The 'Advaita' philosophy that is taught today (almost always) is not
Adi Shankara's philosophy but is (the demon) Maniman's philosophy.
Hereinbelow and hereinafter 'Lisa Loves Krshna' follows an essay
called 'The Beleaguered Reality' aka 'The Reality Divide - A
Historical Hermeneutic'
--- In sathyasaibaba2@
<krshna78@..
>
> CHitta, and all,
>
> WHen you have time, post those messages of yours IN
> adwaitin group and elsw where about Sutruas and Mdhas
> Dwaitha Philosophy,
THE REALITY DIVIDE - A HISTORICAL HERMENEUTIC
What is it that governs the sense of reality given to a thing? To be
a realist in the modern sense, one has to assert the existence of
the world independently of the perceiver. What divides the modern
idealist from the modern realist is a certain dichotomy associated
with the meaning of the word "reality": the dichotomy of
the "outside world" and the "observed world". Today, anybody who
claims that the seen world is the real world is liable to be termed
a naïve realist. It is not surprising therefore that contemporary
cognitive science talks about two worlds, the world of qualia-filled
consciousness, and the world of independently subsisting entities.
In contrast to this duality, there is of course the duality, or
plurality, that is seen in the observed world itself. What is in
focus here is not this observed duality, but the more vexed duality
that has its dividing line on the horizons of our perceptual
ability. It is this duality, or reality-divide, that seems to compel
most Advaitins to call the experiential world an illusion because
the experienced world is only "a product" of consciousness like a
dream, in contrast to the other conceived reality of an "outside
world" that cannot possibly exist. But such notions of duality did
not trouble the ancients. Reality was then natural; it was the world
they saw and experienced and lived in. Today when we look at the
past through the nets of modern theoretical constructs, this
unquestioning simplicity is often taken to be a sign of their
nascent bicameral mind.
The theme of this post is the reality-divide. It is an attempt to
recover the meaning of reality by tracing the origins of the reality-
divide and following the locus of its movement through the history
of human thought. This is not meant to be an ontological quest for
the meaning of Being, nor is it an attempt to uncover the meaning of
reality as used in Advaita, but is rather a historical hermeneutic
that attempts to uncover the roots of a certain conception of
reality that comes to us through modern schooling.
In a certain sense, the first signs of the reality-divide arose in
the idealism of Buddhist philosophy, a doctrine that first creates
the duality of the "outside world" and "inside world" only to negate
the "outside world" as being an impossibility, and then adopts the
one remaining world, that of idealism. Thus the duality rose and
fell, but it left its impact on the Buddhist philosopher in a
peculiar manner. The remaining world was not the same world anymore
that he had perceived earlier. It remained abstracted of the
physicality of the everyday world: metaphorically speaking, it had
the character of a transparent nothingness, of forms suspended in
the void. It was the remaining pole of an artefacted duality after
the discarding of the other pole. Logically, when one of the poles
of an artificially constructed duality falls, the entire duality
collapses, including both the opposing poles of the duality. The
conception of the world should have returned to the pre-meditated
natural world without the taint of the artificial construct. But the
Buddhists adhered to the abstracted world of idealism. It was, I
think, the Mimamsa Philosophers that dissolved the sophistry of this
artificial duality and reverted back to the only world that is
logically meaningful and possible - the world that we see and
experience. The Mimamsa Philosophies did not negate the abstractly
conceived "outside world", but dissolved the duality in the
resolution of the knots of the fallacy. This dualism, or reality-
divide, has never occurred again as a thematic in Indian Philosophy,
not even in the dualistic Nyaya-Vaisesika and the Dwaita
Philosophies. The dualism that exists in Indian Philosophy is
dualism of another kind, not of the uncognisable "outside world" and
the "seen world". There are no inconceivable objects in all the six
schools.
If we move to the Western theatre, we see a somewhat different story
unfold itself. The seeds of the reality-sundering may be detected in
Descartes' famous doubt about the existence of the world. The world
almost divides into two, but stops short of the split as Descartes
reverts back to the comfort of medieval scholasticism. It was the
philosophical knife of John Locke that divided the world into two
realities - the world of secondary qualities that we perceive, and
the world of primary qualities that lie beyond our senses in self-
subsisting objects. But Locke's division was incoherent and
ambivalent. Locke assumed that primary qualities comprised
properties such as density and extension; he was unable to see that
these were nothing more than categories like those of the primary
qualities. But where Locke was ambivalent, Bishop Berkeley was
ruthless. He demolished, as it were, the world of independently
existing objects. Western Philosophy had arrived on the stage of
idealism. Ever since then, it has been unable to cast off the yoke
of this reality- severance even in its most idealistic non-dualistic
philosophies. It is necessary to emphasise here that even in the
conception of idealism, there is the notion of the independent
world - a world that it goes about to deny. This is the schism. As
long as this notion remains, the world has lost something of its
intrinsic character and remains as one pole of a tensional duality
that it has artificially constructed. In the mind of the
philosopher, the world of idealism remains an ideated island
sequestered from the imaged "outside world". It is this that modern
and contemporary Philosophy has not been able to resolve
satisfactorily and which has prevented it from reverting back to the
only natural world that we see and experience and live in. The
rubric of this divide has continued through British Empiricism,
German Idealism, American Pragmatism, Continental Existentialism,
and it continues today to colour the speculations of contemporary
science.
