The Real and the Unreal - Part II - The Reality Divide

[Guest guest]

Om Gurubhyo Namah

 

 

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 judgment about the outside

world. He calls this suspension of judgment the "transcendental

epoche" 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 epoche is brilliant, but I am not sure

if the reality-divide was satisfactorily effaced – the suspension of

judgment 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

Gottleb 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

judgments. 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.

 

_______________

 

 

With regards,

Chittaranjan

[Guest guest]

advaitin, "Chittaranjan Naik"

<chittaranjan_naik> wrote:

> Om Gurubhyo Namah

>

>

> THE REALITY DIVIDE –

 

Namaste.

 

Well, after Ken Knight's torrential downpour from the celestial sky

of the Rg Veda, we have now the start of a dizzy waterfall from the

heights of western philosophy to the gangetic plains of advaita. I

read through the whole post twice very carefully, but I must say I

am totally dazed, even though the whole thing is in the English

language, which I thought, I knew well enough!. Tell me,

Chittaranjan, should I delve into some preliminary study to continue

sitting in your class?

 

Here are some comments from an Ignoramus! The comments are in [ ...]

 

> 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.

[Till now I seem to comprehend what you are saying: but your next

sentence baffles me]

>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.

 

[Do you mean to say that the ancients of India did not ever think of

a world as a construct of the consciousness in its vyashhTi aspect?]

 

>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.

>

>

> 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.

 

[Earlier you said that the ancients did not conceive of

an "abstractly conceived outside world". So here is my first

confusion]

 

[secondly, "the Mimamsa philosophies dissolved the duality in the

resolution of the knots of the fallacy" -- is beyond my

understanding. I shall appreciate a further explanation]

 

>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.

 

[ I don't follow the last sentence above]

 

[From now on, you move into fields which are totally alien to me. I

thought by reading carefully I might understand something. But I

think I need some prerequisites. If you tell me what these

prerequisites are, I may try. Thank you for a wonderful

presentation, which is over my head!

> If we move to the Western theatre, we see a somewhat different

story

> unfold itself. ........

 

PraNAms to all advaitins.

profvk

[Guest guest]

Namaste Shri Professor VK-ji,

 

It was with deep embarassment that I read your words mentioning about

sitting in my class. I am sorry if I have given offence with my

words. I think I need to clarify a bit on what I was trying to say.

 

When I was speaking about the "outside world" by putting it in

quotes, I was referring to a certain philosophical idea which states

that for an object to exist it must be something beyond the ken of

the senses and mind. This idea has its origin in the notion that all

the attributes we can perceive of, or think about, an object are only

those things that the faculty of sensing and thinking can give to the

object. Thus the object, as it is perceived or conceptualised, is not

the object as it is in itself. Thus the object, as it is in itself,

is said to be "something" that we cannot have any idea about

whatsoever. This is what Kant called the nuomena, the "object in-

itself" as different from the seen object which is phenomena. Thus,

there is a conceptual divide that has been created by philosophy in

respect of the world - the world about which we can know nothing

about, and the world that we see. It is in this context that the

term "naive realist" has come to be applied to whoever believed that

the seen world is the real world. This divide has troubled modern and

contemporary philosophy and I do not believe that there has been a

satisfactory resolution to the problem. It is this that I meant when

I wrote "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."

 

This divide has its origin in the same roots that has given rise to

idealism. Before then, I do not think that there was such a notion of

an inconceivable "object in-itself", and it was what was seen that

was taken to be the object. That is what I meant by saying that "such

notions of duality did not trouble the ancients. Reality was then

natural; it was the world they saw and experienced and lived in." I

do not think that the ancient Indians conceived of an inconceivable

object. If my undertanding is correct, an object in traditional

Indian philsophy is always something that is commensurate with the

conception of the object. An object is that which we see as an

object. In Shankaracharya's words, it is that thing which is

differentiated in the content of knowledge as the object. Thus, the

question of an inconceivable object does not arise. It is with this

in mind that I had said that "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." In Samkhya and Yoga,

an object is an evolute of parkriti - it is that which is seen and

not something that can't be cognised. In Nyaya-Vaisesika, it is a

padartha, that which is the object of a word, and not something that

can't be conceived. In both Purva and Uttara Mimamsas, an object is

the object of consciousness, and not something that can't be

conceived.

