Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics

An Outline of Indian Non-Realism

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136868979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia orientale

Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition.

SECTION III

ŚRĪ HARṢA: EXISTENCE

1

Knowledge and Existence

Śrī Harṣa is the third Advaitin whose philosophy is studied in this book. The two chapters in this section explore his interpretation of Advaitic non-realism and his strategy for establishing it. Of the three Advaitins concerned, he is the one who most explicitly develops a systematic strategy meant to do nothing but subserve his non-realism. In effect, his dialectical engagement with various philosophical theories, mostly of Nyāya, itself is supposed to reveal the nature of his non-realism.

In his Khaṇḍānakhaṇḍakhādya, he develops a rigorous and extended critique of opposing schools, aiming to show that by default, Advaita, as he interprets it, is irrefutably established. While the entire book is a sustained critique of the range of philosophical topics then current in the Indian tradition,¹ the very opening section of his introduction provides a metaphilosophical expression of his Advaitic strategy. In it, Śrī Harṣa introduces his method: refute the opponent’s position and claim that one’s own view stands by default. Indeed, he argues throughout his work that the Advaitin only wishes to show that it is impossible to formulate a set position and argue directly for it: all definitions by (various) schools are impossible (sarvāṇi lakṣānanyanupapannāni).² The failure of an opponent to defend a position successfully from within his own assumptions is itself claimed to be a vindication of Advaita.

As we know, Advaita is committed to there being, ultimately, an irreducible universal state, called brahman. The world of current cognition is ultimately reducible to it, and current cognition is transcended when consciousness reverts to the brahman-state. It is commitment to this reading of the Upanisads that motivates Advaitins to argue that the world and cognition of it cannot be determinately all there is to reality. Although a world should be posited in order to explain current cognition, and so that sacred ritual and liberating knowledge cannot be dismissed as illusory, that world cannot be established as an ultimately existent and determinate reality, independent of cognition. There is then the possibility of some state of being other than the world of cognition, a state that transcends that world.

We have seen Śaṅkara argue that the non-ultimacy of the world is shown by the fact that its externality, while required as an assumption, cannot be established ultimately. Vācaspati’s analysis of error shows that, again, while the world appears to be required as the source of cognition (i.e., required in order to explain cognition), its determinacy cannot be established. Śrī Harṣa’s strategy for undercutting the realist claim that the world is ultimately external, independent and determinate is two-pronged. The epistemological point of his dialectical argument is that whatever counts for knowledge and knowledge-related activity in current cognition can be explained without recourse to a realist world. The metaphysical point is that any attempt to establish that there is such a realist world is doomed to incoherence. The epistemological aim is to show that there is no failure to explain the features of cognition by merely assuming (and thereby implying the possibility of transcending) a realist world. The metaphysical aim is to show that a realist world cannot be established; the world can be assumed to be external and independent, but it is indeterminate as to what it is independently of cognition. Together, the two prongs are supposed to do all that philosophy can do in Advaita: remove all intellectual impediments to transcendence, even if that transcendence itself is not a matter of philosophical intellection.

Both of Śrī Harṣa’s points are made, in a highly general way, in the introduction of his philosophical work. Subsequently, his analysis of various aspects of philosophy – the pramāṇa framework, perception, inference, modes of reasoning, rules of logic, etc. – are specific exemplifications of the general points made in the introduction of the Khādya. This chapter focuses on the epistemological point, the next on the metaphysical one.

The central argument with which we are concerned in this chapter is that epistemic activity – the search for and attainment of knowledge – in current or ordinary cognition can be sustained and explained without any commitment to a realist world that is independent of cognition. The next chapter will look at Śrī Harṣa’s critique of the realist conception of the world.

The Nyāya opponent, then, holds that the world is real according to his definition of it. He argues that the cause of our cognitions, the means of proper cognition (perception, inference and the like), and the basis on which our claims to know are validated or invalidated (judged as correct or erroneous) are all likewise real (or ‘existent’). In other words, if the world is existent in the Nyāya way (and we will examine that shortly), then the pramāṇas (i.e., the means and system by which knowledge is attained) are also existent in this way. If so, then all debate, all inquiry, and in general, all epistemic activity, can proceed only if the pramāṇas exist, and are proven to exist in this way. The world of systematic objects (prameya, in this context) is needed for systematic knowledge (pramā), for which systematic means of validation (pramāṇa) of knowledge-claims are required. Without such a system of validation, no debate on metaphysical issues is possible, no inquiry can be conducted, and ordinary cognitive life will cease.

