Non-duality in the Western tradition - 1

[Guest guest]

Namaste,

 

Some recent postings about Descartes have reminded me of two papers

by Professor Stephen R.L. Clark (Liverpool University, Philosophy

Department) about non-dualism in the European tradition.

 

The first of these papers is called 'Descartes' Debt to Augustine'

(published in Michael McGhee, ed., Philosophy, Religion and the

Spiritual Life, Cambridge University Press 1992). This first paper

describes how Descartes' thought is founded in an old investigation

of non-dual truth, whose records go back to the early Christian

Saint Augustine (5th century BCE) and further back to Plotinus (3rd

century BCE) and the Ancient Greeks (going back to Parmenides in the

early 5th century BCE).

 

The second paper is 'How Many Selves Make Me?' (published in David

Cockburn, ed., Human Beings, Cambridge University Press 1991). This

second paper focuses upon the Ancient Greek concept of a purely

witnessing consciousness called 'Nous' and how that pure witness

leads to a non-dual self which is the same for everyone.

 

I think that extracts from these papers may be of interest to

Advaitins of the Shankara tradition, but the extracts are too long

to be given in a single posting. So this posting will present an

extract from the first paper, together with a subsequent comment.

And an extract from the second paper will be presented similarly in

a further posting.

 

 

Descartes' Debt to Augustine

----------------------------

 

.... we do not need to go to distant lands or cultures to discover

thinkers strongly inclined to doubt the seriousness or the reality

of our everyday existence and still devoted to the pursuit of

truth.... our own Western tradition should have revealed as much to

us. 'Really we know nothing, for truth is in the depths' [Democritos

68 B 117]. The world of our everyday experience, structured as it is

by goals and projects of an illusory kind, does not provide us with

a sure foundation. We are like children building sand-castles to be

washed away [Gregory of Nyssa], or dreamers. 'For those who've woken

up there is one common world; each sleeper's turned aside to a

private one' [Heracleitos 22 B 89] -- no less private and delusory

because imagined to be shared with others of our greedy, proud and

frightened sort.

 

And what solution can be found? 'We are to stop our ears and convert

our vision and our other senses inwards upon the Self' [Maximus

11.10b]. That is why, so Philo of Alexandria tells us, the High

Priest must strip off the soul's tunic of opinion and imagery to

enter the Holy of Holies (Legum Allegoriae 2.56). This was

Descartes' project, and his hope, explicitly, was that he might

thereby secure as knowledge what piety already had endorsed....

 

What, on my account, did Descartes argue?

 

(a) The unexamined world we casually inhabit, of lords, priests and

commoners, pets and pests and prey and creepy-crawly things, the

world of fame and fortune, triumph and adversity, is of the nature

of a dream. Nothing that we casually believe, not even the

deliverances of contemporary science or contemporary piety, is

self-evidently true. Our confidence in them, so long as it rests on

unexamined assumptions, is dreamlike in its intensity.

 

(b) Driving himself downward to his foundations, Descartes concluded

that the very act of doubting all things dubitable revealed a Self.

The revelation was, so to speak, an existential one, rather than the

conclusion of a formal argument. It was not so much that Descartes

(or Augustine) identified a certain falsehood in the thought that

there was no thought, and trusted to the thesis that the thoughts

required a thinker, but that wondering woke him up.

 

"Let the mind know itself and not seek itself as if it were absent;

let it fix the attention of its will, by which it formerly wandered

over many things, upon itself, and think of itself. So it will see

that there never was a time when it did not love itself, and never a

time when it did not know itself. [Augustine, The Trinity, 10.8,11]"

 

That [truly] waking self was not self-evidently identical with

Descartes: its being lay in thinking (or as a later, Irish,

Cartesian [berkeley] said, in perceiving, willing, acting). It must

always know itself; 'where could my heart flee from my heart? Where

could I flee from my own self? [Augustine, Confessions 4.7]'...

