Indian and Intercultural Philosophy

Personhood, Consciousness, and Causality

Douglas L. Berger

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350174191
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Filosofía
• Sous-sujet: Filosofía oriental

For over twenty years Douglas Berger has advanced research and reflection on Indian philosophical traditions from both classical and cross-cultural perspectives. This volume reveals the extent of his contribution by bringing together his perspectives on these classical Indian philosophies and placing them in conversation with Confucian, Chinese Buddhist and medieval Indian Sufi traditions. Delving into debates between Nyaya and Buddhist philosophers on consciousness and identity, the nature of Sankara's theory of the self, the precise character of Nagarjuna's idea of emptiness, and the relationship between awareness and embodiment in the broad spectrum of Indian thought, chapters exhibit Berger's unusually broad range of expertise. They connect Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts with classical Indian theories of ethics and consciousness, contrast the ideas of seminal European thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida from prevailing themes in Buddhism, and shed light on the spiritual and political dimensions of the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh's immersion into Vedantic thought. Always approaching the arguments from an intercultural perspective, Berger shows how much relevance and resonance classical Indian thought has with ancient Confucian views of ethics, Chinese Buddhist depictions of consciousness and medieval Mughal conceptions of divinity. The result is a volume celebrating the rigor, vitality and intercultural resonance of India's rich philosophical heritage.

Part I

Brāhmiṇical Traditions

1

Shedding Light on the Matter

Śaṅkara’s Dualistic Theory of Cognition

It remains common in contemporary scholarship on the eighth-century Śaṅkarācarya to brand him as the seminal shaper of “non-dualistic” Vedānta, as “non-dualism” remains the preferred translation for Advaita. As Eliot Deutsch proclaimed in the first modern English-language seminal treatment, Śaṅkara’s philosophy of the self was in all respects dedicated to establishing the “oneness of reality” and human existence (1973: 47). Modern advocates of Advaita have continued to make this case. Bina Gupta, in her survey of classical and modern construals of Advaita, holds that the “non-dualism” of the school consists in its commitment to the conclusion that, because consciousness is the locus of material projections as well as their false object, “being and consciousness are one” (2003: 115). That the entire metaphysical scheme of Śaṅkara’s system has not been convincing either to rival classical schools of Vedānta or to many modern thinkers is, given the radicality of this supposed “non-dualism,” not surprising. None of the early centuries of Advaita commentators, from Padmapāda to Vācaspati to Madhusudana Sarasvati, according to J. N. Mohanty, ever successfully explained how a supposedly changeless ātman, which never performs any actions, could objectify itself into finite persons (1993a: 73). The hard nub of Advaita Vedānta then presumably rests on its ability to explain how a completely unitary and static self could ever have become the basis (āśraya) for a world of fleeting material transformations and discreet cognitions owned by heterogeneous jīva-s.

In his highly provocative and brilliant collection of essays released in 1991 entitled Indian Philosophy: A Counter-Perspective, Daya Krishna included a brief but incisive paper hypothesizing that Śaṅkara’s Advaita, in the way it formulated the fundamental problem of mistaking a unitary spiritual self for an empirical ego, took a Sāṃkhya philosophical departure from the very start. That is to say, when, in the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, Śaṅkara claims that the fundamental error of all consciousness is adhyāsa, the “displacement” of empirical qualities on a spiritual subjectivity, he is describing a process with which a Sāṃkhya dualist would be in full agreement. This creates a dilemma, for if this is the case, Śaṅkara is basing a non-dualistic perspective on a dualistic distinction. Ultimately, Krishna argues, this problem is overcome by Śaṅkara, because in defining the ātman as ultimately completely devoid of difference, he can, contrary to Sāṃkhya, deny all metaphysical identity and difference and be a true Advaitin (1991b: 161).

I believe, however, that Krishna’s brilliant diagnosis of Śaṅkara’s dualistic formulation of adhyāsa has greater implications than he was willing to countenance. What we have in Śaṅkara’s system, I contend, is not an overarching metaphysical “non-dualism” at all. On the contrary, Śaṅkara constructs a worldview according to which a distinctly Sāṃkhya dualism continues to obtain between the eternally pure and homogeneous self and ever-changing, transforming, and finite matter. The only estimable philosophical difference between Advaita and Sāṃkhya lies in the fact that, for the latter, there are multiple and individuated spiritual selves while, for the former, there is only one transcendental self in all beings. However, for Śaṅkara, there is still a persisting difference between self and material existence. And this can be seen not only in the way Śaṅkara formulates adhyāsa, but in how he describes the perceptual and cognitive processes as well. What Advaita then really denotes is the fact that the singular spiritual ātman is not two things, is not both transcendental self and bodily ego. If Śaṅkara’s Advaita is a monism, it is a monism of the self alone, and not a monism that envelopes all beings. This depiction of Advaita does not in any way solve the philosophical conundrum of how such a unitary self can be related to the world of difference and change; it only clarifies what the distinction of Advaita is describing for Śaṅkara. I will in this brief chapter illustrate why I take this implication to be the case. I will do so first by rehearsing and supplementing a few of Daya Krishna’s arguments, and then add a few of my own.

Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Brahmasūtra begins with the assertion that the “notion of this” (asmadpratyaya) and the “notion of the other” (yuṣmadpratyaya) are as different from one another as light is from darkness. By the former term, Krishna rightly points out, Śaṅkara clearly means the unitary and eternally pure spiritual self (ātman), while by the latter he means both all material plurality and relation and all distinctions between individuated egos (1991a: 157–8). Therefore, to attribute the features of the latter, physical, changeable, and heterogeneous, onto the former is a special Advaitic species of adhyāsa. Often translated as “superimposition” or “projection,” adhyāsa really means to place (as) one thing in the locus (adhi) of another thing. This process of misattribution, according to Śaṅkara, enables us both to have individuated awareness, in the form of continuous ego-identities, and to be subjects of knowledge. When we identify our continuous selves with the body and all its specific distinctions, activities, and dispositions, as in “I am short,” “I am old,” “I am a teacher,” “I love my home,” and so on, we wrongly locate bodily, causal, and psychological habits upon the actual source of our continuous self-awareness, the spiritual self. Similarly, when we undergo the cognitions “I see this,” “I taste this,” “I infer this,” and “I remember this,” or even “I do not know this” or “I don’t recall this,” we take specific and li mited cognitive states that are brought about by constrained and contingent circumstances and locate them in the ever-unchanging and tranquil ātman.

This procedure is further described by Śaṅkara as adhyāropa apavādanyāya, or the logic (nyāya) of invoking an exception (apavāda) for a misplaced form (adhyāropa). In normal circumstances, it is simply wrong for us to mis-predicate a feature to a substance to which it does not belong, taking something to be a snake because it is long and winding when it is actually a rope, for example. But in the case of our lived and embodied experience, we cognitively “invoke an exception” (apavāda) for the error of projecting empirical forms unto pure subjectivity, because if we didn’t, we could not live active and conscious worldly lives. There is then a pragmatic sort of logic (nyāya) to the “fundamental incomprehension” (mūlāvidya) of reifying our spiritual selves, since that is how we can become individual persons (jīva-s). Here, Krishna quite correctly observes, despite the metaphysical disagreement between Advaita and Sāṃkhya on whether there is one spiritual self or many, the way that Śaṅkara has described the process of mistaking spirit for matter “is pure and unmitigated Sāṃkhya doctrine” (1991a: 158). After all, the Sāṃkhya philosopher would and does offer precisely this description of our everyday misidentification of the spirit (puruṣa) with the primordial materiality (prakṛti) of the body. Śaṅkara has then, according to Krishna, launched his presumably non-dualistic Vedānta with an argument that can, as such, easily be accepted by an unabashed dualist (1991a: 160).

We should dwell upon this on a more basic level for a moment, just to make what is being presently discussed clear. A standard form of “non-dualism,” which might otherwise be characterized as a “monism,” would hold that all things, in some fundamental respect, have the same nature. If all things in the world, no matter how different they may be in many respects, nonetheless share a more fundamental commonality among them, then at least in that respect, they are “one” in exhibiting that fundamental feature. This is of course how the mahāvākya or “great pronouncement” of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad is often understood. In that text, Uddālaka teaches his son Śvetaketu that, since the existence (sat) of all things lies in a uniformly invisible source, Śvetaketu should consider himself to be the same in essence with all things. That is the meaning of the formula “tat tvam asi” (“that is you”). But this conventional interpretation of tat tvam asi was not held by Śaṅkara. Instead, Śaṅkara holds that there is an irreducible distinction, and not a reducible unity, between ātman and the material world. And so, for Śaṅkara, the “great pronouncement” tat tvam asi identifies the source of the embodied person’s consciousness, and not their separate material existence, with ātman. For a metaphysical non-dualist, then, distinguishing between the self and the world is misguided, while for Śaṅkara, it is the identification of self with world that is the great root of all error.

Krishna goes on to argue, however, that Śaṅkara manages to push this Sāṃkhya premise of his argument toward a genuinely Advaita conclusion. Krishna contends that Śaṅkara holds normal states of conventional cognitive truth to be in the ultimate sense just as erroneous as states of conventional cognitive error. This is so because both wrongly objectify the ātman, and enmesh it with all its differentiation. But this forced identity in both empirical error and empirical truth is always denied in his Advaita (Krishna 1991: 160–2). It is, therefore, not as if Śaṅkara ever really believed that empirical qualities and transformations were real features of existence that were being projected by adhyāsa onto a transcendental self, but instead, empirical features of existence are all ultimately illusory to begin with. Because Śaṅkara, unlike Sāṃkhya philosophers, does not believe that prakṛti or material existence is ultimately real, he can rightly claim a non-dualistic stance. However, even here, according to Krishna, we must be precise about what non-dualism means for Śaṅkara. “It is not an answer to the question of whether reality is one or many. It is an assertion that the real is the realm where . . . duality . . . does not apply” (Krishna 1991: 161). But is this the case? Do Śaṅkara’s frameworks for cognition in general and epistemology in particular enable him to reclaim non-dualist ground after having initiated his philosophical project with a dualistically formulated problem? It does not, as we shall now learn, seem so. Indeed, Daya Krishna let Śaṅkara off the hook too easily.

