tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post845489444613345924..comments2024-01-05T01:21:21.702-08:00Comments on <center>SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS</center>: Peregrinationskholiasthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-61002748496989438342010-11-22T10:06:18.392-08:002010-11-22T10:06:18.392-08:00At Om~~ I am late responding to this but wanted to...At Om~~ I am late responding to this but wanted to acknowledge yr points. Yes, I am aware that a great deal of Sankara's work gets a 'pseudo-' attached by some of those killjoy scholars, and I don't doubt they have their reasons; I wondered when I was reading the <i>Crest-jewel</i> if this was one of those cases but my little cheap p.b. edition's apparatus is scant. I will have to read more closely into your suggestions but as re. this comment -- <i>"Sankara stressed that only knowledge banishes ignorance, karma never can. This is quite against the grain of ritualism"</i> -- I am already inclined to agree-by-disagreeing. Doubtless there is absolutely <i>no</i> magical efficacy of any ritual act whatsoever. But this is precisely why I maintain that all spiritual technique "works in part by not working." To know, too, is in a way an act. One cultivates a disposition. The rite turns inside-out and one sees how dispensable it is -- but one (almost) never sees this without the rite.<br /><br />Thanks too for pointing this out re. Thos. Reid. I seem to recall C.S. Lewis (?) remarking somewhere that we know sleeping from being awake, not vice-versa.<br /><br />Re. L.W. and the books on his shelf, he seems aside from gritty "hard-boiled" American mysteries to have read James, Kierkegaard, and of course Frege. Best book on him I have ever read, hands-down, is Ray Monk's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ludwig-Wittgenstein-Genius-Ray-Monk/dp/0140159959" rel="nofollow">biography</a> of him.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-78835486819533302332010-11-19T12:07:13.769-08:002010-11-19T12:07:13.769-08:00Skholiast:
Thanks.
Vivekacudamani though often at...Skholiast:<br />Thanks.<br />Vivekacudamani though often attributed to Sankara is seriously disputed by scholars. A good text to start with which is regarded as authentic by all is 'Upadesa Sahasri' (A Thousand Teachings). It is particularly strong on epistemology. Pub.by Advaita Asrama. It is the one non-commentarial work which he wrote and it may be taken to represent his own particular style. He places a very strong emphasis on the knowledge on waking that we have been in a state of deep sleep. Only Thomas Reid amongst westerners drew any conclusions from that fact which is interesting seeing as how Thill puts them on opposite sides of the common sense divide.<br /><br />In the central texts Sankara stressed that only knowledge banishes ignorance, karma never can. This is quite against the grain of ritualism and the very goal directed practices of the Brahmin class as mediators.<br /><br />On a programme about James's 'Varieties' on BBC Radio 4's In our Time (worth a listen) I heard that it was the only book of philosophy on Wittgensteins book shelves. So his doubt was not after Descartes' method but his own. Extreme scepticism is contrary to common sense in that it tends to have a paralysing effect. It is to put it mildly non-adaptive. Zen Saying: If you walk, walk; if you sit, sit; above all don't wobble.ombhurbhuvahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-25917228049221319052010-11-19T11:35:57.060-08:002010-11-19T11:35:57.060-08:00Skholiast, good point - but I think there are some...Skholiast, good point - but I think there are some traditions that break even this. The Mahāyāna bodhisattva stays in the world to help others; but the Theravāda arhat does not. He realizes the end of his own suffering and leaves it at that. The same is true even more strongly, I think, for the Jaina and Yoga traditions of <i>kaivalya</i> ("aloneness"), where the ultimate goal is to rest, watching, in empty space, detached from all suffering and all worldly affairs. It seems that it is indeed possible to create a philosophy of radical rupture with the everyday which does not then return to the everyday, and even to sustain it across the generations. (Granted, such philosophies were never very <i>popular</i>, for obvious reasons - popular Jainism often has little to do with <i>kaivalya</i> - but I don't think that interferes with the main point here.)Amodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15978621252917667363noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-71626804693631764792010-11-19T08:13:50.531-08:002010-11-19T08:13:50.531-08:00Om~