 

The Mimamsa and Nyaya philosophers showed that there was nothing to

negate in the conception of such an "outside world" becuase it was

not a meaningful conception, for, according to the tenets of Nyaya, a

word has meaning when it has an object. Thus a word for an object,

wherein the very object that is designated by the word is said to be

inconceivable, is meaningless and reduces to what may be

termed 'vikalpa'.

 

Perhaps, I have unecessarily complicated things by bringing in this

conception from contemporary philosophy into this discussion. This

essay was written by me sometime ago in another context and I was

debating with myself whether to include it here. I thought it might

be a good idea to include it since this conception (of the "outside"

and the seen world) actually exists today. But maybe it wasn't a good

decision. Once again, my apologies if my words came across as being

arrogant.

 

Pranams,

Chittaranjan

 

 

 

advaitin, "V. Krishnamurthy" <profvk>

wrote:

> advaitin, "Chittaranjan Naik"

> <chittaranjan_naik> wrote:

> > Om Gurubhyo Namah

> >

> >

> > THE REALITY DIVIDE –

>

> Namaste.

>

> Well, after Ken Knight's torrential downpour from the celestial sky

> of the Rg Veda, we have now the start of a dizzy waterfall from the

> heights of western philosophy to the gangetic plains of advaita. I

> read through the whole post twice very carefully, but I must say I

> am totally dazed, even though the whole thing is in the English

> language, which I thought, I knew well enough!. Tell me,

> Chittaranjan, should I delve into some preliminary study to

continue

> sitting in your class?

>

> Here are some comments from an Ignoramus! The comments are in [ ...]

>

>

> > 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.

> [Till now I seem to comprehend what you are saying: but your next

> sentence baffles me]

>

> >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.

>

> [Do you mean to say that the ancients of India did not ever think

of

> a world as a construct of the consciousness in its vyashhTi aspect?]

>

>

> >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.

> >

>

> >

> > 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.

>

> [Earlier you said that the ancients did not conceive of

> an "abstractly conceived outside world". So here is my first

> confusion]

>

> [secondly, "the Mimamsa philosophies dissolved the duality in the

> resolution of the knots of the fallacy" -- is beyond my

> understanding. I shall appreciate a further explanation]

>

>

> >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.

>

> [ I don't follow the last sentence above]

>

> [From now on, you move into fields which are totally alien to me. I

> thought by reading carefully I might understand something. But I

> think I need some prerequisites. If you tell me what these

> prerequisites are, I may try. Thank you for a wonderful

> presentation, which is over my head!

>

> > If we move to the Western theatre, we see a somewhat different

> story

> > unfold itself. ........

>

> PraNAms to all advaitins.

> profvk

[Guest guest]

advaitin, "Chittaranjan Naik"

<chittaranjan_naik> wrote:

> Namaste Shri Professor VK-ji,

> > When I was speaking about the "outside world" by putting it in

> quotes, I was referring to a certain philosophical idea which

states

> that for an object to exist it must be something beyond the ken of

> the senses and mind. This idea has its origin in the notion that

all

> the attributes we can perceive of, or think about, an object are

only

> those things that the faculty of sensing and thinking can give to

the

> object. Thus the object, as it is perceived or conceptualised, is

not

> the object as it is in itself. Thus the object, as it is in

itself,

> is said to be "something" that we cannot have any idea about

> whatsoever. This is what Kant called the nuomena, the "object in-

> itself" as different from the seen object which is phenomena.

 

[This 'object-in-itself' is what is defined by 'svarUpa-lakshhaNa'

in Vedanta. I vaguely remember Radhakrishnan using the

word 'noumenon' as opposed to 'phenomenon', for explaining the

object defined by 'svarUpa-lakshhaNa', as opposed to that defined

by 'taTastha-lakshhaNa'] - VK

>Thus,

> there is a conceptual divide that has been created by philosophy

in

> respect of the world - the world about which we can know nothing

> about, and the world that we see. It is in this context that the

> term "naive realist" has come to be applied to whoever believed

that

> the seen world is the real world. This divide has troubled modern

and

> contemporary philosophy and I do not believe that there has been a

> satisfactory resolution to the problem. It is this that I meant

when

> I wrote "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."

