I blame the British Empiricists.

I bang on like an untethered gate about Idealism and Realism but I take consolation in the fact that I am in good company. Practically all philosophers have spurned Idealism even if like a mutating virus it comes on in waves weakening as they put about their noxious fumes. Even so, some philosophers share Kant’s dismay at the lack of proof for an external world and take pains to work abstruse demonstrations which commit the usual error. They attempt to move from an inner conviction to an outer reality. That can be about God for Descartes and Berkeley. Like the writer to the editor ‘I blame the parents’ or The British Empiricists in the case of the inner turning to found an outer reality. Following them one is balked from the world by the direct acquaintance with our sensations merely and their cause devolves into an inference. Occasional error damns us as though not knowing everything were to condemn to universal ignorance. My philosophic chums of the moment are Etienne Gilson and Thomas Reid, champions of common sense. Can you prove causality? Can you prove the excluded middle? Are there limits to demonstration? For them common sense is not folk epistemology though it may require work to show its depth. Guided by Gilson’s ‘Thomist Realism’ I and Reid’s ‘Intellectual Powers’ I follow that trail. Sankara the advaitin has words on that topic addressing the Buddhist vijnanavadin (subjective idealist).

“So also it has to be admitted that the regularity in the simultaneous appearance of the cognition and its object is owing to the relation of causality between them and not owing to their identity.” (B.S.Bh - commentary on the Vedanta Sutras)

There is much more to say on this but why is it important? In a nutshell: de-incarnation is a very subtle and powerful mind virus.

Hazlitt would-be Hazlitt

The fascination of what's difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart.

(W.B. Yeats)

Straining after the just out of reach and depreciating what is near to hand, and what you can do well, is the disease of perfection. ‘The best is the enemy of the good’. Did Napoleon, the idol of William Hazlitt, really say that? My father often said it also. He never ascribed it. Hazlitt wanted to be a great painter, a British Titian no less. His portrait of Charles Lamb in a cloak but without regulation corybantes is a fine production that has fetched up in the National Portrait Gallery. If he had the money that would give him time to develop a clientele. It is clear that his talent was of a high order and he might have been successful like his brother John who was a noted miniaturist.

The other ambition which was never fulfilled was the production of a body of work in philosophy. At age 27 he published An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. It was reviewed three times but otherwise did not find a readership. According to P.P. Howe biographer and editor of his work the gist of what he wrote is contained in his long essay Self-Love and Benevolence published in his Literary Remains (1836). I’m reading that at the moment. In general it is contra the extremes of empiricism found in Hartley, Helvetius and Locke. The other philosophical essay in ‘Remains’ is Belief, whether Voluntary. A late work I think containing the summary of his deep doubts about political commitment. Are our cherished visions of society merely the induced perturbations of the historical situation?

At last he had to resign himself to being one of the finest writers in the English language.

Tabula rasa with desk-like features.

When my wife points out that I am leaving books on every surface and turning the sitting room table into a desk I respond:
- It's not a desk, I know that, it's a table with desk-like features.

Is this upamana at work? I think so. Moreover, rather than being restricted to the gavaya (bos gaurus) of the standard example and its configuration which seduces us into trying to devise congruent examples; we are in fact using the pramana all the time in various ways. The usage in translation of 'means of knowledge' may be a misdirection. We are inclined then to think of some sort of device that we utilise whereas upamana as a capacity that only exists as it is being used, mysterious as that sounds, may be closer to its reality. My resistance is to a Lockean abstractionist view which sees the the tabula rasa as the primitive condition.

Locke, Newman, Clifford and James on Assent.

Reasonings and convictions which I deem natural and legitimate, he apparently would call irrational, enthusiastic, perverse, and immoral; and that, as I think, because he consults his own ideal of how the mind ought to act, instead of interrogating human nature, as an existing thing, as it is found in the world. Instead of going by the testimony of psychological facts, and thereby determining our constitutive faculties and our proper condition, and being content with the mind as God has made it, he would form men as he thinks they ought to be formed, into something better and higher, and calls them irrational and immoral, if (so to speak) they take to the water, instead of remaining under the narrow wings of his own arbitrary theory.

This is Newman writing in A Grammar of Assent about Locke on ‘Probability’ and ‘Enthusiasm’ in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ‘Grammar’ was completed in 1870 and it is interesting that W.K. Clifford in his well known Ethics of Belief published in 1877 offers the same view of assent that Locke does. Personally I am persuaded by the psychological force of Newman’s rebuttals and his discovery of contradiction in Locke. It is instructive to compare his view of our normal acceptance of incomplete demonstration to that which William James limns in The Will to Believe from 1896. In that essay is a picture of spiritual anguish and of forced assent that is far from healthy-minded.

In this short note I merely draw attention to a cluster of views occurring around the latter quarter of the 19th. century. It may be that the ascetic had the more penetrating analysis of the three.

Ideas

What would it be like to live in a world without persons? Some psychologists seem to know; for them it is a world of brains that do whatever it was supposed that persons did, whatever they are. This inscrutability about persons brings to one’s attention the philosophical conundrum: do you prefer the intelligible falsity to the mysterious? That is not to accept that psychology could achieve much or perhaps all of its research findings even if individual psychologists all held different metaphysical views. Dualists, monists, panpsychists, Spinozists might all be able to work their trade in the brain without conflict. Ingenious T.E.s will prove me wrong but that is the current position in reality as politicians say.

David Chalmers has a nice crisp video:
consciousness

Reading about John Locke and his ‘idea’. What is it? It seems to me that only persons can have ideas, brain events are not ideas but if they weren’t present neither would ideas be.

Coleridge has a nice footnote/conspectus on the ‘idea’:

I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume's sense on account of its general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though against my own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been the cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in its original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object, when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign of Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it, more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be displeased with the following interesting exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one band, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world,—Locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and confined the word idea to ,the latter.]

(Chap.VII Biographia Literaria)