 

© The Self revealed is not identical with anything observable, and

so is incorporeal. We recognize ourselves as being, not by noticing

something that might actually or conceivably be absent, something

that is -- as it were -- 'reflected' in the inner eye, but 'really'.

'The known I is simply identical with the and equal to the knowing

mind itself. [F.M. Sladecsek, on Augustine]' To suppose otherwise --

to think that we know only what is 'reflected' as an image in our

sensorium would deny us any chance of knowing ourselves to be such a

spiritual mirror. Accordingly, I must suppose that I know myself

without having, or needing, any 'idea' that is identically me. Since

the mind does know itself, and does so in a way that no corporeal

entity could, it cannot be a body.

 

(d) Having discovered the Self, or his self, must the Cartesian be

doomed to solipsism [the position that only the personal self is

known to exist]? That has been one result, no doubt, and one

sometimes blamed on Augustine, 'whose interest was not in the cosmos

but in psychological introspection and the question of personal

guilt and salvation. He, more than any other Western figure,

influenced the Christian West to be individualistic' [M. Fox, The

Coming of the Cosmic Christ]. I think the charge unjust. At the

least, though perhaps it was true of Descartes, as it was of

Berkeley and the young Newman, that there were for him 'two and two

only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, [him]self and

[his] Creator' [J.J. Newman, in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, M.J. Svaglic

(ed.)]. The very act of doubting revealed the Self as sometimes, or

as possibly, mistaken.

 

What Descartes realized was that this revealed a truth: namely, that

there was indeed a Truth by which his thought was measured. Maybe

nothing that I ordinarily suppose is true: so be it, but in that

case there is still a Truth, unknown to me, by comparison with which

my thought is false. My thought is imperfect, shifting, possibly

self-contradictory, finite: but it is all these things because there

is a perfect, unchangeable, coherent, infinite reality, *and I

already know that it is so*.

 

There could be no doubt, no error, unless there were a Real, nor

could we entertain such doubt or recognize the notion of such error

unless the image of the Real were stamped within our hearts. As

Plato pointed out long before, I must already know what the True is

if I am even to notice that my thought might not be true Plato, Meno

80e ff)....

 

(e) Of the Truth I only know it cannot be surpassed (as my thought

can be), and cannot be denied, or thought not to exist. Even to

suggest that it might not exist (that it might not be true that

there is such a thing as Truth) is indeed to talk nonsense....

 

The presence of Being to us is revealed in our discovery that our

thought stands under judgement, that our thought is often confused

and self-contradictory, but yearns to repossess that which it still

remembers. I have an image of Truth (and without it could not even

entertain the thought that I am often wrong, that I am not the

Truth): it is that entity of which Boethius spoke, 'the whole,

simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life' [boethius,

Tractates and Consolation of Philosophy 5.6.9]. Because I have that

image I both can and must bring my inquiries before it, and accept

such clear and distinct ideas as look most like it, always

remembering that nothing in the world of my experience or yours is

ever quite the Truth (for it might not be true, whereas the Truth

itself is always true).

 

"I had promised to show you, if you recall, that there is something

higher than our mind and reason. There you have it -- truth itself!

Embrace it if you can and enjoy it" [Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio

2.13.35]....

 

(f) Descartes therefore believed that there was, that there must be,

a way established for us to approach the Truth of which we already

know the elements. 'If any other than you were to inspire me', said

Augustine to his God, 'I do not believe that my words would be true,

for you are the Truth, whereas every man is a liar, and for this

reason he who utters falsehood is only uttering what is natural to

him' [Augustine, Confessions 13.25]....

 

 

Comments from an Advaita Vedanta perspective

-----------

 

As Stephen Clark points out, modern academics have often been

suspicious of reflective enquiry, as exemplified by Descartes and

Augustine. Such an enquiry has often been dismissed as a merely

'psychological introspection', which ends up with the 'solipsism' of

a mind-obsessed identity, caught up in personal preoccupations and

thus isolated from an external world.

 

Accordingly, a question is raised. Is introspection merely personal?