Śrī Harṣa argues against this position. He contends that

1)the world and the pramāṇas cannot be established in the ontologically significant way required by Nyāya;

2)inquiry/debate can proceed merely on the assumption that the pramāṇas exist in the required way; and

3)nothing further can be established than the conclusion that, since the pramāṇas best explain such features and capacities of cognition as inquiry and debate, they can legitimately be assumed to work, even though they are not established as Nyāya requires them to be.

One can see here all the elements of the essential Advaitic notions at work. In 1), he challenges Nyāya realism. In 2) he abides by the Advaitic claim that it is perfectly coherent nonetheless to continue epistemic activity. In 3) he upholds the Advaitic view, so dear to him, that the failure to establish determinately the nature of a real and existent world itself points to the fact that it is indeterminate as to what this world is in metaphysical terms.

The specific debate here is over the Nyāya claim that the pramāṇa system of validation (and thus the world of objects extrinsic to the subject, about which knowledge-claims are made and which claims the pramāṇas systematically regulate) must ‘exist’ in some metaphysically significant way if there is to be any debate about the possiblity of knowledge. Śrī Harṣa attempts to refute this claim by showing that it is perfectly viable to continue debate with just the assumption that there exists such a system. He argues that that assumption is required both because current epistemic activity should not be ruled out (because the Advaitin does not want to say that all empirical activity is illegitimate as such) and because the pramāṇa system cannot deliver what Nyāya demands of it. What remains is the Advaitic view of a provisionally accepted system for attaining knowledge, wherein the absence of any determinate proof of its existence alerts us to the possibility that it may not be ultimately real after all.

1 Sattā and Existence

First, a central point of interpretation must be made. There is a special sense in which ‘exists’ is used in this debate, not in the metaphysically neutral way as the value taken by a quantified entity, but in a more demanding sense. The general view is that sat means ‘exists’, that sattā is the quality that marks an existent. It is not, however, exactly like the use of ‘exists’ in the contemporary Western tradition. The notion of sattā revolves on the claim that entities are objects of cognition only because their properties are the locus of some general feature. In our grasp of them in terms of characterisation and description, we may use concepts (kalpanā) in the form of categories etc., where these characterisations are dependent on intellectual formulations (buddbyapekśam).³ It is, however, by virtue of something that these objects are in common that they are objects of cognition. This common state is possession of ‘Existence’ (sattā).⁴ In other words, sattā (i.e., being an existent) is something located in all ‘objects’ which are not entities dependent for their intrinsic identity (svalakṣaṇa) on delineating conceptions of them. The notion of a general concept, or as some prefer, a universal, called sattā sāmānya (the general category of Existence) will come to this. It is in order to signpost the specific nature of this notion, despite its many similarities with the Western philosophical use of ‘existence’ (with which there will be some comparison in the next chapter), I will translate sattā as ‘Existence’. The next chapter will explore in much greater detail the content of the realist doctrine of Existence or sattā and Śrī Harṣa’s refutation of the claims for its metaphysical purpose.

The discussion will proceed with the by now familiar use of the concepts of ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’. In order to keep the implications of these terms in mind, here is another attempt to define them:

• Independence is the condition under which the causal account of an element x’s nature does not require Ψ in the causal complex; in that case, χ is independent of Ψ
• Dependence is the condition under which Ψ occupies a place in the account of the causal complex which explains x’s nature; then % is dependent on Ψ.

With these definitions in mind, we may say these things:

1)Something being sat will mean it is not dependent on cognitive grasp for it to possess qualities that themselves are sat; so the entity and those qualities will be what they are without subjective intention.

2)There is no instance of cognition of any entity that is sat at any time that, if correct of it at that indexed point, is sublated by judgment from cognition at any other indexed point. Sublation (bādhaka) in this context means the occurrence of a later cognition judged to be true whose truth will render invalid the claim consequent on the former cognition.⁵

3)The contention of Nyāya is that intentional objects that are dependent on cognitive capacity are derived from those objects which are characterized as sat.⁶’⁷

4)In giving the characteristics (lakṣaṇa) of any object, if it is held not to be a cognitive construct, but an object as under 1) and 2), it is only on the presupposition that it is the locus of sat that we describe it, or assert or deny predicates of it.⁸

Keeping these in mind, I shall use satta to talk of a world constituted by entities whose nature is independent of reference to the content of cognition, and upon whose nature the capacity to cognise is dependent. In the terminology of this study of Śrī Harṣa, but drawing on our discussions of Śaṅkara and Vācaspati, the following definition should be kept in mind in this chapter and the next.

Existence = A world external to cognition, which forms a determinate totality of objects independently of cognition of it.

Śrī Harṣa rejects this conception of the world, and rejects it th...