I excised a portion of my comment above conce...Om~<br /><br />I excised a portion of my comment above concerning Sankara because I don't feel competent, so I am grateful for this eloquent summation. But as I look again at the <i>Crest-Jewel of Discrimination</i>, I'm quite struck that the "identification with Brahman" that he commends, and as means towards which he suggests all kinds of intermediate steps (refusal of gifts, renouncing of pleasures, abandonment of worldly desires, etc) -- which are themselves in some sense only possible because there <i>are</i> gifts, pleasures, desires, etc -- can only happen as a sort of grace, if it isn't to be a trmendous subterfuge by the very ego he's combating. The claim that this subterfuge is <i>all</i> it is is an old (not to say hackneyed) one, and I don't mean to dwell upon it; I only say that it's a risk, and so if we grant that there is, after all, something else and more to Sankara, then in a sense we have to say you are right: the everyday world of the senses is in a way left completely alone; it is the meaning of this world that is changed. But of course this is everything.<br /><br />I do think that for Parmenides we have a similar situation, and certainly for Plato. I grant that we don't have a great deal to go on with Parmenides, but it is surely quite striking that, as I have mentioned <a href="http://speculumcriticum.blogspot.com/2010/07/mythos-andor-logos.html" rel="nofollow">before</a>, chunks of his poem are apparently about specific instances of astronomy, anatomy, and raising animals, among other things. I'm not just saying that the philosopher remarks upon "practical" matters, but that for the mind informed by participation, every practical matter is in continuity with the metaphysical. Now participation is not yet philosophy; it is itself prone to every critique skepticism can muster. Philosophy is (to my mind) the re-institution of the intuitions of participation via the very mechanism of critique.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-20281214039472048912010-11-19T01:32:11.491-08:002010-11-19T01:32:11.491-08:00Skholiast, Amod,
The possibility of error as a gre...Skholiast, Amod,<br />The possibility of error as a great problem for Shankara? No, more of an opportunity.<br />To get a sense of this one needs to look at what is called the 'adhyasa bhasya' or preamble on superimposition, the first few pages of the Brahma Sutra Bhasya. In broad outline the central paradigm case of error is taking a thing to be that which it is not. This has two aspects to it. Along the horizontal there is ordinary perceptual error, the famous coiled rope seen as a snake and on the vertical axis there is the structural, metaphysical error which can be rationally discerned but does not thereby become annihilated. <br /><br />It is the first sort of error which has been most commented on historically and which has given rise to fantastic claims about cosmic illusion. It is a complex issue and impossible to go into within the scope of a post but the conclusion of the sober and philosophically informed is that perceptual experience is taken at its face value. Now it may be cancelled/denied/sublated by a further experience but that is not to say that we only hold to its truth provisionally if by provisionally we mean a metaphysically sceptical adherence. Nothing very alarming there I think.<br /><br />Now the second sort of error, the metaphysical or structural, represented by the boys that see the sky as bowl shaped or like a wok. Even when they come to rationally know that this is not the case they will continue to experience it as such, much as we do sunrise and sunset and a stick bent in water. The realisation of absolute unity does not eliminate the experience of otherness. Because experience and the sort of experience we can have is the result of being an individual human being then the realisation that this is a horizontal truth stays at that level. Sankara's realisation stayed with Sankara, his individual 'vertical' error was sublated.ombhurbhuvahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-34660765389152415602010-11-18T21:57:20.714-08:002010-11-18T21:57:20.714-08:00I'll use Plato for my example; a more "as...I'll use Plato for my example; a more "ascending" philosopher you will not find, yet even for Plato, the philosopher must return to the cave. You are right that there is a difference in the way the intuited or commonsense worldly desires are evaluated -- "normatively we are somewhere very different," as you put it -- but this difference has a bearing upon our starting place, as startling as the reversal of figure and ground. For Augustine as for the Christian fathers generally, in fact, we come ultimately not to the denial of the flesh but to the <i>resurrection of the body</i>; and for at least certain forms of Buddhism we come to the mysterious but just-thus identity of Samsara and Nirvana.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-13481349043083818962010-11-18T15:10:46.792-08:002010-11-18T15:10:46.792-08:00Thanks, Skholiast. I don't think it's fair...Thanks, Skholiast. I don't think it's fair to say that all philosophy returns to common sense (or to "intuitions" etc.) This is part of what Thill has been complaining about (and as you've no doubt observed, it's been his comments that have provoked my most recent set of posts, in one way or another). <i>Some</i> philosophies do this, for sure - I would say Aristotle, Hegel, Confucius all come back in the end mostly to popular belief with a more sophisticated underpinning. But not all do this. Especially, philosophies with an ascent orientation of whatever sort leave us in a very different place from where we started - that's the point. Augustine, the Pali suttas or the Jaina sutras all urge us to leave behind our normal worldly desires, to the extent that we can do so, for a better transcendent reality beyond. It's true that they do "save the appearances" in a descriptive sense, but normatively we are somewhere very different. (And for Śaṅkara or Nāgārjuna, even descriptively, the appearances are saved only through a theory of error.)Amodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15978621252917667363noreply@blogger.com