Upamana and Vedic Words (yet again)

 What can we do to naturalize the Vedic Words doctrine?  Why do I call it a doctrine?  It is a firmly fixed rock to which the crampons of epideictic thought are attached.  The Vedas are there forever, with each emission of the universe they remain unchanged.  They are apoureesha (not of human origin).  They act as the secret core of things that makes things to be what they are.  In a sense they are the esoteric Godelian axiom.  All this mundane reality rests on them, the secret seed of things.  They are the ground of grounding. (cf. general post on the topic of 'vedic words' etc: vedic words )

It is then not a surprise to find that Sankara’s teaching is similar to that of Plato’s.  There is a realm of ideas.  There must be. That doctrine to be naturalized must be put to the test of empiricism.  What do we actually do?  What is the procedure by which we gain the use of general concepts, ideas, universals or whatever you are having yourself?  

The pramana upamana (comparison) is a good place to start.  What make comparison possible, a procedure that we can operate?  May I suggest that the ultimate comparison is identity as paradoxical as that may sound.  A thing is found to be the same as itself.  It is what it is.  We know a thing as that thing by the fact that it is that thing.  Our first encounter with an entity is to accept that it is.  That is the default position true for all awareness even mistaken awareness.  Next step ontologically is to recognise it as a ‘some’ thing or as having an identity.  Does that not seem in-duh-bitable?  Such is philosophy with its fascination for the process of turning the obvious into the mysterious.

A thing is what it is.  The being or existence element though never found un-composed is the ontic, the ( ti on: Gk) what it is the ontological.  This initial identity spawns other non-numerical identities using as aids the striking qualities of the original.  The ur-thing is the natural kind that is not a composition of its qualities or attributes.

Identity does not arise in a temporal sense.  It is now and for all time the ground of upamana.  The identity of a thing with itself is eternal, has no beginning and does not last.  Vedic in short if we take that expression as a metaphor.

Goldilocks and the Seven Sages

Perhaps you’ve seen already this essay by Derek Parfit from the files of the London Review of Books:
why anything why this
I spent a couple of hours pre-dawn this morning reading it and when I crept back to bed, I sleep in shifts these days; a great Odin sleep came over me and I awoke refreshed and perfectly unenlightened. More than anything it demonstrates how little space a philosopher needs to turn and how a 5,728 word essay can be generated by the application of judicious extrapolation. I resist the idea of selection points which he proffers as it seems to represent a mathematical view of time as a series of instants with all the information present for the next predictable move. I feel that there is unbroken action on all fronts in both a monistic and a pluralistic sense.

The Hindu theory of world cycles with its vertiginous yugas, kalpas and days of Brahman holds that the dissolution and the re-projection of the universe is endless but there is one constant; the Vedas. They emerge in every cycle and are heard (sruti) by the Sages. The sage of Kanchi in his book on the Vedas has interpreted this doctrine. More anon.

Upamana and Bergson

Upamana (comparison) is a King Charles’s head with me. Like Mr. Dick with the latter (David Copperfield) I am fascinated by it to the extent that I believe that even those who accept it as a pramana aren’t aware of its decisive role in the problem of universals. Nobody understands upamana ! That way lies madness.

When re-reading Matter and Memory I find that Bergson with his sense of the foundational nature of comparison/resemblance takes a similar view:

It would seem, then, that we start neither from the perception of the individual nor from the conception of the genus, but from an intermediate knowledge, from a confused sense of the striking quality or of resemblance: this sense, (pg 206) equally remote from generality fully conceived and from individuality clearly perceived, begets them both by a process of dissociation. Reflective analysis clarifies it into the general idea; discriminative memory solidifies it into a perception of the individual.

Sankara with his theory of vedic words proposes a notion of universals along the same lines as Plato’s. Pramana for Sankara then might be restricted to a way of going from the innately known genus to the unknown particular - from cow to gavaya as per the standard example. Bergson would deny ideas and accept comparison (upamana) which he would term the “striking quality”. Upamana on its own could generate a world of universals and particulars.

Bergson’s statement of the classic problem is succinct:

individual objects. The whiteness of a lily is not the whiteness of a snow-field; they remain, even as isolated from the snow and the lily, snow-white or lily-white. They only forego their individuality if we consider their likeness in order to give them a common name; then, applying this name to an unlimited number of similar objects, we throw
back upon the quality, by a sort of ricochet, the generality which the word went out to seek in its application to things. But, reasoning in this way, do we not return to the point of view of extension, which we just now abandoned? We are then, in truth, revolving in a circle, nominalism leading us to conceptualism, and conceptualism bringing us back to nominalism.
Generalization can only be effected by extracting common qualities; but, that qualities should appear common, they must have already been subjected to a process of generalization.

Moreover what Bergson says about this power of discerning resemblance namely that it is of the nature of a primal force that does not have to be set into motion by a psychological effort, has the true flavour of pramana as irreducible.

But we relegate nothing to the unconscious, for the very simple reason that it is not, in our opinion, an effort of a psychological nature which here disengages similarity; this similarity acts objectively like a force, and provokes reactions that are identical in virtue of the purely physical law which requires that the same general effects should follow the same profound causes.

Vedic Words

There may be a truth in the mythic idea that the word itself is a real thing. I mean that it is more than just articulated air. We have this thought in the ancient theories of magic, the name and that which it names are connected non-adventitiously. We find this in Hebrew, Greek and Arabic and the theory of the Vedic word is treated most seriously by the Advaitic philosopher Shankara.

It's curious that this should be so when you consider that Sanskrit is a declined language like Latin, Turkish or Gaelic etc and the body of the word can change its shape quite radically in the various cases. So then it is not the shape of the word that is significant it is the meaning of the word, what it signifies, connotes, denotes, its extension, intension, take your pick. The word as articulated air has a nimbus about it. The word 'scian' has a sharpness about it, it has a piercing nature, 'couteau is blunt, (to me) In ancient taboos some words are forbidden, they call up that which they mention or refer to. Fairies (air spirits) are not called such but are known as 'the good people', the Furies are the Euminides (well wishers), certain activities which further the continuance of tie species are known as 'this thing'. Euphemism is commonplace and surely has its origins in the idea that to mention something is to call it up.

There is a difference between saying that there is a relationship between the word and the 'thing’ and the word as the 'thing’. What does Shankara have to say on this point? What in short are Vedic words?

"It is on the basis of the inborn, relationship between words and their meanings from the very beginning that the validity of the Vedas has been established by saying...."
The Vedantin holds that "because the universe, consisting of the gods and others, originates verily from the Vedic words."

The objection to this seems cogent at first sight. If something has an origin then it is non-eternal. So are we to take it that the gods are non-eternal? No, says Shankara, it is the relationship that is eternal and not the event of the word giving rise to the existence of the thing.

Is this an acceptable answer? Let us go on to consider the rest of his thoughts on the subject. He makes the obvious point that there cannot be a connection between each instance referred to by a word and the vedic word. It is the generic word that is eternal, a notion, very similar to that of the 'ideas' of Plato. There is besides no imputation of a birth from words in the samesense as birth from a material cause.

Is this theory subject to the same difficulties as that of Plato’s? Can generality precede instantiation? Can the meaning exist separately from the instantiation of the meaning? This puts us in mind of the Cheshire Cat and its smile. Can there be equivalence without things we discover to be equivalent. Can there be identity which precedes things which are identical or exactly similar? This seems to be a paradoxical doctrine. How, again, is it known that the universe originates from words? "From direct revelation and inference".

Essentially he means from the Vedas and Smriti. He offers Quotations. An intuitive rationale of Shankara's is. "Besides it is a matter of experience to us all that when one has to accomplish some desired thing, one remembers first the word denoting it and then accomplishes it." He uttered the syllable bhuh, He created the earth. Tai.Br. II.ii.4.2

How is this meant to happen?

Sphota is the answer of the grammarians. There is an impression created by the words which are themselves created by the letters which constitute them. Shankara is capable of activating his critical intelligence on this notion which had been in abeyance due to his acceptance of a literal understanding of the vedas. His judgment is that the unit of intelligibility, to coin a phrase, is the word. "And. this sphota has no beginning, since its identity is recognisable at every utterance (of the word)." This then is the intuitive core of the Vedic word. It corresponds to the problem of the origin of universals. How can you find them unless you have them already?

His final considered opinion is that the single concept ‘cow’ emerges on the basis of the letters as a whole and not any other thing (called sphota).

Page 111 V.P.(Vedanta Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra a medieval scholar, pub.Advaita Ashrama) Of these, secular sentences are of the nature of restatements, since their meanings are primarily apprehended through other means of knowledge; but with regard to the Vedas, since the meaning of Vedic sentences are known at first hand, they are not of the nature of restatements."