ontological depth out of which perception rises is preserved even when there is error.  The deep structure is maintained.

Nisargadatta’s teaching is an illustration of how Advaita  blurs the distinction between religion and metaphysics.  He uses the standard dialectic of adhiropa / apavada or affirmation followed by qualification and correction.  You move towards the implications of a position and find a resolution to its internal difficulties.

The first dialogue in the book centres on the spiritual practice of keeping the central fact of experience constantly before the mind namely ‘I AM’.

Reading this dialogue it almost seems like a set-up allowing Maharaj to develop his characteristic teaching.

“Questioner: It is a matter of daily experience that on waking up the world suddenly appears.  Where does it come from?”

 May I interject here to ask from the perspective of Western philosophy:

Is this a suggestion that the world exists in consciousness only, a not unknown position in philosophical circles that takes the form of subjective idealism or representationalism?

M. rejects this saying that this ‘sudden appearance’ must have a background for it to appear on.  The experience of change must have a changeless background, one which is not an experience as such because of course experience implies changeability.

The Q. who is caught in the grip of the model of awareness as being simply that of mental subjects and mental objects replies that - “Before waking  up I was unconscious”

M. in an  acute observation brings up the commonplace experience of a loss of memory?  You have no consciousness of that yet  you  do not believe that you did  not exist during that time.  Your existence then is not reliant on being conscious of it.  Similarly on waking from a dreamless sleep ‘I  am’ is an immediate awareness.  I am - a body- in the world can be intellectually broken up but in fact it is a simultaneous awareness.  “A single idea of having a body in a world”.

All states of awareness including memory lapses and deep dreamless sleep are unified by the changeless  background of pure consciousness.  Nisargadatta Maharaj uses the same argument as Shankaracarya in  relation to waking up from Deep Dreamless Sleep.  You know that you have been asleep and that there is a continuity between the individual that is woken up when called and the one prior to falling asleep.

Then he says and this is an intriguing light on the disputed claim made by Jacques Maritain that there is an intuition of being.

 

“On waking up the experience runs: ‘I am - the body- in the world.’   It may appear to arise in succession but in fact it is all simultaneous, a single idea of having a body in a world. Can there be the sense of ‘I am’ without being somebody or other?”

To be continued:

I am, it is: Mystical Conjugation

 

What is this thing called Being mentioned so frequently in philosophy?  Philosophers ascribe to it a power that is there but somehow cannot be separated out, but we are at the same time immersed in it.  How?  So powerful is it that Nisargadatta Maharaj achieved enlightenment but continually keeping before his mind ‘I am’.  Etienne Gilson reflects on the power of the self-definition of God,” I am that I am”.

“There is then a resemblance between Being and beings.  It is written inGenesis 1:26 Let us make man in our image and likeness.There is at least one sense in which this is true, and this first sense is presupposed by all the others:to beimplies necessarily a certain likeness to HE WHO IS.”  (The Elements of Christian Philosophy)

When I first heard that response to Moses in Exodus 3:13-14: I AM WHO AM at the age of 15 it gave me a most uncanny feeling , a premonitory saltation to the age of 27 when at the instantaneous recognition of the reality of God, that name came into my head.

What is the deep reality for the  philosopher who espouses a realist ontology behind the apparently simple recognition in experience of something - it is and it is this.  How is that propaedeutic to the mystical immersion in pure being.  Let me affirm that being mistaken is founded on the default nature of the unity of being.  A mistake is a take.

The very first chapter of Nisargadatta’s teaching (‘I AM THAT) is called ‘The Sense of ‘I am’.  I’ll have a look at that next and then at that exceptionally lucid book of Etienne Gilson’s ‘Methodical Realism’.

Anon.

