Classical Indian Philosophy: Selfhood, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality
By Anand Vaidya, originally published at Aeon. Vaidya (1976-2024) was a professor of business ethics and the philosophy of artificial intelligence at San José State University, and visiting professor of Indian philosophy of mind and knowledge at University of California, Los Angeles. His publications included the co-edited textbooks Professions in Ethical Focus: An Anthology (2nd ed, 2021) and The Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology (2023).
The classical Indian philosophical tradition is usually – if somewhat misleadingly – classified as comprised of the five sub-schools of Vedic Hinduism and three schools outside of it (Buddhism, Jainism, Cārvāka), each representing a long lineage of scholars who argue in favour of different notions of metaphysics and epistemology. We will focus on ideas from one of the Vedic schools, the Vedānta, which builds atop three foundational corpora: the Upaniṣads, the Brahma-sūtra and the Bhagavad-gītā. We will focus on two figures within the broadly construed Vedānta tradition, the singularly influential 8th-century philosopher Śaṅkara, and one of his interlocutors, the 11th-century philosopher Rāmānuja.
For a flavour of the kind of things classical Indian philosophers thought about, we will begin with a bird’s eye view of a few notions from classical Indian philosophy, with the caveat that every idea described below has been hotly debated for hundreds of years.
Central to Indian philosophy is the idea of illusion. Here, there is a distinction between temporal and presentational notions of illusion. The first holds that whatever is not permanent in time, or else beyond time, is thereby an illusion. Of the various schools of Indian philosophy, Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree in accepting this account. The second notion holds that whatever is presented to a subject of experience as other than how it is, is an illusion. This notion derives from the school of Nyāya, its early proponents from the 1st millennium and the work of the 14th-century philosopher Gaṅgeśa, considered to be the founder of the New Nyāya movement.
With talk about illusion, of course, comes talk about reality. And here the classical Indian philosophers made a number of fine distinctions. For our purposes, three are of note: conventional reality, apparent reality, and ultimate reality. Conventional reality just means everyday reality, one that is based on the pragmatics of everyday life under societal conventions and laws. Think of money, or the game of chess. Apparent reality is the notion of a reality that depends on our sensory organs of perception and the machinations of the mind: what we see is a tree and not an aggregate of organic molecules. Finally, ultimate reality is the notion that there is an underlying or hidden substratum to the world. Advaita Vedānta, for example, holds that brahman is identical with this ultimate reality.
The other great Indian topic we’ll be concerned with is the self. The self is frequently understood in five different aspects. The first three are often also explored in contemporary Western philosophy of mind: the self as what makes decisions, engages in rational activity, and enables action; as what can gain and lose knowledge over time; and as what experiences in the ordinary empirical world. These three notions of the self might encompass what William James, in the chapter ‘Consciousness of Self’ from The Principles of Psychology (1890), called the ‘empirical self’, which he defines thus: ‘The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me.’ James contrasted the notion of the empirical self with the more subtle, transcendent ‘pure’ self.
The fourth aspect is perhaps what some would call more ‘spiritual’ – and which we simply define here as a subjective and usually ineffable experience of something venerable and greater than oneself. This is the self as what is permanent in time, and what undergoes transmigration from one body to another through karmic rebirth; it is sometimes expressed by the word soul. The fifth aspect is the self as the individual manifestation of a universal and single foundational consciousness (brahman). And here we return to Yama’s lesson.
Śaṅkara offers an analogy about how to understand all this. He compares brahman to a tree:
Its roots above, its branches below, this is the eternal banyan tree. That alone is the Bright! That is brahman! That alone is called the Immortal! On it all the worlds rest; beyond it no one can ever pass.
He goes on to focus on the illusory nature of experience in his accompanying commentary:
It is a tree, so-called because it is felled; this tree consisting in manifold miseries of birth, decay, death and grief, changing its nature every moment … the subject of several doubtful alternatives in the intellects of many hundreds of sceptics … growing from the seed of ignorance … having for its trunk the various subtle bodies of all living things … having for its tender buds the objects of intelligence and the senses, having for its leaves the logic, learning and instruction … having various tastes such as the experience of joy and sorrow, having endless fruits on which living beings subsist, with its roots entwined and fastened firm by the sprinkling of the waters of desire … reverberating with the tumultuous noise arising from dancing, singing, instrumental music, joking … induced by mirth and grief, produced by the happiness and misery of living beings and felled by the unresisted sword of the realisation of the highest Self proved by the Vedānta, this tree of saṃsāra always shaking by its nature to the wind of desire …
The idea that the only foundational reality is brahman, and that all else is presentational illusion, does not go unchallenged. The philosopher Rāmānuja disagrees with Śaṅkara on almost all the key points. He makes the following argument. First of all, foundational reality cannot consist in the existence of a single hidden and purely phenomenal consciousness, as per Śaṅkara, because the subject-object dichotomy is an inherent attribute of all mental phenomena. (This point anticipates Brentano.) Moreover, our everyday perception of the world cannot be fundamentally illusory (again, as per Śaṅkara) but must be said to accurately represent reality if we want to claim to understand anything about the world at all. Finally, there is no coherent reading of the foundational texts without invoking the idea of a transcendental God, one wholly and fundamentally different from everything else. Therefore, Śaṅkara’s monism is false to the textual tradition.
Incidentally, somewhat later, the French philosopher and polymath René Descartes would employ similar reasoning to argue in favour of a dual conception of reality in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), viz that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world, mind and matter, with God being distinct from both.
While the prevailing view is that Rāmānuja’s most important contribution to Indian philosophy is his defence of theism, his arguments against illusionism and monism are more interesting when it comes to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, and the contribution that Indian philosophy can make to them. What is really at stake here is the question of the very nature of consciousness as ‘illumination’ (prakāśa).
For Śaṅkara, the relevant sense in which consciousness consists in ‘illumination’ is not a matter of what is thereby illuminated or revealed, but that ‘illumination’ is what allows for the revealing to occur in the first place. It is not just another object in the world but the very condition for the appearance of objects. As Wolfgang Fasching insightfully puts it in 2021:
[Śaṅkara] insists on the ontological uniqueness of consciousness: it is fundamentally different from anything we ever encounter as an object of consciousness, as different as ‘light’ is from ‘darkness’, as Śaṅkara says in the initial statement of his Brahmasūtrabhāshya.
So, as Fasching continues, for Śaṅkara,
[C]onsciousness is to be distinguished from all contents of consciousness that might be introspectively detectable: it is precisely consciousness of whatever contents it is conscious of and not itself one of these contents. Its only nature is, [Śaṅkara] holds, prakāśa (manifestation); in itself it is devoid of any content or structure and can never become an object.
For Rāmānuja, on the other hand – and this is key to his disagreement with Śaṅkara – consciousness is not an abstract, contentless, structureless illumination, but is always tied to objects and to individual selves (jīva). Rāmānuja maintains that consciousness is relational. It has both content and structure.
This article was originally published at Aeon and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
Discover more from Harmonist
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Related Posts
Homeward Bound →
Mystic Poetry and Yogic Enlightenment →
Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī →
