Perception in Gaudapada and David Hume - Paradoxes of Idealism

 II.15 M.K.: Those objects that appear as obscure inside the mind and those that appear as vivid outside, are all merely created by imagination.  Their distinction is to be traced to the difference in the organs of perception.

If there was ever an indication that Vedantins aren’t from Mars it is this.  The tendency to idealism brings to the fore the notion that it is only a matter of vividness that marks the difference between the imagination and perception.  This is to be found in Hume.  A similar epistemology will evoke a related  response to the problem of differentiation between the mental and the sensible.  Impressions and ideas together are perception, is how Hume  puts it.  So how does one distinguish them?  By their relative vivacity. 

The notion of vivacity comes up in Sankara’s commentary on the sutra only to be dismissed. 

“The fact that things in the mind, called up by mere mental impressions, have an obscurity, while externally as objects of the sense of sight etc., they have a vividness, (that fact) is not due to the existence of the objects themselves; for this distinction is noticed even in a dream.  To what is it due then?  This is caused by the difference in the organs of perception.  Hence it is proved that the things of the waking state are as much a creation of imagination as the dream objects.” M.K. II.15.

Obviously there is a difference between their views on the  ontological status of perceptions.  Gaudapada holds that because we have perceptions in dreams and perceptions in the waking state the common denominator of being perceptions is their true status.  They thus remain as items in consciousness.  The activity of the senses is also in consciousness. So all being in consciousness and  consciousness qua consciousness resulting from superimposition (adhyasa) all experience is mithya/false. 

Hume  bundles mental and sensible events  into the one category of perception but distinguishes between the constituent impressions and ideas by virtue of their relative vivacity.

It’s interesting to see how the attempts to fix the paradoxes, that arise from the adherence to Idealism, criss cross each other generating  bafflement. 

Sutra 2:4:11 of Brihadaranayka Upanisad with Sankara's Commentary

 

Brihadaranyaka Upanisad 2:4:11 

"As the ocean is the one goal of all sorts

of water, as the skin is the one goal of all kinds

of touch, as the nostrils are the one goal of all

odours, as the tongue is the one goal of all

savours, as the eye is the one goal of all colours,

as the ear is the one goal of all sounds, the

Manas is the one goal of all deliberations, as the

intellect is the one goal of all kinds of knowledge,

as the hands are the one goal of all sorts of work,

as the organ of generation is the one goal of all

kinds of enjoyment, as the anus is the one goal

of all excretions, as the feet are the one goal of

all kinds of walking, as the organ of speech is

the one goal of all Vedas."

Here then is the bird’s eye view, the forest view or being high enough up to be no longer in danger of missing the forest for the trees.  Yes I do know that the idiom is ‘missing the wood for the trees’  but in that locution is the germ of a typical equivocation which has consequences if that is not too portentous.  When was I ever afraid of the portentous, God help me.  Wood, as lumber, firewood etc.,  is a product of trees.  A wood is also a large number of trees growing in the same place. A forest is an even larger group of trees, co-located, as in the Black Forest and so forth.  This is the view that I want to focus on.  And while I am talking about ‘views’ let me assert before it is offered as a transcendental hypothesis, the ‘view’ in Sankara’s advaita is a Realistic one.  There is a world and it is independent of our knowledge of it and elements of it wholly unknown too also exist sheltering under the umbrella of being.  Unless that is kept firmly in mind the inquiry due to the pullulation of terms that relate to awareness, consciousness, illusion and so forth can beguile us into a species of Idealism.  In that direction lies Buddhism, Humean/Empiricist epistemology and other sloughs of error.

The forest view is the height of the sutra eye.  When you ignore all the differentiating factors of the modalities of sense you resolve them all into the category of awareness or consciousness.  Notice that this last sentence is the typical stepping off point into the thin air of Idealism.  Don’t walk that plank.  Reflect on the point also made by Sankara that Samadhi, taken to be the sine qua non of enlightenment by yogis, is also but another form of awareness.

Everything is pervaded by or its being is SatChit/BeingConsciousness.

“Moreover, it is not only at the time of its origin

and continuance that the universe, on account of its

non-existence apart from Pure Intelligence, is Brahman,

but it is so at the time of dissolution also just as

bubbles, foam, etc. are non-existent apart from water,

so name, form and action, which are the effects of Pure

Intelligence and dissolve in It, are non-existent apart

from It.” (from Commentary by Sankara on the sutra)

Paradoxically this ‘everything is consciousness/Brahman’ is foundational for the Realism of Advaita as expressed in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya (Sankara’s Commentary) and also in succinct fashion by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in his ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’.  I am referring to the concept of ‘perceptuality’ or the structure that underlies our experience of the ‘external’ world.  We see it as it is .  Error is possible but only from the standpoint of that default view.

That I think is a big enough bite for today.   Dinner will be the ‘chit jada granthi’, the knot between the inert and consciousness.  The ‘mind/Manas’ is not, you see, of its nature conscious.  Tomorrow.  Now I have to mow a lawn, a really real lawn.

Kitaro Nishida on True Reality

 

"To understand true reality and to know the true nature of the universe and human life, we must discard all artificial assumptions, doubt whatsoever can be doubted, and proceed on the basis of direct and indubitable knowledge. " (Kitaro Nishida: ‘The True Nature of Reality’)

Instead of dumping everything into the universal solvent of doubt why not just take as default what you perceive and if that disappoints you by not behaving as expected ‘come let me clutch thee I have thee not and yet I see thee still; move to the stage of ‘dagger of the mind’.  Indeed this is the common sense way which in his next sentence he rejects as a merely conventional assumption.

"From the perspective of common sense, we think that things exist in the external world apart from consciousness and that in the back of consciousness there is something called the mind, which performs various functions."

Insoluble mysteries and the spawning of explanatory epicycles issue from this supposedly critical theory.  You have started by assuming a mental approach rather than an experiential one when you espouse doubt as a starting point.  Moreover you have cut yourself off from the whole animal kingdom out of which evolution issued.  For them as well as for us the brain is an organ of action and reaction replete with routines that do no require thought.

Arthapatti/postulation, Adhyasa, and Vulcan

 

Arthapatti variously translated as ‘postulation’, ‘presumption’, ‘supposition’ is treated almost perfunctorily in the classic texts usually focusing on the simplest canonical examples of fat Devadatta who doesn’t eat during the day and the living Chaitra who is not at home.  A restricted diet of examples leads to intellectual starvation in that the inquiry can be led into the path of cliched thinking. Take the very topic itself ‘pramana’ usually translated as ‘valid means of knowledge’.  I seem to notice the error that ensues in the conviction that if valid knowledge does not ensue then there was no pramana employed which is bizarre considering that confusion/illusion/delusion is such a topic in Vedanta.  Perception, a primary pramana, was used but knowledge did not happen.  Therefore I must demur from the statement of Swami Satprakashananda in his ‘Methods of Knowledge’:

It is worthy of note that arthapatti is applicable only when there is but one alternative explanation of the fact to be explained.  When there are more than one possible explanations the assumption of any one of them cannot explain the fact assuredly (with certainty).  So this cannot be a case of postulation (arthapatti) which is a means to valid knowledge.

This is an elision of the use of arthapatti in science which proceeds by hypothesis and experiment.  In advaitic/non-dual metaphysics the adhyasa theory is the result of a transcendental hypothesis or arthapatti which attempts to solve the aporia of perception viz. how does that out there extended object come to be in my mind as a state of unextended consciousness.  This is the subject of the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya by Sankara about which I have written extensively.  It is noteworthy that this aporia only exists for a Realist epistemology, for the subjective Idealist there is only the presentment to the mind and the object drops out as at most an inference.  As Sankara says in his commentary we perceive objects, we don’t perceive our perceptions.  There is a non-dual (non-numerical identity) between that out there and this in here.  In fact the division into ‘out there/external’ and ‘in here/internal’ is a dubious one.  That’s another topic.

Vulcan, the home planet of Mr.Spock the eminent logician was proven to be an illusion by Einstein.  My Google AI friend has a succinct account:

Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity played a pivotal role in debunking the existence of the hypothetical planet Vulcan. Prior to Einstein's theory, astronomers, including Urbain Le Verrier, proposed Vulcan to explain discrepancies in Mercury's orbit, which couldn't be fully explained by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. Einstein's theory, however, provided a more accurate understanding of gravity as the curvature of spacetime, eliminating the need for a hypothetical planet to explain the observed orbital anomalies.

Here's a more detailed explanation:

   The Discrepancy:

   Mercury's orbit showed a slight wobble, or precession, that couldn't be fully accounted for by the gravitational pull of the known planets in the solar system.

The Proposed Solution:

Le Verrier proposed that a planet between Mercury and the Sun, dubbed Vulcan, was causing the wobble.

The Hunt for Vulcan:

Astronomers searched for Vulcan during solar eclipses, but it was never found.

Einstein's Revelation:

Einstein's theory of General Relativity, published in 1915, explained that the precession of Mercury's orbit was due to the way spacetime is warped around massive objects, like the Sun. This warping effect was more pronounced closer to the Sun, making it unnecessary to postulate the existence of a hypothetical planet to explain the observed orbital anomalies.

The End of Vulcan:

Einstein's theory effectively eliminated the need for Vulcan, demonstrating that the observed precession could be explained by the curvature of spacetime, and not by the gravitational pull of a hidden planet.

Here arthapatti correctly employed produced the planet Vulcan.  Some people even mistook sun spots to be the transit of Vulcan across the Sun.  

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:

Theories of Self in Sanskrit philosophy in the 9th.Century (from Sankara's Commentary on Brahma Sutras)

 

Sankara’s commentary on the Brahma-Sutra Bhasya I.i.1

Opponent : If Brahman be well known in the world as the Self, then It being already known, there arises the difficulty again that It is not to be deliberated on. 

Vedantin : No, for there is a conflict about Its distinctive nature. Ordinary people as well as the materialists of the Lokayata school recognize the body alone to be the Self possessed of sentience. Others hold that the mind is the Self. Some say that it is merely momentary consciousness. Others say that it i~void. Still others believe that there is a soul, separate from the body, which transmigrates and is the agent (of work) and the experiencer (of results). Some say that the soul is a mere experiencer and not an agent. Some say that there is a God who is different from this soul and is all-knowing and all-powerful;others say that He is the Self of the experiencing individual. Thus there ar emany who follow opposite views by depending on logic, texts and their semblances. If one accepts any one of these views without examination, one is liable to be deflected from emancipation and come to grief. Therefore starting with the presentation of a deliberation on Brahman, here is commenced an ascertainment of the meaning of the texts of the Upanisads with the help of reasoning not opposed to the Upanisads themselves, for the purpose of leading to emancipation (through knowledge).

There you have it, an itemisation of the known theories of the Self and Self-Knowledge in the sphere of Sanskrit philosophy in the 9th.Century. Note that many of its topics did not become salient in Europe until much later.  Momentary consciousness (Annica) a Buddhist doctrine had to wait for Hume and his bundle of perceptions/series of conscious states, theory.  I have written about this at length previously. Follow the topics.

The vijnanavada subjective idealism is akin to that of Kant’s thing in itself and its unknowability.  The whole question of the ‘external’ world and what we really are directly aware of is give a thorough examination by Sankara in the commentary on the Brahma Sutras. (B.S.B. II.ii.28)

Materialism is mentioned and so forth and so on.  Suffice it to say that Sankara was not a mere theologian, an idea that is often encountered in academic circles.  He wants to test those theories using rational means to uncover contradictions and fallacies.  His critiques are well worth an examination by readers who have chiefly focused on the Western canon.

Realism, the Mind/Body problem in Western and Advaitic thought.

 

“Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.”  (from ‘Radical Empiricism’ by William James)

In his clear way James has set out the aporia which in Advaita is called the chit jada granthi (the knot between the conscious and the inert).  It is the initial statement of the puzzleShankaracarya deals with in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  He writes:

“Accordingly, the superimposition of the object, referable through the concept “you”, and its attributes on the subject that is conscious by nature and is referable through the concept “we” (should be impossible), and contrariwise the superimposition of the subject and its attributes on the object should be impossible.”

What he finds to be a difficulty that must be stated before his commentary on the body of the sutras is simply this: how does that out there a material object come to be in here in my mind as a subjective unextended state of awareness.

This is just that very ‘double entry’ problem that under various modalities keeps cropping up.  The problem of universals comes under that rubric, primary and secondary qualities thinking is coloured by it and it may even be that the hard wired moral tenets, the evolutionary adaptive, correspond to the really out there as against the ‘in here’ cultural mores.  To put it at its most general: is Realism a thing?

Aristotle and Plato thought so and got to it in their different ways.  Advaita as I have pointed out mentions the problem and via the pramanas assumes the truth of realism but its discussion of the problem is put to one side by the very practical problem of self-realisation.  That gives a Cartesian critical tinge to its philosophical investigations.  What is ‘kuthasta ‘, unchanging, as firm as an anvil?  It is Consciousness irradiated by self awareness, underlying that advice given by Nisargadatta’s guru - focus on ‘I AM’ and become liberated.

Earnest Advaitic seekers will demur claiming that none of this Western problematic exists.  It does but they are dazzled by the shiny object of confusion, summarised in the snake/rope analogy and are thereby led into interesting problems such as ‘how is error possible’  and the various fata morgana of Idealism.

Sankaracarya stated the central aporia in the preamble and therefore we must assume that the commentary on the sutras is a working out of a solution.  Essentially the answer is non-duality or how you can have non-numerical identity between consciousness and the objective world.  I have written several notes on this for anyone who is interested in following the subject topics/labels.

James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings (ed. James A. Harris)

 

I proceed, in the second place, to take notice of some of the more remarkable phenomena of Memory.

This is a faculty, which, if it were less common, and we equally qualified to judge of it, would strike us with astonishment. That we should have it in our power to recall past sensations and thoughts, and make them again present, as it were: that a circumstance of our former life should, in respect of us, be no more; and yet occur to us, from time to time, dressed out in colours so lively, as to enable us to examine it, and judge of it, as if it were still an object of sense: - these are facts, whereof we every day have experience, and which, therefore, we overlook as things of course. But, surely, nothing is more wonderful, or more inexplicable. (Beattie on Memory taken from ‘Selected Philosophical Writings’ ed. James A.Harris)

James Beattie (1735 - 1803)is less famous that his two near contemporaries Thomas Reid (1710 - 1796) and David Hume (1711 - 1776).  Both Beattie and Reid were opposed to the sceptical Hume particularly on consciousness and memory.

Thomas Reid:

Why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of the thing, memory a belief of the past existence, and imagination no belief at all, I believe no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.

Further down:

Philosophers indeed tell me, that this immediate object of my memory and imagination in this case, is not the past sensation, but an idea of it, an image, phantasm, or species of the odour I smelled; that this idea now exists in my mind or in my sensorium; and the mind contemplating this present idea, finds it a representation of what is past, of what my exist, and accordingly call it memory, or imagination.

(from An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense by Thomas Reid)

Specifically on the odd idea that memory and imagination were distinguished by vivacity James Beattie writes:

Some philosophers refer to memory all our livelier thoughts, and our fainter ones to imagination: and so will have it, that the former faculty is distinguished from the latter by its superior vivacity. We believe, say they, in memory; we believe not in imagination: now we never believe any thing, but what we distinctly comprehend; and that, of which our comprehension is indistinct, we disbelieve. - But this is altogether false. The suggestions of imagination are often so lively, in dreaming, and in some intellectual disorders, as to be mistaken for real things; and therefore cannot be said to be essentially fainter than the informations of memory. (op.cit)

Beattie’s further ruminations on the difference between the two are closely observed  and follow the rubric of common sense realism that holds that we experience the world before we begin to reason about it and focusing on the ideas we have leaves us marooned on the desert island of solipsism castaway by the shipwreck of idealism.

It is interesting that among the moderns Margaret Anscombe is taken by the irreducibility of memory.

Writing in her essay on Memory and the Past Elizabeth Anscombe:

Then what makes my state or act of consciousness memory of the thing. Is it the mere fact that the thing happened and that I witnessed it? In that case there is nothing in the memory itself that makes it refer to the actual past event. And if so, why should the experience of memory have anything to do with actual past events or show one what it means for something to have happened?

She then in her consideration of the phenomenon of memory examines the present experience of which memory is supposed to be.

 

 But if I consider some present thing (which can, if you like, be a state of mind) and my future ability to speak of it, it is brought out more clearly how difficult it is to make out that anything I may attribute to my future mental state will make what I say refer to this.

Beattie is exceptionally readable.  The 18th.Century was one of prose as Matthew Arnold remarks in his essay on Thomas Grey.  There  is a fine handling of the long sentence with numerous parentheses which are immediately intelligible.  His remarks on the location of memories remind one of the fact that Neuroscience and its accomplices in Philosophy have not moved past the problems that he identified:

The human brain is a bodily substance; and sensible and permanent impressions made upon it must so far resemble those made on sand by the foot, or on wax by the seal, as to have a certain shape, length, breadth, and deepness. Now such an impression can only be made by that, which has solidity, magnitude, and figure. If then we remember thoughts, feelings, and sounds, as well as things visible and tangible, which will hardly be denied; those sounds, thoughts, and feelings, must have body, and, consequently, shape, size, and weight. What then is the size or weight of a sound? Is it an inch long, or half an inch? Does it weigh an ounce, or a grain? Does the roar of a cannon bear any resemblance to the ball, or to the powder, in shape, in weight, or in magnitude? What figure has the pain of the toothache, and our remembrance of that pain? Is it triangular, or circular, or a square form? The bare mention of these consequences may prove the absurdity of the theories that lead to them.

Nisargadatta on Idealism and Realism

 

Nisargadatta is not promulgating an ontology/epistemology.  He uses the existing philosophy of the enquirer as a means to attainment of a path that might lead to enlightenment.  The point is finding water by drilling deep not by a multitude of small holes.  Sifting through various approaches, realism or idealism, internal or external reality is beside the point for him.  Sincere seeking using the dialectical advaitic method of adhiropa/apavada or statement followed by retraction.  Maharaj challenges the Questioner’s implicit realism:

“M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness, you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way.  Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.  Have a good look at yourself and all those misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve.  Just as all our little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.”