According to Śaṅkara, the living body has the standard Indian philosophical compliment of five external sense organs and the “inner instrument” (antaḥkaraṇa) of mental states. While later Advaitins like Vidyāraṇya tried to erect subtle arguments denying that these sense organs were physical or directly causal, there is no evidence from Śaṅkara’s corpus that he conceived of them in any such subtle ways (Mayeda 1992: 29–30). Śaṅkara describes the senses as going out from the body in the direction of external objects (bahirmukha), and notions (pratyaya) of those external objects are brought about in the antaḥkaraṇa by those external forms (bāhyākāranimittatva) (Mayeda 1992: 35). Now, it is certainly the case for Śaṅkara, as it was for all Brāhmiṇical systems, that this process of outer and inner sensation was not sufficient for consciousness, since material processes and interactions were for these thinkers by definition unconscious. Only the ātman, for Śaṅkara, is cognitively luminous (prakāśa), and it is the self’s luminosity that makes the external forms and internal sensa tions take a false coupled appearance (ābhāsa), manifesting themselves as the grasped (grāhya) and grasper (grāhakā) in our experience. And, again, later Advaitins would continue to stress that both the forms of things and the cognitive luminosity of the self were only experienced together internally, in the illuminated space of the “inner instrument,” and so we should not think of perception proper as involving external contact (Mayeda 1992: 34). However, we should not let all of the special pleading of Advaita authors and commentators distract us from details of the perceptual process as they describe it. In order for us to be conscious, we need the prakāśatva of ātman, surely. But in order for ātman to be conscious of anything else, it must “light up” the antaḥkaraṇa, and in order for this “inner instrument” to form “notions” of external or internal features, it must be stimulated by external or internal senses which are in contact with their objects. No dreams, no memories, no perceptions, and no sensations will be experienced without physiological or physical activities taking place. The “inner instrument” is but a locus where spirit and matter must come together in order for us to have embodied experiences. And, if Śaṅkara is to be believed, all the causality involved in these processes must come from the side of the physical and physiological, for nothing whatsoever is caused or brought about by the self.

The requirements that both spiritual luminosity and physical causality are necessary in order to give rise to individuated and embodied experiences are, then, held very much in common by Sāṃkhya and Advaita. And the details of their fundamental agreements go farther still. Because his cosmology insulates brahman from all causal interactions as well, Śaṅkara must posit the existence of an “unevolved name-and-form” (avyākṛte nāmarūpe) from which material nature (prakṛti) arises. And because Śaṅkara provides us with no explanation of his mere claim that “unevolved name-and-form” itself evolved from brahman, his cosmology differs from the Sāṃkhya dualism between spirit and nature only in minor detail (Mayeda 1992: 22). On top of this, Śaṅkara’s portrayal of the way the “inner instrument” (antaḥakaraṇa) is first illuminated by ātman and then reflects back to ātman a false appearance of its own subjective agency corresponds very closely with descriptions given of the buddhi in late Sāṃkhya commentaries (Rukmani 1988: 367–76). The unavoidable need for both spirit and matter in explaining cosmic evolution and human cognition in Śaṅkara’s Advaita perpetuates, and does not negate, its dualistic formulation of adhyāsa.

This feature also applies to Śaṅkara’s technical epistemology. It is here where Krishna believed Śaṅkara extricated himself from the dualistic implications of his other ideas because, ultimately, he held physical and differentiated things to be māyā, cognitive “magic.” But in fact, Śaṅkara was not quite so categorical about the ontological status of material objects. It is true that he glosses the māyā of the Upaniṣads with the more technical term avidyā or “incomprehension.” But close attention must be paid to how he writes about the latter. It is assuredly the case that Śaṅkara does not believe the paramount truth (paramārthasatya) of the identity between brahman and ātman can be gleaned from any of the widely recognized “means of knowledge” (pramāṇa-s) of the philosophers, but only through scripture and direct insight. However, this by no means entails that the “means of knowledge” should simply be ignored. In fact, Śaṅkara is not hesitant to assert that the “means of knowledge,” such as perception, inference, and testimony, are directed toward materially existing objects (yathābhūtaviśaya) and are based on externally existent phenomena (vastutantra) (Mayeda 1992: 47). In addition to this, it is crucial to keep in mind how Śaṅkara describes the ontological status of external objects. They are not, he tells us, illusory or false, but instead are anirvacanīya, or “incapable of articulation,” such that we cannot determine their ontological status with any verbal precision. In one sense, we cannot say, given Śaṅkara’s lofty standards, that empirical things in the world have existence (sat), since they are limited in spatial extension and temporal duration and their depr...