By asking questions that reflect back into their own thinking and

their own assumptions, can we clarify our knowing of what is

impersonally true and real, in the personal perceptions, thoughts

and feelings through which each person experiences the world? In

short, by looking back into our differing bodies and our varied

minds, can we approach an impersonal truth that is independent of

our personal and doubtful faculties?

 

This is the question Descartes asked. It is, of course, a question

that had long been asked, by his predecessors in the Christian,

Roman and Greek traditions. But Descartes asks the question

analytically, in the context of a new spirit that has started to

encourage an independent-minded questioning into our individuality.

 

Descartes' analysis starts out with body, which he calls 'res

extensa' or an 'extended thing'. A body is extended into different

parts, which are located differently in space. Each body is a

structure, which is made up from co-existing parts. Each part exists

in its own place, from where it interacts with other parts. Through

these interactions, the parts of a body are related to each other.

And different bodies are related together into larger bodies, in a

world of structured space.

 

This world of space is essentially divided and mechanical. It is

divided into different locations. And it's made up like a machine,

of parts that act upon each other. Here, action is from one body to

another or (within a body) from one part to another. This kind of

action is caused by a mechanical energy, which is exerted divisibly,

from various different bodies and their various different parts.

 

In this divided world, it's clearly insufficient for a body to look

back into itself. For each body is a driven part of world,

corruptible by forces from outside. The body's perceptions are thus

partial and liable to make mistakes, so that Descartes is forced to

look for truer knowledge in the mind.

 

In his examination of the mind, Descartes speaks of it as 'res

cogitans' or a 'thinking thing'. And he points out that while the

body is essentially divisible and corruptible, the mind has an

essential nature which is indivisible and incorruptible (see his

Meditations, Synopsis 2). Here, he identifies the mind's essential

nature as just that which it cannot rightly deny or doubt about

itself, because that nature is essentially required in each doubt

about the divisible and corruptible appearances of body and the

body's world.

 

But how does Descartes know that essential nature of the mind? He

speaks of that knowing as a 'prima cognitio' or a 'first knowledge'

of which he is completely assured, because its apprehension is so

clear and distinct, beyond all possibility of doubt (3rd Meditation,

2).

 

But having thus reflected back to that 'first knowledge', he is

confronted by a problem. He has to admit that the thinking of his

mind is afflicted by conflict and confusion, so that it fails all

too often to be clear and distinct -- in its understanding of the

appearances that are presented to it, through its perceptions and

conceptions of a structured world.

 

The thinking of the mind is accordingly imperfect. It is, as the

word 'cogitans' implies, a 'co-agitation' that essentially disturbs

the mind, along with the agitation of what is perceived and

conceived to be a conflicted and a changing world.

 

To address this imperfection, Descartes admits that his mind is an

imperfectly thinking thing, which needs the support of a perfect

being to correct its misapprehensions. Accordingly, the thinking

mind is identified as an imperfect self, which must turn inward to

the perfect being that is worshipped by the name of 'God'.

 

>From an Advaita Vedanta perspective, Descartes has stopped a little

short, in his reasoning analysis. He is still caught in a false

identity, which confuses a truly knowing self with an imperfectly

thinking mind. The thinking of the mind is not quite the same as the

knowing of true self. A little more analysis is needed, in order to

distinguish knowing from the stream of thoughts that come and go in

mind.

 

In the end, knowing is that consciousness which shines by its own

light. It is that shining presence which is always there, in

everyone's experience, as states of mind replace each other in the

course of time. It's only knowing that can be self-luminous, not any

thinking in the mind.

 

The thinking is a changing act, producing a succession of replacing

appearances. In this experience of our minds, there is no structured

space, made up of parts that co-exist. There's only changing process

in the course of time, whose passing states cannot be present

together and cannot therefore act upon on each other.

 

In this process of our minds, all action must arise from underlying

consciousness, which carries on beneath the change of mental states.

As actions rise into perceived or thought or felt appearances, they

each express the consciousness from where they originate.

 

The energy of that expression is alive. It is a living energy which

does not act mechanically, from any object in the world. It acts

biologically, from underlying consciousness, as it is thrown up from

the knowing subject into every object that becomes perceived or

thought or felt in anyone's experience.

 

Here, the word 'subject' means 'under (sub-) the throw (-ject)'. And

the word 'object' means 'against (ob-) the throw (-ject)'. In this

sense, the objects of the world are what the living energy gets

thrown against, so that the energy becomes reflected back into the

consciousness it has expressed.

 

Most of the old sciences were founded on this biological conception

of a living energy. Sadly, Descartes rather ignored it, in favour of

a predominantly mechanical conception of the world. And after

Descartes, a perverse interpretation of his thought has been taken

to promote the mechanical approach -- at the cost of a deeper,

biological approach through which the old sciences (including the

humanities) have long been studied and explored.

 

To me, this interpretation of Descartes is perverse in the sense

that it goes against his basic aim, which was to explore the depth

of ancient European learning in a way that accords with modern,

independent-minded questioning.

 

Some more of the depth in that old European learning is addressed in

Stephen Clark's second article, which will be the subject of a

further posting.

 

Ananda

[Guest guest]

advaitin, Ananda Wood <awood wrote:

>

> In this process of our minds, all action must arise from

underlying

> consciousness, which carries on beneath the change of mental

states.

> As actions rise into perceived or thought or felt appearances,

they

> each express the consciousness from where they originate.

>

> The energy of that expression is alive. It is a living energy

which

> does not act mechanically, from any object in the world. It acts

> biologically, from underlying consciousness, as it is thrown up

from

> the knowing subject into every object that becomes perceived or

> thought or felt in anyone's experience.

>

> Here, the word 'subject' means 'under (sub-) the throw (-ject)'.

And

> the word 'object' means 'against (ob-) the throw (-ject)'. In this

> sense, the objects of the world are what the living energy gets

> thrown against, so that the energy becomes reflected back into the

> consciousness it has expressed.

 

 

Namaste Ananda ji,

 

Thanks for that very well articulated and truly meaningful post.

Before you come up with the next one, shall i express my thinking on

the above portion of your post?

 

I seem to concur with the thoughts you have laid out above. As i

understand, in the Vedantic method of 'explaining' the objective

world and the method of 'returning the seeker to his source', there

is a clear role for the above thoughts that you have expressed. I

see it like this:

 

In the Kathopanishad mantra 'parAnchi khAni..' (i think you dilated

on this mantra some time ago), it is first shown that the senses

are 'damned' to be outward-turned, to the objectifying mode. When

this happens, Pure Consciousness expresses Itself as 'energy'. As

a result of this objectification and interaction of

the 'experiencer' and the 'experienced' within that world of

objectivity, there arises a variety of experiences, put in one word

as 'samsara'. The Upanishad gives the remedy in that very mantra

itself. The 'daring' aspirant, determined to 'return' to the

Source, Pure Consciousness without a second (that is, without

the 'dissipation' of PC into 'energy') puts in great effort to turn

away from the objectified world and realign himself with the PC.

When this is accomplished, the 'energy' lost outside is recouped and

ploughed back to the PC as it were, and he succeeds in freeing

himself from samsara.

 

I think this is the basic theme, nay, the method of the Kundalini

Yoga as well. As they explain, the 'chakras' starting from

the 'mUlAdhAra', the lowest, upto the 'AjnA', the highest in

the 'outward' objectified world, signify the energy. When by proper

sadhana an aspirant succeeds in directing the energy from the lowest

to the Supreme sahasrAra by crossing even the 'aajnaa', he is freed

from samsara. They call it `the re-uniting of the Shakti with

Shiva'. In Vedanta it is the `negation' of the objective world and

realizing the Pure Consciousness alone to be the remaining Real.

 

Even in the sadhana where Bhakti is predominant, this basic theme is

the keynote.

 

Since everyone is turned outside through the apparatus of the body,

your characterizing the interaction as biological is apt, i think.

 

Just what occurred to me on seeing your post.

 

With warm regards,

subbu

Om Tat Sat