The important thing is getting detached from the panoply of awareness to focus on the central fact which cannot be sublated, the I AM you are in the moment.  What are you at with your theories, you can only be distracted by them.  By being in the presence of a master one has other business than that.

On the face of it Maharaj seems to be offering a pure subjective idealism as a ‘final’ theory.  Such would be the western way of doing philosophy.  In advaita/nondualism the theory ends in the unsayable, the apophatic.  Move towards the ‘trikala abheda’ or that which is un-contradicted in the three moments of time;  past, present, and future.

Last word from Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“Don’t mentalise and verbalise.  Just see and be”

Etienne Gilson on Thoughts and Things

 As realists we abide in things not thoughts.  The thing comes first not the thought about the thing.  What you have in Descartes is certainty but its a dead certainty.  Nothing living can come from it.  It cuts us off from things and leaves us the world as a true hallucination as Taine put it.  

Etienne Gilson in his brilliantly clear ‘Methodical Realism’ which would be an offence to summarise has an essay of 30 paragraphs on the superiority of Realism to Idealism.  Realism is the true because what we do would be impossible if Idealism were the case.  Section 5 in the series is an example of his wit:

The knowledge the realist is talking about is the lived and experienced unity of an intellect with an apprehended reality. This is why a realist philosophy has to do with the thing itself that is apprehended, and without which there would be no knowledge. Idealist philosophers, on the other hand, since they start from thought, quickly reach the point of choosing science or philosophy as their object. When an idealist genuinely thinks as an idealist, he perfectly embodies the essence of a “professor of philosophy”, whereas the realist, when he genuinely thinks as a realist, conforms himself to the authentic essence of a philosopher; for a philosopher talks about things, while a professor of philosophy talks about philosophy.

Bergson as a Dualist

 

In the introduction to ‘Matter and Memory’ Bergson states that his philosophy is dualist but having read his rejection of both Materialism and Idealism we are inclined to say ‘yes Henri, it’s dualism but not as we know it.  He starts from the common apprehension of a primal division between subject and object.  It’s perfectly natural and inevitable but the aporiai that it spawns sends him in a new direction.  Let’s take it that there is an interaction between a sensitive actor, the subject, and the world of sensible inputs. It is this interaction which is experienced as a plenum but not from the vantage point of a subject.  The natural tendency to place this experience in the subject is what the Advaitins call adhyasa or superimposition.  In Bergson’s panpsychist analysis memory pervades this interaction and lays it up never to be forgotten.  Now the perception which is a function of the superimposed subject has its images in a direct way in contrast to memory which is non-temporal but can insert its input.  This I think is the source of the notion of reality as the ‘aggregate of images’.  There is a pooling together from both sources.

I have previously mentioned  my intuition of the metaphor of mirror and images as being a source for his philosophy.  Metaphors instead of being merely an illustration of a point to be clarified can themselves be a higher realisation which hovers on the edge of the inexpressible.

More anon on that.

Realism in Advaita part 1

 

Advaita throws the word ‘real’ and its antonym ‘unreal’ about freely leaving the casual reader or the sitter at the feet of Swamiji, guruji, and the internet oracle, confused.  Is Advaita a type of subjective Idealism which holds that the world is a dream or ‘like’ a dream in that it is experienced and vanishes on waking, an ‘insubstantial pageant’?  Fear not, let this mini-guru with more than a hint of tin in his water pot put you right.  One thing I have though, if not enlightenment, is a fair reading in general philosophy that allows one to sift the nuances of the levels of reference.  Am I then referring to the vyavaharika/pratibhasika (absolute/relative) distinction?  Not quite.  Let me first deal with the opening question purely from an epistemological point of view.  What are we aware of when we experience something?  Is it an internal occurrence in our minds  that by some process represents the external reality or is that an overly complex way of saying that we experience an object?  Effectively, experience of the object is the immediate thing and all else is an over elaboration of the febrile mind and a derealising distraction.  There is a tiny, shy, half-truth in that.  My counter would be that Adi Shankara catered to the seeker who requires rational clarification.

The other, frequently met with, counter to this question of epistemological stance is the Orientalist - ‘really this Realism/Idealism dyad is a Western preoccupation that does not apply in Vedanta’.  Again, Shankara took it seriously though Vedanta’s answer to the aporia (puzzle) is so to speak, non-binary.   What else does non-dual mean if not that?  In any case the attempt to navigate between the Scylla and the Charybdis of Internal and External has also a long history in Western thought from, I would hold, Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and the modern revival of Panpsychism.

