Perception in VP

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Perception in VP, note 3

 

Namaste All,

Sankara considers the part played by the organs in his

commentary on Brh.Up.II.iv.11. He has been writing about the successive

merging of the objects of sense - " When through these successive steps,

sound and the rest, together with their receiving organs, are merged in

Pure Intelligence, there are no more limiting adjuncts, and only Brahman,

which is Pure Intelligence, comparable to a lump of salt, homogeneous,

infinite, boundless and without a break, remains. Therefore the Self alone

must be regarded as one without a second. "

 

How one might ask are the receiving organs to be merged? His answer to

this resolves a puzzle which sometimes bothers those who look on

perception and perceptuality from a psychological angle. If we had other

sorts of organs or organs with different capacity would not the objects of

perception be different for us. That seems to be a matter of common

sense. After all we do not navigate by echolation like a bat or by nose

like a dog. A corollory of this position extends the problem to other

people - how do we know that they have the same colour blue as we have?

How do we know that they even have the same object as we have ourselves?

Thus they are left with a personal private object and the so called public

object has become a sort of nounmenon or unknowable.

 

Sankara does not adjudicate on this issue specifically but we can infer

his position from his view about the nature of the organs (of

perception). At the subtle level of mergence " the organs are but modes of

the objects in order to perceive them......Hence no special care is to be

taken to indicate the dissolution of the organs; for these being the same

as the objects in general, their dissolution is implied by that of the

objects. "

 

My understanding of this leads me to the conclusion that worry about the

mutability of objects due to varying acuity etc. of sense organs is a

fundamental mistake about the nature of objects. The object as such is

not an ultimate but merely a limiting adjunct of pure consciousness. It

is this that gives rise to the objects perceptuality. Without this there

would be no objects. Objects are not an ultimate.

 

Best Wishes,

Michael.