Upamana

To begin with I think it is worth while quoting the entire treatment of the valid means of knowledge (pramana) knows as upamana as given in the locus classicus of Vedanta Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra who seems to have flourished in the 17th. Century. It will be noted just how short a treatment is given of what I hope to show is an extremely important pramana.

Now comparison is being described. The instrument of the valid knowledge of similarity is comparison. For instance a man who has seen a cow's form in cities and has gone to a forest, where his eyes have come in contact with a gayal (gavaya - bos gaurus) has the cognition, "This thing is like a cow". Then he has the conviction, "My cow is like this." Here by a process of agreement and difference, the knowledge of the likeness of a cow which exists in a gayal is the instrument, and the knowledge of that likeness of a gayal which exists in a cow is the result.

this is not possible through perception, for then the cow's form is not in contact with the eyes. Nor is it possible through inference, for that likeness of a cow which exists in a gayal cannot be the sign (reason) for inferring the likeness of a gayal in a cow. Nor can it be urged that this is possible through the following inference:

My cow is like this gayal.
Because it corresponds to its likeness existing in a gayal.
That which corresponds to its likeness existing in a thing is like the latter.

As Caitra, who corresponds to his likeness existing in Maitra, is like him.

For even without this sort of inference, the cognition, "My cow is like this," is a matter of common experience, and has also the apperception, "I am comparing the two,". Hence comparison is a distinct means of knowledge.

The first thing that must be remarked is the insistence that upamana is a distinct means of knowledge which is to say that it cannot be reduced to anything more basic or primitive. It thus takes its place along with the others such as Perception and Inference. There are 6 in all accepted within the philosophical system known as Advaitic Vedanta. It would take us too far out of our way to go into any detail about the rest of them though later I may offer a note on anupalabadhi or non-apprehension of existence.

Let me first make the point that perhaps 'comparison' may not be quite the apposite word in relation to this means of knowledge. I will be staying with the canonical example of the gayal for the moment. When the cow is seen in the gayal where is there what we would strictly in English call a comparison? When one speaks of comparison one generally requires that there be two things, a eye-witness description and a known individual. The one is compared to the other and a match is declared or a partial match or a mismatch. This seeing of the cow in the gayal seems to me to more like the successful deployment of the concept 'cow'. Our having the concept 'cow' allows us to 'see' the cow in the gayal. There is no comparison as such, having the concept is what enables us to do this, to have this recognition so to speak. For this basic reason I would stay with the term upamana to avoid what I think is an erroneous identification with the notion of comparison.

In Mental Acts Peter Geach speaks of concepts as capacities exercised in acts of judgement. Does exercising the concept just involve 'seeing' the cow in the gayal? Is the notion of comparison a misunderstanding that the translation of upamana underlines? We can construe what we have done as comparison only after the fact. That is what we must be doing we say to ourselves presenting an analysis that makes sense to us. It makes sense to us because of the inherent hankering after empiricist explanations. Evidence is required even if we have to make it up to have a likely story.

Why do we find it hard to accept that there things that we can do, that there are powers we just have and concept acquisition and concept utilisation are those sort of powers or they are perhaps a single power of double aspect. Having the concept 'white' means among other things seeing it in milk and chalk. No comparisons needed.

I am I have to admit ignorant of later speculation about pramanas and specifically this one amongst that school known as the New Logicians (Navya Nyaya) in its later phase. The perennial focus on the gavaya (bos gaurus) by commentators in general leads me to think that the general understanding of what was at issue was not clear. The canonical example is often a lifebuoy to cling to in a sea of incomprehension. My own speculations may be a matter of my own fancy and no better.

Note to a Rationalist

There are things that are not true and you shouldn't believe them. One of these things would be the FSM. It's not any sort of explanation for the phenomena that you could rationally infer to, it makes no sense, it does not connect in any way to the sorts of explanations that make up your rational apparatus. To assimilate the FSM to a deity is merely rationalist bluster, sanctified by usage. Are there other things that you, Benjamin, shouldn't believe but are perhaps true? I would say yes, namely the things that do not cohere with the corpus rationalis that you have, from a boy, created. These might be tales related in The Varieties of Religious Experience that do not enter into what makes sense to you. They are not live options, they are dead options or they perhaps reside in that dim Sheol of the indeterminate couldn't care less. Obviously on your best day you recognise that you are not the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not that they are not.