Burbling Along

 

When you are young you burble along with your own special properties of amiability or being a nuisance or that unique special blend that is all your own. Character is in the process of being formed and it is likely unless you come into abrupt contact with the legal system that it will be forgiven for its shapelessness.  You  may even be told ‘life will knock the corners of you boy’.  What a thing to say, am I not great as I am?  No you are probably not but stay busy adapting the world to yourself.  Then at a certain stage you get into a relationship often marriage back in the day, in  your early 20s, imagine.  Rows or radical adaptation would commence or resignation.  There it is, it is what it is.  We were still malleable.  Children raised their pudgy little paws, endearing as bear cubs.  They demanded care and you gave it.  You adapted to what was in essence a life of obedience and you got on with it.

Nowadays, that dread word, you will be in your 30‘s not so behaviorally supple.  Is your relationship committed or not, you don’t know.  What does that mean anyhow?  The having of children has been put off, now never seemed to be the right time.  Both of you are set in your ways with individual and couple routines and there’s the barrier of inertia that keeps both of you burbling along.

Camus and the Absurd

 

Yes of course he was a young man when he wrote “The Myth of Sisyphus’ with its deep pondering on the Absurd.  Olivier Todd in his biography is kind about this and offers a few quotations from letters and his journals about the whole topic without deconstruction. “The human cry and the world’s unreasoning silence”, ‘feeling inside yourself happiness and reason’.

However truth is a thing. It is what it is.  Our nature wants to conform or have the world conform to what is right and just.  There are human needs.  Camus was sick and therefore could not serve in the army but there was something he could do.  The absurd was an affectation when there was a situation that you had to fight.  Evil is privative, an emptiness that must be opposed by a presence: a truth against a lie.  That the truth cannot be expressed does not make it absurd.  His editorship of ‘Combat’ the resistance paper was an important part of the fight against the Boche.  He took a stand.  Something does matter after all.

'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by Thomas Hardy.

 

Its a web of secrets that enfold each other based on a single great crime.  Henchard  has sold his wife in a fit of drunken irony that she grew tired of as a repeat performance.  The sailor Newson bought her and off he took her never to be seen for another twenty years.  I don’t need to go into it, you will know the story or have read a synopsis.  In any case the many twists and turns  viewed on that level make it decidedly soapy but that is only the narrative carapace that covers some deep questions about fate, character as destiny, the possibility of moral renewal, forgiveness and of course corn futures.

Henchard has renewed himself with a vow to quit the drink for 21 years and having attempted to find his wife and child and reclaim them from the sailorman he goes on his way as a hay trusser with his wimble, his spike and his hay knife all in a woven basket.  The wimble is a good metaphor for the narrative for it is a brace like device for twisting the binding of the truss using strands of hay as though they were a yarn. The secret shame he has been able to tell no one is like the grit in the oyster that a malign pearl has grown over.  It haunts him as a cathexis that draws energy making him gloomy, impatient and hard.  Good qualities in a man of business for when we see him again after twenty years he is a man of substance, wealth and high position as a mayor of a prosperous town in a district of fertile land.  Yet there is in him that reserve which accompanies the possession of a dark secret.  Nobody knows and nobody must know because the loss of respectability would lead to his material downfall.  Who would trust such a man?

This brings on the other strand twisted in by the wimble - ownership of my wife, my daughter, my business my tangible property, chattels at my disposal.  When his wife turns uptogether with a daughter Elizabeth Janeafter she has supposed Newson has perished at sea.  Henchard accepts them but a secret plan is adopted to fool the town.  Eventually after a period of bogus courtship they get married and settle in.  Susan the double married does not know that there is another woman in Henchard’s life who nursed him when he fell ill while doing business on the island of Jersey.  That was in the recent past and through being overmuch with him and indiscreet she was compromised and somewhat declasse among the respectable.  Susan has her own secret about the birth of Elizabeth Jane who is Newson’s child, that Henchard thinks to be his own.   When he discovers that she is not that piece of property is alienated and they part.  The other element of ownership is when  he discovers that Farfrae the Scots foreman already outshining him in business is interested in Elizabeth Jane.  He must go.

Secrets that he cannot own to and attempting to own that which cannot be possessed are the twin poles which bring Henchard to ruin.  It is this unravelling by a reverse wimbling that is interesting rather than the excessive coincidences and correspondences.  There is also the business of the rustic chorus the skimmington ride and the bautifully realized natural descriptions.

