Kena Upanishad on 'Can Brahman be Known'?

 

3: The eye does not go there, nor speech, nor mind.  We do not know (Brahman to be such and such), hence we are not aware of any process of instructing about it.

4: “That (Brahman) is surely different from the known; and again, It is above the unknown” - such was (the utterance) we heard of the the ancient (teachers) who explained it to us.

(Kena Upanisad I.3, 4 )

There  is what seems a straightforward admission that the logico-empirical method cannot establish the existence of Brahman.  Why might that be so?  If Brahman is the Self then the Self cannot be grasped in the way that any object might be.   The consciousness that is being grasped would have to grasp itself being grasped and that grasping of etc.  Bertrand Russell noted this in a letter to Frege.  There is inevitable infinite regress.  Shankara in his commentary :

Though the mind thinks and determines other things, it does not think or determine itself; for of it, too, Brahman is the Self.  A thing is cognised only by the mind and the senses.  As Brahman is not an object of perception to these, therefore,na vidmah,we do not know.

How then is Brahman to be communicated or taught to a disciple?  Brahman escapes all categories but there is deep wisdom embedded in the realised masters of traditional authority.  Put the disciple in the vicinity of a realised sage and he will begin to resonate with the knowledge of “the Brahman that is immediate and direct - the Self that is within all” (Brhadaranyaka Up. III.iv.1)

In this way, the text, “Thus we heard” etc., states how through a succession of preceptors and disciples was derived the purport of the sentence which establishes Brahman that Self of all which is devoid of distinguishing features, and is the light of pure consciousness.  Moreover, Brahman can only be known through such a traditional instruction of preceptors and not through argumentation, nor by study (or exposition), intelligence, great learning, austerity, sacrifices, etc.....

Ronald Knox and Lord Russel's The Conquest of Happiness (From Broadcast Minds 1932)

Officers for whom the war was over but who were exceedingly keen to get back into it again were sent to Staleg 7. It wasn’t the durance vile which compared favourably with boarding school that vexed them: their duty called. Though R.K. did not volunteer as a combatant in the First World War he had the idea of allowing himself to be taken captive and thus be able to minister to other prisoners in Germany. The War Office took a dim view. Lord Bertrand Russell was of course a conscientious objector and spent nine months in Brixton prison as a result. Ronald Knox loved his days at Eton mixing with the elite of which he was one for both his father and grandfather were bishops in the Church of England by law established. Whether they ever sat in the House of Lords or not they were entitled to do so. From Eton thence to Balliol (Ox.) as ever winning scholarships and prizes and being the centre of a coterie of high-minded wits. I seem to recall that he was offered a fellowship before his final results were known. Then he was ordained a priest and began to affect a dandyish get-up, buckled shoon and pleated chasuble. It bothered him that the local washer folk were not acquainted with such Ultra High Church verging on Roman requirements and he cast about for an R.C. dhobi wallah. Larkiness and fun really but as he inched towards the springboard of Father Tiber to whom the Romans pray the seriousness of such a move away from his highly cultivated background must have troubled him. But he did it and his talent for satire, mockery and gibing was applied to the irreligion of his day from another point of view. His chapter on Bertrand Russell’s book, The Conquest of Happiness is entitled The Rogue’s Hand-Book. It opens:

There could, I conceive, be few purer intellectual pleasures than to watch from an absolutely impartial standpoint the hesitations of a society shedding, half consciously, the last bonds which affiliate it to its old Christian beliefs. What may and may not, what must and must not be said; the limits within which its prophets must hold themselves, if they are not to be discredited by too much of delicacy or of precipitancy, the gradual deterioration of its theological currency, as men relinquish ideas, and cling all the more eagerly to the words that once established them – all this could be the subject of the most exquisite satire, if judgment could be suspended, if the issues were not felt as vital. It might be supposed that we were now past that stage; that the disintegration of our creeds had gone too far for any such embarrassments to persist. But – so innately conservative are we – the most advanced of our new spokesmen are not free men in dealing with their intellectual constituencies; they must speak in parables, they must gild the pill. If they are to demolish our certainties with success, they must set to work behind a scaffolding which advertises the intention of refacing them.

Knox regards this work of Lord Russell’s as a trifling production, a sort of self-help manual in the Samuel Smiles tradition of enlightened self interest. Bizarrely the notion of their being 3 main sort of human being is introduced, ‘very common types’, the sinner, the narcissist and the megalomaniac. That the first two are common types is a fatuous assertion that Knox dismisses. The sinner is merely an over scrupulous individual who feels the eye of god on him. Knox explains :

And there is a sense of sin, which is natural to the ordinary man living in a fallen world; as natural as the self-respect, with a touch of vanity in it, which we find in the majority of our neighbours; as natural as the decent spirit of ambition which Lord Russell himself praises.

( For some reason L.R. calls these natural attributes narcissism and megalomania. Very Odd!)

According to Russell the chief thing that brings happiness is ‘zest’. This spiritual condiment is liberated when we become immersed in some activity which takes us outside ourselves. Knox writes:

I do not find his psychology convincing when he suggests that we ought first to rid ourselves of the mental encumbrances which obsess us, self-pity, envy, inordinate ambition, and so on, in the hope that when we have done this impersonal interests will automatically supervene. A man may surely go through a good deal of mental self-discipline before he finds that it has evoked a nascent curiosity about the doings of the Bolton Wanderers.

Ronald Knox and the Omniscientists

Listening in is a subtle idiom. It seems to indicate a voluntary direction of auditory attention by someone. That which they listen in to would go on without them. People were invited to listen in to BBC programs. Perhaps ‘listen’ seemed too imperative to the polite English. In the 30‘s the invitation would be to listen in to Ronald Knox , Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Gerald Heard and John Langdon-Davies. A book which I bought last Saturday for ein euro by Ronald Knox called Broadcast Minds is a critique of what he terms Omniscientism in the others listed. That portmanteau word is of course a coinage of Knox’s and suggests ‘know all ism’ in a smattering sense combined with a touch of scientism in its reverence for the empirical method. Such we have always with us but in the age of the wireless the power of such shallow thinking was enhanced. He likens it to gunpowder and printing which changed everything in their respective spheres. His book was published in September 1932. In 1933 Goebbels having just introduced a cheap radio to the German public was expressing his view of the power of broadcasting as a way of creating a unified nation.

 We on the other hand intend a principled transformation in the worldview of our entire society, a revolution of the greatest possible extent that will leave nothing out, changing the life of our nation in every regard.

(from  propaganda)

What Knox as a cleric impugns in the written works and the broadcasts of those listed is their animus towards religion which is never frankly admitted but advanced by distortion and omission. H.G. Wells in his Outline of History likened by Knox to 1066 and All That set the tone for others.

He has not been without imitators. Nobody, of course, has dared to cover precisely the same ground; he would be afraid of the comparison, for Mr. Wells is readable. But he has pointed the way to a number of anti-Christian writers, and in some case thinkers, who have learned to abandon the old method of direct attack, and bury all religious and metaphysical issues under a cloud of scientific information. This is the technique of the omniscientist; he does not make any sustained attack on religion; he dismisses it in a series of contemptuous allusions, giving us to understand that he is too busy talking about science to delay over such trifling matters. Meanwhile he contrives to insinuate that religion and science are necessarily incompatible; that everything, therefore, which he has said in praise of science is ipso facto a condemnation of religion. He will belittle Christianity by forced contrasts; now dwelling on the long “aeons” which elapsed between the appearance of Moses, now showing how ignorent and brutish the Middle Ages were by comparison with the civilization that dates from Darwin. He is the prophet of a new age, and he has the public ear. He astounds with outpourings of quaint scientific facts; he dazzles with glimpses of the incomprehensible. He creates the impression that religion is of yesterday, science of today.

New Atheists have gone back to firing plague corpses from catapults over the battlements. The Internet has changed everything and perhaps such sly acerbities as ‘and in some cases thinkers’ may be too subtle for distributed micro attention. Knox’s discussion of Sir Julian Huxley’s Religion without Revelation pub. in 1927 and in a revised edition in 1957 must be the topic for a separate post as it dissects the idea of 'religiosity without religion' which continues to coruscate and lure the magpie thinker.

Bergson's Wind Tunnel

Wilbur: We’ve taken this flight thing as far as we can go. Let’s admit it; we’re stuck
Orville: I agree. We need some intellectual technology.
Wilbur: Send for that cerebretonic ectomorph, what’s his name.
Orville: You mean Bertie Russell.
Wilbur: Yeah, he’ll get us off the ground.

Dan Linford in
public letter to Bill Nye
is clearly fond of the usages of his apprenticeship which was in science. As I read his open letter I thought his views on scepticism might bring some rebuttals followed by clarifications. His intellectual technology kite will also not survive the rigours of the wind tunnel so to speak.