Waiting for Godot

I have always felt that Dawkins was on the ‘probable’ bus because it was heading towards the terminus of science and the safe haven of the empirical. By affecting to hold this position he could insist that the likelihood of evidence emerging for the existence of God was vanishingly small. Agnosis still falls within the precinct of gnosis, the conceptual dyad still stands if the question remains open.

Grayling impugns this stance by saying that such ‘evidence’ could never come to pass, nothing would ever serve to prove the existence of God. In effect evidence that could never become manifest is not evidence at all. The agnostic then is a confused atheist that wants a firm talking to. It's the old 'tooth fairy' argument.

This position of Grayling’s is a 'buck up man, stop being windy' retort to a Dawkins stance. It is to be contrasted to the apophatic mystical. God in whom we live, move and have our being is not an object of empirical observation, we will not stumble on it while looking for the tv remote.

The agnostic stance may be a valid position emotionally but faulty from a purely intellectual point of view. People like to keep their options open. This is why paint shops sell testers. However thinking it through, looking for definitive evidence is to have failed to appreciate what the entity in question is. Something that can be settled empirically even though there is a remote possibility of that eventuality ever coming to pass is not adequate to any serious concept of God. That we do not know is true but that we cannot know is also true. We cannot know because the intellectual equipment is not adequate to that purported object. If God is not an object he/she/it cannot be known. Therefore without some sort of realisation of God however limited that might be, the atheistic position is to this believer the intellectually respectable one. Is Grayling that sort of atheist? He has taken a stance about supernatural agencies and their incredibility on the basis that there is no evidence that could not reasonably be forthcoming. Colour me atheist.

Who then is an atheist in the heroic sense that I have been urging? A contender might be the philosopher Simon Critchley whose influences are continental and therefore large positions are second nature to him. Interviewed on http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2002-12/simoncritchley.htm re his book on humour he has this to say:

Are you suggesting that in a secular age, humour is the new God?

SC: This is an important question and it strikes me that there are about twenty things to say. First, there is no God. I begin from the assumption that modernity is defined by the impossibility of any metaphysical belief in a deity. That's where I begin from and that is axiomatic for me. It means that if I had a religious experience I would stop doing philosophy: philosophy for me is essentially atheistic.

Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period. So the difficulty of modern life, of modernity in the full sense is this: the way in which we make sense of ourselves, those things we value and attribute meaning to, is still within a religious framework. Yet we cannot believe that religious framework. So from my perspective, modernity as a fully secular worldview has never really been achieved. We still inhabit the traces, the memory of, that religious perspective. And that's an ambiguous thing.

Critchley being English has an acute sense of the folly of portentousness so I suppose it is a mark of his commitment that he ventures so far into an irony free zone. I respect that. His position on deity is a metaphysical transcendental one. Empirical confirmation or disconformation is senseless.There is no 'waiting for Godot'.

facing death, facing life

His father had always been a stranger, an irritable stranger with exceptional powers of intervention and comment, and an air of being disappointed about his offspring. It was shocking to lose him, it was like an unexpected hole in the universe, and the writing of “Death” upon the sky, but it did not tear Mr. Polly’s heartstrings at first so much as rouse him to a pitch of vivid attention.

(The History of Mr. Polly by H.G.Wells)


That amusing and warm hearted novel has a lot of wisdom in it. We face death by facing life otherwise it’s just a distracting mystery encompassed by either table turning or nihilism. As an old English labourer explained to me as I hacked ineffectually with my pick axe at the obdurate ground of Hertfordshire - ‘Pat, you’ve got to put a face on the work’. I won’t reduce that piece of instruction to its complete architectonic significance but the practical import of it is that you must first create a decent hole with a face that you can prise away into the void that you have created.

In which Somerset Maugham meets Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

Somerset Maugham read a great deal of philosophy including Eastern Philosophy as is evident from the title of his book The Razor's Edge pub.1944 which is from the Katha Upanishad.

Arise, awake, and learn by approaching the excellent ones. The wise ones describe that path to be as impassible as a razor's edge, which when sharpened, is difficult to tread on.

(Ka.Up. I.iii.14)

The master in that book is called Sri Ganesha and no doubt may have had elements of the famous Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvanamalai in South India whom he visited in 1938. Ramana's teaching was the ancient one of atma vichara or self inquiry and it consisted of continuously asking 'who am I', analysing the answer that you come up with and thus by progressive discrimination arrive at the permanent basis of self awareness.

I am not sure how well the details of the visit are known generally but I found an account of it in a book put out by the Ashram called Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

15th.October, 1938:

Somerset Maugham, a well-known English author, was on a visit to Sri Bhagavan. He also went to see Maj. Chadwick in his room and there he suddenly became unconscious. Maj.Chadwick requested Sri Bhagavan to see him. Sri Bhagavan went into the room, took a seat and gazed on Mr.Maugham. He regained his senses and saluted Sri Bhagavan. They remained silent and sat facing each other for nearly an hour. The author attempted to ask questions but did not speak. Maj.Chadwick encouraged him to ask. Sri Bhagavan said, "All finished. Heart talk is all talk. All talk must end in silence only." They smiled and Sri Bhagavan left the room.

Spinoza's Stone

Spinoza trivia: The title of a bestselling novel taken from Ethicspublished in 1915, with no less than 3 film versions.Trevor Howard and Bette Davis were co-stars in 34, as were Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak in a '63 version. None of those 'treatments' came close to the book Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. The title of the Fourth Part of 'Ethics' is Of Human Bondage or of the Strength of the Affects. It is an excellent novel.
Maugham was a man of wide culture and perhaps it is a fancy of my own that he didn't just take the title in a quasi-ironic way and leave it at that. I imagine it amused him to use what is quite abstruse rationalism as a pattern . For instance we find at 4P.III.:

4P.3: The force by which man perseveres in existence is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes.

Philip Carey the protagonist, born with a club foot, is orphaned at the age of 9 losing both his father and mother in the same year. At this point he is taken to live with his uncle on his father's side and his aunt, a childless couple in their 50's. The uncle is a C of E. vicar in a seaside town who is at odds with the chapel folk who cater to the lower orders. We are in the tail end of the Victorian era, genteel poverty, coarse poverty and as a special treat the top of the vicar's egg. It is all beautifully rendered with simple language reflecting the consciousness of the child.
Philip is saved by the power of his imagination that is liberated by the travel books which the uncle collects.

4P.IX: If we imagine the cause of an affect to be actually present with us, that affect will be stronger than if we imagined the cause not to be present

.
He occasionally lapses under the pressure of misery into the fantasy that his mother has not died and that it all is a dream that he will wake from. The visualisation that Spinoza recommends can be neurotic denial as well as enabling. His school chum breaks a pen of his and he lies saying that it was a gift from his dying mother. Tears flow even though he knows that he bought it for 1s.4d a fortnight before.
There are many such masterful touches throughout the book. As was written:

4PXIX : According to the laws of his own nature each person necessarily desires that which he considers to be good, and avoids that which he considers to be evil.

The discrimination that comes through experience is the gyroscope that corrects the trajectory of Spinoza's stone.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. (from letter to Schaller, no.62)

In one thing though Maugham departs from the rubric that Spinoza laid out. It is possible for the deep courses of the soul to be running their own way beyond the reach of the discursive intellect. Without working it out we can arrive at a point of profound importance quite without that engagement of the conscious mind that is the ideal for Spinoza. Without Geometry or even Algebra we are there. Thus it was that Philip Carey arrived at the realisation that his faith has evanesced once the props of culture that support the Church established by Law were no longer in place.

He was surprised at himself because he ceased to believe so easily, and, not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty that he had reached to his own cleverness.

We know more than we know would seem a willful paradox but is the plain truth. For Spinoza what is reasoned out is the established truth, the other stuff is just truthy or a post hoc abduction. Everything must be brought into the light of reason to truly exist. The name given for this strain of European thought, often associated with the Enlightenment, is alienation in both senses of subreption and estranging. The problem for the novelist is to convince us of those underground streams. Like the twitches of the dowser's rods he must indicate the living water that is under the narrative.

Bellwether Jones

I take out my little hammer and I tap your knee cap and oops your leg goes up. What a surprise! Like the good preacher he is, first Bellwether Jones told us what he was going to do, then he did it, then he told us what he had just done. Bad things happened but that had nothing at all to do with him and to assert that they had is to deny agency to the perpetrators. For his next trick Jones is going to a gang infested Afro-American quarter of LA and hold up a big sign saying 'N--s are spawn of Satan and the sons of Ham' and experience at first hand the cause effect nexus. The right to free speech must be upheld at whatever cost and if Jones is a martyr to it, so be it.