Cleon on Gaza

 Thucydides in his ‘History of the Peleponnesian Wars’ lays out the formula for the movement towards genocide caused by collective punishment and general slaughter which does not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.  (Bk.III:36-50)

The Mytelenians  had joined in a revolt against Athens opportunistically which so greatly embittered the Athenians that they decreed that their defeated foes should all be put to death and their women and children enslaved.  This seemed meet in the heat of the moment and a trireme was despatched to relay that order.  However on the following day they bethought themselves and considered the injustice of punishing both the innocent and the guilty in a hetacomb.  In the assembly  to debate the issue Cleon a man of influence noted for his stern and violent character spoke in favour of the judgment.  To reverse our judgment at this point is to project weakness and lability, he urged, and to be moved by rhetoric and paradox.  Reprisal should be swift, immediate and final and let the defeated know the folly of resistance against our power.

“To feel pity, to be carried away by the pleasure of hearing a clever argument, to listen to the claims of decency are three things that are entirely against the interests of an imperial power.”

He adds in the conclusion of his argument that:

“For he who has suffered for no good reason is a more dangerous enemy, if he escapes, than the one who has both done and suffered injury.”

Diodotus speaking against Cleon makes the usual points about the promotion of good governance, alliance with the moderate parties and supporting democracy.  Good, fine, splendid.  Of course all true and worthy and contrary to conventional political realism.  However he then appeals to common sense:

“But if you destroy the democratic party at Mytilene who never took any hand in the revolt and who, as soon as they got arms, voluntarily gave up the city to you, you will first of all be guilty of killing those who have helped you, and, secondly, you will be doing exactly what the reactionary classes want most.  For now, when they start a revolt, they will have the people on their side from the beginning, because you have already made it clear that the same punishment is laid down both for the guilty and the innocent.”

The Cleon party have their supporters  as they watch the results of collective punishment in Gaza.Lets kill them all and put an end to the ‘mowing of the lawn’.  Let us be hard and cold, cold as ice, our descendants will thank us for it.

Hamas it is noted has increased its support as you have nothing to lose by joining in the uprising. Die a martyr or as an unfortunate collateral victim.

(Trans: by Rex Warner in Penguin Classics)

'The Lost World' by Arthur Conan Doyle (pub. 1912)

 

We are introduced to Professor Challenger:

He sat in a rotating chair behind a broad table, which was covered with books, maps, and diagrams. As I entered, his seat spun round to face me. His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size which took one's breath away—his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top-hat, had I ever ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-gray under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.

You have read the various adventures of Sherlock of course and if you have rested there you have committed a grave mistake.  There is much much more that is readable and entertaining in the oeuvre of A.C. Doyle.  Humour, wit, invention, description of flora and fauna abound, nay ebulliate.  Adventure across the world to known, unknown and lost worlds beckon.  There is always too a hint of the possible not entirely fanciful in his fantasy.  Could there be an isolated closed territory in which evolution has paused and dinosaurs roam the earth?  In other words the title of the movie ought to be ‘Lost World: Jurassic Park’.

All the tropes of adventure are there, the fragmentary map, the barely credible gasp of the expiring traveller, unexplored regions, trusty bearers trudging through vile mosquito infested swamps and the trappings of imperial power, a giant negro by the name of Zemba faithful and as intelligent as a horse. Yes Massa the map of the world was pink and if that upsets you, stay at home you lily livered shirker.

In this volume you get not one but two mad scientists, Challenger and Summerlee; a blue blooded knight of the realm,explorer and sportsman Roxton and finally the narrator Malone the naive but intrepid reporter. Where are you bound for?

 What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear. You will observe that both the pterodactyl and the stegosaurus are Jurassic, and therefore of a great age in the order of life. They have been artificially conserved by those strange accidental conditions."

Bring sun block.