Bergson’s lecture on Philosophical Intuition from 1911 to the Philosophical Congress warns of philosophic hubris (from The Creative Mind)

One would find the same kind of relationship between a philosophical system and the whole body of scientific knowledge of the epoch in which the philosopher lived.
There is a certain conception of philosophy which requires that all the effort of the philosopher should be to embrace in one large synthesis the results of the particular sciences. Indeed, the philosopher, for a long time, was he who possessed universal knowledge; and today even, when the multiplicity of particular sciences, the diversity and complexity of methods, the enormous mass of facts collected make the accumulation of all human knowledge in a single mind impossible, the philosopher remains the man of universal knowledge, in this sense, that if he can no longer know everything, there is nothing that he should not have put himself in a position to learn. But does it necessarily follow, that his task is to take possession of existing science to bring it to increasing degrees of generality, and to proceed, from condensation to condensation, to what has been called the unification of knowledge? May I be pardoned if I consider it strange that this conception of philosophy is proposed to us in the name of science, out of respect for science: I know of no conception more offensive to science or more injurious to the scientist. Here, if you like, is a man who, over a long period of time, has followed a certain scientific method and laboriously gained his results, who says to us:
"Experience, with the help of reasoning, leads to this point; scientific knowledge begins here, it ends there; such are my conclusions"; and the philosopher would have the right to answer: "Very well, leave it to me, and I'll show you what I can do with it! The knowledge you bring me unfinished, I shall complete.

What you put before me in bits I shall put together. With the same materials, since it is understood that I shall keep to the facts, which you have observed, with the same kind of work, since I must restrict myself as you did to induction and deduction, I shall do more and better than you have done." Truly a very strange pretention! How could the profession of philosopher confer upon him who exercises it the power of advancing farther than science in the same direction as science? That certain scientists are more inclined than others to forge ahead and to generalize their results, more inclined also to turn back and to criticize their methods, that in this particular meaning of the word they should be dubbed philosophers, moreover that each science can and should have its own philosophy thus understood, I am the first to admit. But that particular philosophy is still science, and he who practises it is still a scientist. It is no longer a question, as it was a moment ago, of setting up philosophy as a synthesis of the positive sciences and of claiming, in virtue of the philosopher's mind alone, to raise oneself above science in the generalization of the same facts.
Such a conception of the role of the philosopher would be unfair to science. But how much more unfair to, philosophy! Is it not evident that if the scientist stops at a certain point along the road of generalization and synthesis it is because beyond that point objective experience and sure reasoning do not permit us to advance?

Russell on Bergson

Writing in the Monist on Bergson
monist
Bertrand Russell employs all his rhetorical skill to put his subject in the Continental box. It might even be considered early analytic scorning of the elegant nonsense put out by system builders or the instauration of the great divide. Obviously Bergson was not going to please the great rationalist.

Though Russell does not deal with The Two Sources in his piece there is a tangential reference to the bifurcation of instinct and intellect which is crucial to Bergson’s thinking on morality.
Russell:

 But among animals, at a later stage, a new bifurcation appeared: instinct and intellect became more or less separated. They are never wholly without each other, but in the main intellect is the misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees, and Bergson.

Russell does not quite pardon Bergson for writing well:

In the above outline, I have in the main endeavored merely to state Bergson’s views, without giving the reasons adduced by him in favor of their truth. This is easier than it would be with most philosophers, since as a rule he does not give reasons for his opinions, but relies on their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style. Like the advertisers of Oxo, he relies upon picturesque and varied statement, and an apparent explanation of many obscure facts. Analogies and similes, especially form a very large part of the whole process by which he recommends his views to the reader. The number of similes for life to be found in his works exceeds the number in any poet known to me.

In the second part of his critique of Bergson’s philosophy he settles on specific issues which are substantive and fall within his own area of interest. Bergson has got a wrong notion of the genesis of our concept of number, he says, but it seems to me that Bergson is describing its acquisition by the non-mathematician. It may be that the specialist builds on this primitive foundation. In any case it is Bergson’s core thesis that the division of time into sequential units is drawn from the mathematization of space and though useful is not adequate to the metaphysical reality which is duration.

This second part of the discussion is interesting and perhaps if the reader went to it first they might get more out of the paper. The initial donnish persiflage may diminish the later acute examination of key concepts such as Duration, Images, and Memory. These are terms which have a special meaning in Bergson’s work and so examination from their conventional acceptation is perhaps missing the point. Certainly worth a read.