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.