This is a long menu and the first item must be the neglected - what is the nature of the person, the mind/body complex that is in a world of objects?  

I’ll be back.

Advaitic Realism versus Buddhist Idealism (Vijnanavada/Yogacara)

 I have entered the whole section of B.S.Bh II.ii.28 (below) as it is worth reading in toto but here my focus is on the paragraph beginning ‘This conclusion is not honest’.

The Buddhist has a theory that holds that all cognition is internal  and is immediately self-luminous.  For him this supplies all that is required for experience and the very idea of an external object is a redundant and pointless fabrication that has no grounding in reality.  This is what he means by impossibility.

Sankara then examines this notion by resorting to the ontological position reminiscent of the Scholastic: what is is possible.  How do we discover what is (quid est)?  We ask ourselves whether the valid means of knowledge (pramana) can be applied to it and if so then it is possible (posse est).  What you cannot hold is the converse namely that possibility brings on a quasi existence.  ((Here come Zombies))

Vasubandhu’s (Vijnanavada/Yogacara teacher)  saying “The non-existent is imagined” is a variant of this possibility thesis.

Vijnanavada from B.S.Bh. II.ii.28:

Vijnanavadin:  (External objects are) not non-existent, for perceived.

Advaitin: It cannot be asserted that external things do not exist

Vijnanavadin: Why?

Vedantin: “Because they are perceived.” As a matter of fact such thingsas a pillar, a wall, a pot, a cloth, are perceived along with each act of cognition. And it cannot be that the very thing perceived is non-existent. How can a man’s words be acceptable who while himself perceiving an external object through sense-contacts still says, “I do not perceive, and that object does not exist”, just as much as a man while eating and himself experiencing­ the satisfaction arising from that act might say, “Neither do I eat, nor do I get any satisfaction”?

Vijnavadin:    Well, I do not say that I do not perceive any object, but all that I hold is ‘that I do not perceive anything  apart from the perception.

Vedantin: Yes, you do speak like that, since you have no curb) to your mouth; but you do not speak logically, for some­thing other than the perception has to be admitted perforce, just because it is perceived. Not that anybody cognises a perception to be a pillar, a wall, etc., rather all people cognise a pillar, a wall, etc. as objects of perception. And it is for this reason that all people understand those others (viz the Buddhists) as really assuming the existence of an external thing even while they deny it by saying, “That which is the content of an internal awareness appears as though external”. For they use the phrase “as though” in the clause “as though external” just because they too become aware of a cognition appearing externally in the same way as is well known ‘to all people, and yet ‘they want to deny any external’ object.   Else why should they say, “as though external”? For ‘nobody speaks thus: “Vistumitra appears like the son of a barren woman”. Accordingly, those who accept truth to be just what it is actually perceived to be, should accept a thing as it actually reveals itself externally, and not “as ‘though appearing outside”.

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 a accordance with the possibility or impossibility (of the thing) What is known through any one of the means of knowledge, direct perception etc., is possible, and what cannot be 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 knowledge; so how can they be declared to be impossible by raising such alternatives as different, non-different, etc. For external things are perceived as a matter of fact. It is wrong to say that external things do not exist merely on the ground that cognition is seen to have the likeness of an object, because the very likeness of an object is not possible unless the object itself be there, and also because the object is cognised outside. 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. Again, in (such forms of awareness as) “knowledge of a pot”, “knowledge of a cloth’ difference is seen in the two qualifying parts, pot and cloth, but not in the substantive part knowledge, even as in the case “a white cow” and “a black cow” we find that whiteness and blackness alone differ, but not so the cowhood. And the difference of the one (viz cowhood) from the two (whiteness, blackness) stands out clearly, as also the difference of the two from the one. Therefore an object and its knowledge differ. Similar should be our comprehension in the cases of the seeing of a and the remembrance of a pot. Here also the substantives. seeing and remembering differ, but not so the adjectival viz pot; this is just as in the cases of the cognitions, “the smell of milk”, and “the taste of milk”, where the substantives smell and taste alone differ, but not so the adjectival part milk.

Moreover, as regards two cognitions occurring successively, which vanish after self-revelation, there can be no logical appre­hension of the one by the other. And in that case will be nul­lified all the assertions made in the Buddhist scriptures them­selves about the difference among cognitions, momentariness and other attributes, individual characteristics, common charac­teristics, bequeathing of tendency by one cognition to the other, true, false, or mixed attributes arising from contact with nescience, as also about bondage, liberation, and so on.

Again, if one admits a distinction between knowledge and knowledge, why should not one admit external objects such as a pillar, a wall, and so on?