'The Outsider' by Albert Camus

 In May 1940 ‘The Outsider’ is finished. Camus is a mere 27 years old.  It is a quite remarkable achievement which outstrips his own understanding of it which he maintained throughout his life.  In 1955 for instance in a preface to a college edition he would write:

I summed up The Outsider a long time ago by a remark which I agree was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death".  All I meant was that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not stick to the rules.  In this respect he is foreign to the society in which he lives, he wanders about on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life.  And this is why readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage.  A much more accurate idea of the character, or at least one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emergeif it is asked just how Meursault refuses to conform.  The reply is a simple one: he refuses to lie.  To lie is not only to say what is not the case.

The authors intentions are in the case of genius a frail barrier between his work and the active imagination which takes the writer past a conscious aim.  Mersault you see begins to get into the trouble which will cost him his head by composing a letter for Raymond, a violent pimp.  The aim is to lure an Arab woman to him to chastise her.  Which is what happens.  But Raymond gets off by Mersault’s  explaining to the cops that the lady had cheated on the pimp which makes it a crime of passion as it were and a mitigating factor.  

Above the majority settler French town of Algiers are the white poster blocks of houses where dwell the les indigènes  known as Arabs throughout the book.  As though a beach of the metropolitan France were translated to the other side of the Mediterranean.  And with extra added exoticism, the same sand, sex, sea, swimming and a midday heat that fries your brains and causes you to empty your pistol into the body of a generic Arab.  Bringing a knife to a gun fight would warrant one shot but four seems vicious intent.  

In a series of essays published in 1939 ‘Nuptials’ there is presented a portrait of the innocent pagan who lives in the moment unburdened by a categorical imperative.  How can the weight of an act move past the moment to affect a future state which is not here yet.  Why that’s absurd, there is only the present moment.  Take it while you can. Carpe Diem:

The hallmark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for easy pleasures.  But above all, it lies in a haste to live that borders on extravagance.  In Belcourt, as in Bab-el-Oued, people marry young.  They start work very early, and exhaust the range of human experience in ten years.  A workman of thirty has already played all his cards.  He waits for the end with his wife and children around him. (from ‘Summer in Algiers’.

That’s right babes, trust non one over thirty.  Its that fatuous, a young man’s philosophy.  Camus added to this the religion of ‘The Absurd’, a class of paratheism in which nothing matters.  The imponderable gravity of Dr. Guillotin’s invention will sort that out.

Its a good novella to be read without the author’s prompts.

Snake and Rope - Superimposition and Substratum in Advaita.

 Ive been around this rope/snake area before and though it looks to be quite simple it has its complications due to the fact that it is an analogical vade mecum with subtle differences in its deployment.  My latest attempt to grasp its usage I offer for your metaphysical delectation.

It breaks in two, obviously, the snake and the rope or the superimposition and the substratum.  The latter is the reality, in theatrical terms the back cloth upon which the ‘snake’ is painted.  In Sankara’s commentary on the Mandukya  Upanisad he describes it thus.

“No, for an unreal illusion cannot exist without a substratum; for the illusion of silver, snake, human being, mirage, etc., cannot be imagined to exist apart from the (corresponding) substrata of the mother of pearl, rope, stump of a tree, desert, etc.”

There enumerated are the standard examples of confusion.  In a footnote Swami Gambhirananda writes:

“Since an illusion is perceived as soaked in the idea of existence, it cannot have non-existence as its basis.”

The analogy moves into the metaphysical when it is stated that similarly this mundane reality is as it were painted on the back drop of pure being.  As limited contingent being it requires absolute being as its reality.

An analogy is used to express what is beyond human reality:

“For a relation between the real and the unreal does not lend itself to verbal representation, since the relation itself is, unsubstantial.”

That is then the well known general use of the confusion/delusion analogy.  However in the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhyasa Sankara introduces a subtle variation.  Superimposition now becomes an epistomological/ontological method of transferring the really out there, in the ‘external’ world, object into the mind of the subject.  That is possible because the substratum of the consciousness of the subject and that of the object is the same.  This is the core of the non-dual/Advaitic philosophy.  What we have is a non-numerical identity between the subject’s reality and the object’s.  This is the basis of perception what in the the Vedanta Paribhasa of Adhvarindra is called perceptuality.

For the mind of the sage there is no other:

“On the view, however, that like the rope, imagined variously as the snake etc., the Self, too, though one, is imagined in the three states (waking, dreaming, deep sleep) to be possessed of such attributes as consciousness of the internal world etc., there follows the cessation of the phenomenal world of misery simultaneously with the valid knowledge , arising from the negation of such attributes as being conscious of the internal world;  and therefore there remains no need to search for any other means of knowledge or any other discipline (like constant thinking/Manana?)  for the realisation of Turiya/Enlightenment.  This is similar to what happens in the case of the knowledge of the rope where the elimination of the snake from the rope occurs simultaneously with the discrimination between the rope and the snake.” (Sankara's commentary)

Sankara's Treatment of Buddhist concept of Possibility in Brahma Sutrra Bhasya

 In his description  of the Vijnanavada theory of perception which is strikingly like what in Western philosophy would be called subjective idealism Sankara introduces their concept of impossibility.

Accordingto this Vijnanavada, all dealings concerned with means of knowledge, objects of knowledge, and ends of knowledge become possible as subjective occurrences superimposed on consciousness; for even though an external object may exist, there can be no activity of the means of knowledge etc., unless it be through a superimposition of that object on consciousness (i.e.unless the mind or intellect is aware of it). If it be asked, "How, again, can it be known that all these processes are subjective, and that nothing but subjective cognition exists"?-the answer he (the Buddhist) gives is that, this is so because no external thing can possibly exist.

That’s a startling claim also akin to the thought of Berkeley’s immaterialism though the rationale is based on Buddhist atomic theory or what fundamentally exists, a purely metaphysical position being beyond human perceptual capacity.

"This is so because no external thing can possibly exist. When external objects are assumed, they must either be the individual atoms or an aggregate of them--a  pillar for instance. Of these the knowledge of the atoms cannot be acquired through a perception of the pillar etc., for the atoms are not objects of perception.38a And a pillar etc. cannot be a conglomeration of atoms, since the (aggregates like) pillar etc. cannot be ascertained to be either different from or identical with the atoms. Thus also are to be rejected genus, (quality, action), etc. Moreover, knowledge, as it arises, has the common feature of being a mere awareness; but it displays a selective bias for individual forms,such as the knowledge of a pillar, the knowledge of a wall, the knowledge of a pot, the knowledge of a cloth, and so on. This particularization cannot be possible unless there be some peculiarity in each individual cognition itself. "

That is a long citation but interesting for its delineation of the core insight which sustains subjective idealism in its myriad forms.  There is a subject, there is an object, there is internal reality and external reality.  How are the two realms to meet unless one be superimposed on the other?  This is the original aporia of metaphysics and there the paths of Realism and Idealism diverge.  To stay with the Buddhist anfractuosity for now Sankara has the answer to the ‘impossibility’ claim, the focus of this post.  He treats it as a flouting of modal direction if you like.

Buddhist : Since no object can possibly exist externally, I come to the conclusion that it appears as though it is outside.

Vedantin : This conclusion is not honest, since the possibility or impossibility of the existence of a thing is determined in accordance with the applicability or non-applicability of the means of knowledge to it, but the applicability or non-applicability of the means of knowledge is not ascertained in accordance with the possibility or impossibility (of the thing).What is known through anyone of the means of knowledge, such as direct perception etc., is possible, and what cannot be known through any one of these means of knowledge is impossible. In the case under discussion, the external things are known individually by the respective means of applicability or non-applicability of the means of knowledge is not ascertained in accordance with the possibility or impossibility (of the thing).

In other words you can’t get the results before you sit the exam.  Impossibility or possibility is ascertained by an application of a criterion, a test of some kind but you cannot say that a thing is impossible because a test cannot be applied.  There must be something to test and there is no testing of the inexistent.  This may also be connected to the Thomist idea that the reality of something guarantees its possibility.