>

> This divide has its origin in the same roots that has given rise

to

> idealism. Before then, I do not think that there was such a notion

of

> an inconceivable "object in-itself",

 

[if my suggestion of "object-in-itself" as that defined by its

svarUpa-lakshhaNa is accepted, then the 'inconceivability' does not

arise]- VK

 

>and it was what was seen that

> was taken to be the object. That is what I meant by saying

that "such

> notions of duality did not trouble the ancients. Reality was then

> natural; it was the world they saw and experienced and lived in."

I

> do not think that the ancient Indians conceived of an

inconceivable

> object. If my undertanding is correct, an object in traditional

> Indian philsophy is always something that is commensurate with the

> conception of the object. An object is that which we see as an

> object. In Shankaracharya's words, it is that thing which is

> differentiated in the content of knowledge as the object. Thus,

the

> question of an inconceivable object does not arise.

 

 

[Thank you, for a detailed explanation of your contention. I shall

continue to follow your excellent presentations] - VK

 

 

PraNAms to all advaitins.

profvk

[Guest guest]

Namaste Shri Professor VK-ji,

 

advaitin, "V. Krishnamurthy" <profvk>

wrote:

> [This 'object-in-itself' is what is defined by 'svarUpa-lakshhaNa'

> in Vedanta. I vaguely remember Radhakrishnan using the

> word 'noumenon' as opposed to 'phenomenon', for explaining the

> object defined by 'svarUpa-lakshhaNa', as opposed to that defined

> by 'taTastha-lakshhaNa'] - VK

 

I believe that Radhakrishnan is not representing Kantian philosophy

correctly if he means that "svarupa-lakshana" is the noumenal "object-

in-itself" because the noumenal in Kant is absolutely beyond

comprehension. For example, primary qualities as postulated by Locke

are totally contained in Kant's phenomena as the transcendental

categories of the analytic which include such conceptions as

substance, causality, etc., as constituents of the phenomenal things

themselves. They are constituted in the object through what he calls

the synthetical unity of apperception in consciousness. But if we go

by the meaning of the word "noumenal", which comes from the

Greek "nous", it would mean that the noumenal is something that is

not sensed but is intelligible. But this is not the way Kant uses it,

though such a meaning may be found in the phenomenology of Husserl

wherein the "noema" is the core of an object behind its sensible

attributes; but Husserl arrives at this conception only after

suspending judgment about "objects-in-themselves" through what he

calls the "transcendental reduction".

 

> [if my suggestion of "object-in-itself" as that defined by its

> svarUpa-lakshhaNa is accepted, then the 'inconceivability' does not

> arise]- VK

 

This can't be a correct representation of Kant (and the meaning

derived from Kant in later philosophy) because conceivability of

an "object-in-itself" is a contradiction in the Kantian scheme of

things i.e., it is a conflation between the phenomenal and noumenal.

Kant himself was uncomfortable with the postulate of the "thing-in-

itself", and in his second edition of "The Critique of Pure Reason"

he changed his stance on the noumenal and said that it was merely the

limits of conception. To assert anything at all about the noumenal

would be, according to Kant, an extension of the categories of the

analytic beyond its legitimate boundaries i.e, it would mean that

conception, which is a phenomenal process, would be illegitimately

extended to denote the noumenal - which it can't).

 

If I understand these terms correctly, "tatastha-lakshana" would mean

an object as it is by itself, and "swarupa-lakshana" would mean an

object in its formal attributes. In traditional Indian philosophy,

there is no difference between "tatastha-lakshana" and "swarupa-

lakshana" when the object is conceived correctly because then it is

conceived with the attributes that belong to it by virtue of its

innate nature. The two would only be different when the object is not

conceived correctly and has attributes not belonging to it - in which

case the confusion is said to be "viparyaya".

 

Pranams,

Chittaranjan