Buddhist:      A cognition is actually perceived.

Vedantin; External things too are perceived, and so they too should be admitted.

Buddhist:      Since cognition is a luminous thing it stands self-revealed like a lamp, but an external object is not like that.

Vedantin:    Then like assuming that fire burns itself, you assume that something can act on itself by itself, which is absolutely opposed to reason; yet you do not admit the well-known fact, bearing no contradiction, that an external object is known through a cognition which is different from the object. What a great display of erudition you make! It cannot be asserted that consciousness is known to itself as something apart from objects for the simple reason that there can be no action on oneself.

Buddhist. If a cognition has to be known by some entity other than itself, that second one will have to be known by another, and that one again by another. This will lead to an Infinite regress. Moreover, since cognition is an illuminator like a lamp, if you should imagine a second cognition (to know it), then since both the cognitions are similar there will be no revela­tion of the one by the other, so that this whole assumption will fall to the ground.

Vedantin: Both these arguments are wrong, for once an awareness of the cognition occurs, no further desire to appre­hend the witness of the cognition can arise; and so there is no possibility of infinite regress.  And since the witness and the cognition are different by nature, there can be a relationship of the perceiver and the perceived among them. Besides, the self-evident witness cannot be denied. There is another consideration. When you assert that cognition shines by itself like a lamp without requiring some other cognition, you virtually say that a cognition is not apprehended by. any other means of knowledge or by anything else, which would be like saying that a thousand lamps shine (unknown) within a massive boulder.

Buddhist:      Exactly so; for cognition being of the nature of an awareness (suggested by you), you have only approved the view that we hold.

Vedantin:      No, for it is seen that some other perceiver. having the eye etc. as his instrument, perceives a lamp etc. So it is understood that since cognition has equally to be revealed by some one else, it can be perceived like a lamp only when a distinct perceiver is present.

Buddhist:      By upholding the theory that the perceiving wit­ness is self-effulgent, you only accept under a different garb of words my own view that cognition shines by itself.

Vedantin:      Not so, for you admit many such distinctions for cognition as origin, destruction, multiplicity, and so on. And hence it is that we establish the apprehension of that cognition by some entity outside it, as in the case of a lamp.

Sankara's Adhyasa Bhasya: Advatic Stone Kicking

A la Samuel Johnson - ‘Thus I refute thee’ of the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley.  It sounds like that, because in both the translations of the adhyasa bhasya (Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya) at my disposal the declaration of the foundational externality of perception is declared emphatically.

(a) It being established etc. (Swami Gambhirananda)

(b)It is not a matter requiring any proof etc. (George Thibaut)

Then there is the paradox that this externality, which is so patent that it does not require proof, comes burdened with the aporetic: how does that object out there, a material entity, come to be somehow inside me as a cognition which we intuitively accept as a true picture of what the object is.

No wonder the idealist says ‘stop, there is no outside and externality is an illusion’ and by the great razor of Occam this is the simplest explanation.  That only leaves one with the difficulty of an illusion of something that has never occurred.  A rare beast indeed.

Sankara declares that externality (a) should be impossible; (b) it would be wrong, given the aporia/impasse just detailed.  Nevertheless it is so.  Let us describe what seems to be taking place and work from there towards a transcendental hypothesis which accounts ontologically for it.  This is a ‘saving the appearances’ operation and is begun with the concept of superimposition viz. adhyasa.

More anon.

 

Thou art That #141, #142, #143

 Please tell us (Idealists)  what benefit you derive by holding that knowledge depends on other things.  If it is contended that dependence (of knowledge) on the knower is desirable (we reply that) the knower also, according to us, is nothing but Knowledge.

The intellect itself, though indivisible, is looked upon by deluded people as consisting of the division of the knower, knowing, and the known.

Action, agents etc. consist, according to us, (Idealists) of knowledge only.

(Reply from advaitin). You must accept an agent of this knowledge, if you admit its existence and destruction (every moment).   (#141, #142,  #143 Chap. XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)

The locus classicus for a thoroughgoing refutation of Buddhist Idealism (Vijnanavada) is of course Bsb.Bh. II.ii.28.  It is ironic that what is called British Empiricism shares the same view that what we are in contact with is a state of consciousness and anything further is an inference of some kind or native faith.  In other words we perceive perceptions.

Sankara in this comment on Vijnanavada impugns the annica/annata (no-self/momentariness) aspect since the topic of the chapter is the Self.  Holding that there in no knower only knowing implies that the agent of knowing is created and destroyed in every moment.  Thereby they (Buddhist Idealists) contradict themselves.

Dharmakirti, an Idealist?

Professor Birgit Kellner in her discussion of the idealism of Dharmakirti, and if indeed he was one offers this citation from his Pramanavarttika in which, at least to my mind, he appears to be one and virtually ready to be snagged by the crozier of Bishop Berkeley.

If cognition has the form of the object, what evidence is there for the external object?39 If cognition is without the form of the object, how could
it be an experience of that object?
If cognition’s having the nature of awareness is not conditioned by resemblance, then that nature of awareness is established of the cognition
just from cognition itself (svata eva). What is then contributed by an external object?

(from: dharmakirti idealism

This does not seem so far away from the position that Shankaracarya impugns in Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya II.ii.28.

Is Shankara an Idealist?

You will occasionally read that Shankaracarya was an Idealist, a position which is clearly wrong when you consider his rejection of Vijnanavada (Buddhist Subjective Idealism) in B.S.B. II.ii.28. A pithy summation would be – we do not perceive our perceptions, we perceive/cognize a pillar, a wall or whatever as objects of perception. That’s straightforward but it might be interesting to consider why such a view might take root on the Coleridgean principle that until I understand a person’s ignorance I am ignorant of his understanding.

All philosophical systems require translation even those in our native language. How much more then can the usage of such terms as mind, matter, image etc offered as translations derail our understanding as we fit them into our native epistemology.

For the swerve towards idealism I blame the concept of vritti or mental modification.

Now, as the water of a tank, issuing through a hole, enters in the form of a channel a number of fields, and just like them assumes a rectangular or any other shape, so also the luminous mind, issuing through the eye etc., goes to the space occupied by objects such as a jar, and is modified into the form of a jar or any other object. That very modification is called a state (vritti)

(from Vedanta-Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra writing on perception)

You can see that a focus on the mental capture of the object might lead one to consider it as the point of departure to an inference of the object. Our knowledge of the object can become to be seen as mediated by the vritti. Vedanta-Paribhasa corrects us:

…, in the case of the perception of a jar as, “This jar,” the mental state in the form of the jar being in contact with the jar, the Consciousness limited by that mental state is not different from the Consciousness limited by the jar, and hence the knowledge of the jar there is a perception so far as the jar is concerned.

Pure Consciousness as limited by the object and pure consciousness as limited by the mind of the subject is one and the same. Therefore the object can be ‘in’ the subject as it really is.

Possible Evidence and Evidently Possible (B.S.B. II.i.28 on Vijnanavada))

Should the existence or non-existence of a thing depend on the possibility or impossibility of the evidence for that thing? If we accept that view, the road to the ontological argument lies open and inevitable. Should we rather not hold that the possibility or impossibility of a thing is decided on the basis of being able to apply the means of knowledge to it. What can be perceived is evidently possible. This would include cloud chamber data and so forth. However, in this case the contrary to the possible is not the impossible but the theoretical for which we have as yet not devised empirical means of gaining evidence for.

Is idealism the chasm between the object and its evidence?

Materialism and Idealism as Monisms

It seems that Materialism and Idealism are now being described as monisms. So be it, as long as moving the terminalogical goal posts does not change the nature of the game. The plumping for one causes the other to be resorbed so to speak but not a quite vanished or banished twin. It's a position that always seem to be held 'against' the other one. Advaita is, in my view, a true monism in that there is always only a unity of being. However we do move from the 'natural' dualistic position of self and other towards it even if that 'movement' is purely notional.

Adhyasa/Superimposition as the key to Advaitic Critical Realism

“But availability for empirical experience depends on superimposition” (pg.419 numbered section 142: The Method of Vedanta by Sri S.S.S.)

Even though the Swami is talking about mutual superimposition of the Self and the non-self I think that a tangential truth is expressed about what Vedanta Paribhasa calls perceptuality. In other words, superimposition is the fact whereby the stone out there as an object comes in some sense to be in me, the subject.

Why do we not take the experience in here as a bounded subjective domain in the manner of Idealists (both subjective and objective) and Representationalists/Scientific Realists? Because for Vedantins the Vedas have an intrinsic ‘aboutness’. The language that they are expressed in is eternal, capturing, for all time, and in every eon, universals (vedic words). The action of the enjoined sacrifices is real and effective.

Starting from that foundation a metaphysics is promulgated which can sustain the non-numerical identity of object and mental modification (vritti). In his own way Aristotle squared that circle also.

What about illusion? Does that not break the upadhi link? It was a witty metaphysics that used as a founding analogy the fact of error. It is still the case though that our default assumption is of perception as veridical. Further experience may prove us wrong and we can accept this. We may even test our experience in an experimental fashion: Come let me clutch thee/I have thee not and yet I see thee still. Our realism is critical (krites/judge).