Yet, there have been occasions when modern philosophy seemed on the
verge of collapsing the divide. Edmund Husserl was perhaps the
genius that almost succeeded in resolving this riddle where others
had failed. He begins his philosophy on the note that it is
fruitless to philosophise about the "outside world". As the first
step to fruitful philosophy, he calls for a suspension of judgement
about the outside world. He calls this suspension of judgement
the "transcendental epoch" or the "transcendental reduction". The
world and its objects are primarily the forms of consciousness, and
we must investigate it through an eidetic investigation of objects
as objects of consciousness. In Husserl's Phenomenology,
consciousness is an intentional consciousness and objects are
objects of the intending consciousness. Thus arose the call of "back
to the objects themselves". If we must understand objects, then we
must find fulfilment of the meanings invested in those objects by
the meaning- conferring acts of the intending consciousness. It is
this ground prepared by Husserlian phenomenology that has influenced
most of existentialism, from Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, to
Jean Paul Sartre and others. Husserl's epoch is brilliant, but I am
not sure if the reality-divide was satisfactorily effaced - the
suspension of judgement in phenomenology fails to quell the tides of
unrest within the rational man. Yet Husserl was a beacon of light in
the dark abyss of the reality-divide. It was his intention to
develop a scientific method to ground philosophy and science in a
transcendental reason. But the Husserlian method was too abstruse
for a scientific community where pragmatic compulsions to
postulate "theories that work" more often than not overruled
adventures into transcendental methods.
In some respects, it was Wittgenstein that came closest to resolving
the reality-divide. Wittgenstein was nurtured in the field sown by
Gottlieb Frege, the philosopher who had sought to develop an ideal
language to avoid the pitfalls of language-misuse. Frege had said
that idealist philosophers do not use language the way it should be
used when they say that the world doesn't exist. Frege
differentiated thinking from the truth-assertion of what is thought.
Thus sentences become propositions, and the assertions of their
truth, the truth judgements. He developed a framework of symbolic
logic in which proper nouns are the referents that point to objects
in the world, and where abstract nouns are classes under which
objects fall. Frege's system was the formal system of a new modern
logic. The germ of this idea grew, in Wittgenstein, into a full-
bodied philosophy of language in which language and the world are
intimately connected to each other. The limits of the world are the
limits of language. Language speaks the world, as it were. The
reality-divide seemed to have collapsed. Wittgenstein said that
language cannot point to its own internal structure; that the
structure is mirrored in language. Therefore, metaphysics, which
purports to speak about structures, begins when "language goes on
holiday". The last pages of his Tractatus contain the following
words: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.
They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical". Few
understood Wittgenstein and fewer still understood the ramifications
of his philosophy. The shadow of the reality-divide continued to
haunt the fertile fields of philosophy.
Why does this reality-divide not appear as a theme in Indian
Philosophy? I think the answer lies in the philosophical method of
Nyaya, which was the common platform for philosophical debate in
India. At its foundations, Nyaya is a philosophy of logos; it is
tuned to the way language operates. The "outside world" cannot
appear in its vocabulary because the other side of the reality-
divide reduces to an absence of a referent. It does not remain a
denotative symbol, but reduces to a meaningless warp in the use of
language. Thus, reality remains as the world that we see and
experience. Yet, idealism did arise in later Advaita. The reality-
divide may have been absent as a theme, but an
unarticulated "parallel universe" lurked behind the language of the
illusory world. Shankaracharya had already demonstrated the fallacy
of "objects that only appeared to be objects" in his arguments
against the Vijnanavadins, but somehow the illusory-world seems to
have made a re-appearance. I believe it has something to do with the
conflation between the descriptive and the prescriptive aspects of
Advaita.
What comes to us today is not so much from the conceptions of
philosophy, but predominantly from those of science. Science has
borrowed many of its concepts from philosophy: the atomic theory
came from the speculations of the Epicureans; the belief that all
phenomena can be explained through natural causes can be traced to
Lucretius and Bacon and to the further impetus it received through
the demise of Scholastic philosophy after Descartes; the conception
of space as a relation between mass-points (special theory of
relativity) had its origins in Leibniz. All these conceptions, and
many more, have come from philosophy. Yet, science is not
metaphysics, it is physics, and it has never examined its own
conceptions with philosophical clarity. Its approach is positivist
and is articulated in the positivism of August Comte, who said that
human progress is governed by three stages of development: the
intuitive stage of religion, the speculative stage of philosophy,
and the rational empirical stage of science. Ironically, it was a
brand of positivists called the Logical Positivists that tried to
bring to science, in the early years of the twentieth-century, the
analytical methods of philosophy. The story of Logical Positivism is
too long to be told here, but its attempt to establish
a "verifiability criteria" for the propositions of science turned
out to be a failure, and with this setback the movement slowly came
to an end. As a result, the gulf between science and philosophy
remains to be bridged. The reality-divide is present in the
theoretical formulations of science as an unarticulated implicit
premise. Science does not have a clearly formulated conception of
reality, but operates in a loose framework of a kind of Lockean
duality. The reality-divide continues to lurk beneath our
educational and pedagogical systems, and we are unconsciously
schooled in its ways of thinking.
The metaphysics of illusion is fraught with danger. Yet we must
admit that "illusion" has its use. The vision of the world as
illusion brings home the truth that the world is not independent of
the perceiving consciousness. It is the insight of an epiphany, a
point of spiralling into the numinous ground of Self. But as a
metaphysical description, I believe there is a need to recover the
meaning of reality from the modern phantom of the reality-divide. If
the world is real, it does not mean that the world is independent of
consciousness. It merely means that we employ the natural locution
that language has given us. The reality-divide makes two realities
out of one: one harder than it can possibly be, and the other softer
than the ether of vacuity. It is time we went back to the reality
that we see and experience, the healthy and lusty reality that is
joyful and painful, that stretches from the abyss of darkness in the
hidden recesses of the mind to the exuberance of life bursting forth
from the virgin fields of earth. She is the Reality encompassing the
world of the mortals and the worlds of the immortals. She is the
Great Mother, the eternal consort of the Lord.
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment