English
This is not the place to attempt a detailed criticism of the principle ‘ de omnibus dubitandum est ’ and the basal truths it leads to. His ‘ cogito ’ has been justly made the unhappy target of criticisms by the Hegelian school. The ‘ I ’ of his ‘ I think ’ could not, on his own showing, be identified with the self—what James would call the psychological ‘ Me ’—for which he mistook it. His doubt hav¬ ing destroyed the whole content of consciousness, his ‘ cogito ’ degenerated into an abstract possibi¬ lity merely, a bare potentiality of thinking. I I, * > - * Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 17-18, ■ AN APPROACH THROUGH EPISTEMOLOGY 111 think,—but what?—there being no object of thought, the thinking in question remains an un- verifiable hypothesis merely. It is true that Des¬ cartes has sought to justify the demand that all else being denied the denier remains, that in the event of there being nothing there must be one to conceive this nothing. But he misinterprets this demand, so far as he construes it as a proof of the existence of the denier, of the doubting or the thinking ego. Samkara manipulating a somewhat similar argu¬ ment avoids the danger to which Descartes succum¬ bed. In a well-known passage the argument it thus introduced: ‘ Just because it is the self, it is impossible for us to entertain the possibility of its ever being conjured away or refuted. For (the knowledge of) the self is not with anybody some¬ thing adventitious, it being self-evident or self estab¬ lished.’* The argument, however, is rounded off with the words : * such (a self-established entity) is incapable of being repudiated or abstracted, but not that which is the essential nature (of him who repudiates or abstracts). The agent of repudiation or abstraction is the essential nature of him who repudiates or abstracts.’t Samkara has in another context a string of verses designed for the determina¬ tion of the true nature of the self (jgpN fiwnraf ) and has reproduced the same argument with an * PHumnitaiflqqfti: i *r wwn m*: qrcrfvf WifassJUl—Com. on V.S. II. 3. vii. t *r f'HUK’i t ^ i q ft i— Ibid. A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA added significance : ‘ If a man has doubt as to the fact that he exists, he is to reckon in that connexion that the doubter is no other than his own self.’* Such a self, according to Samkara, is the cor¬ relate of the object ( fq t ra ; ) and continuous there¬ with ; as revealed by subject-consciousness JUWPfrW ) or the ‘ I-consciousness,’ the inward self ( hottort ) in its true character as the eternal subject ( ) or witness ( ) forgets or forsakes its own nature, and comes to be adumbrat¬ ed somehow in the empirical series, by virtue of that endless, innate, delusive process of superimposition known as adhydsa ()• The inward self which, according to Samkara, is the eternal witness of all the modifications of the producer of the notion of self-hood (viz., the internal organ (*pnftrc'iPl)t may be defined as the Self of self, consciousness of consciousness itself, or in other words, Self-con¬ sciousness. Such a self is essentially self-manifest (), self-revealing and self-revealed. As eternal, timeless caitanya (), it is self-evidencing and self-evident; and its existence can be demonstrated only negatively by a reduet,io ad absurdum. Of such a self it can truly be said that it exists only as it thinks and that it thinks always ( v: firafrwtgwnWT ),fas Samkara ' says explicitly.^ But Descartes equates such a self - to * “vfa wrfwfawi vvr: jv: i uviflt tfufimr a: vw”— t Cf. Introduction to Ved&ntotQtra. 1 Com. on V.S. n, 8, xviii. AN APPROACH THROUGH EPISTEMOLOGY 113 the individual soul or mind that thinks always (mens semper cogitat), thereby exposing himself to the justified criticism of Locke that the child. 6as the potential man) should think even in the mother’s womb. A similar charge of lapse in the continuity of self or consciousness on the basis of such evident lapses in consciousness as swoon (*£#) and dreamless sleep ( ^gfg;) in which there is an apparent breach in the psychic continuum, could not be urged against Samkara; for, as it haB been already shown, the self or consciousness (tnut) or ), of which Samkara speaks, is not de¬ pendent for its existence on any physical apparatus, which is simply its manifesting vehicle. This is a point on which the greatest thinkers of the world, breaking down the barriers of age and clime— thinkers like Socrates and Plato, Hegel and S$am- kara—concur fully. In a remarkable passage which could be assigned to Samkara with no loss of meaning, Green, the accredited English exponent of Neo-Hegelianism, observes : “ We are in our very essential nature the eternal consciousness repro¬ duced under limitations of time and animal orga¬ nism, but retaining the essential character of being out of time, as regards our knowledge, as regards that in virtue of which we are men. The potential content of our consciousness—knowledge—eternally exists in us as ideas which we laboriously attain unto. What exists potentially we try to realise or aotualiee. What we call our mental history is not history of this (eternally complete) consciousness which in itself can have no history, but a history 15 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA of tbe process by which the animal organism be¬ comes its vehicle.”* In his commentary on a well- known text,f Samkara emphatically declares that it is only the Self, as immutable and uncreated con¬ sciousness, that shines forth, as also held by tbe Sruti texts such as ‘ satyaiji jMnamanantaw■ Brahma,’ ‘ prajMnam Brahma,’ etc4 That this was the main drift of Samkara- Vedanta appears from two significant passages, the first of which runs thus: the entire aggregate of (empirical) objects being abstracted or denied, what remains is the inward Self as the mere subject (which can never become an object) and there the philosophic impulse finds a final resting-place. § The other passage is that famous one in which he is equally emphatic : “ The existence of Brahman, again, is known from the fact of its being the Self of every one. For everyone is conscious of the existence of (one’s) Self, and never thinks ‘ I am not.’ If the existence of the Self were not known, everyone would think ‘ I am not.’ And this Self is ‘ Brahman.’ ”|| The Cartesian method which * Fairbrother’s Green, p. 19. t Praina Uyanishad, VI. 2. t 'wiratwwWTOwwiWft -wnwl ‘vs} wwntf *’ iw* isnft I § wan ffcwsrmw aft fa rcft w : Jrsnrawr jrtffir farcrwr ffafa —Com. on V.8. III. 2. xxiii. || xwfasrafafV. i wnnfarsf i uft fr munfjrawfafk: wnj infant i—Com. on V.S, 1.1, i, AM APPROACH THROUGH EPISTEMOLOGY 115 is the method of abstraction has been employed by Samkara as well. By abstracting all objects of thought from the individual thinker, the self of the ‘ coyito,' Descartes had reduced it to an abstraction merely, and rendered it abortive. But the method of ‘ neti ’ ( ) ( * neti ’ ( or ‘ not this ’ ‘ not this ’—the via negativa as it has also been called—is the only method Samkara could adopt in characterising that trans-subjective subject which is indicated by the term ‘ Brahman.’* The Being that emerges in the rarefied, stifling atmosphere of the freezing heights, as the terminus of an upward movement is not the ‘ Intense Inane, ’ the residuum of a thread-bare logic-chopping, or the relic of Scholastic metaphysics, but the quintessence of all reality, the Truth of all truths (nsra “If the via negativa or method of abstraction were to land us in sheer emptiness, in a metaphysical blank or non-entity, would it (in all propriety) be called the Truth of all truths?”! Extremes meet; and here is a case in point. It is literally true, al¬ though of the nature of a paradox—and all highest truths are of this nature—that ‘ in spiritual things the greatness of the price we pay has much to do with the value of the good we acquire.’ The ‘ Ever¬ lasting Nay ’ of a spiritual quest must needs be pressed to its furthest limit in order that the ‘ Ever¬ lasting Yea ’ of a blessed life, symbolised by the * qmilm* n ircrotstftfa—Com. on V.S. III. 2. xxii. t g sftiW fit erw Zoc. cit a k SYSTEMATIC STtfDY Of TfiE VEDANTA mystic syllable A urn ( can be attained—a glorious consummation and consequent quietus of all restless linking and striving (finiraT It does not, however, overtake the soul abruptly as an alien something, but we have a foretaste of that consummate bliss in deep, dreamless sleep. It is the fourth, the Tuny a ( ) condition of the self, ‘ not an exclusive self, but the common ground of all,’ comprehending and transcending all the three grades of reality—those of waking, dream and dreamless sleep indicated by the three consti¬ tuent syllables ‘ A (*T) —U —M (^) of ‘ AUM’ In the inspired language of the Mandukya Upanishad,f this the fourth ( qClqif) is not that which is conscious of the subjective ( (T*r:inr ), nor that which is conscious of the objective (j nor that which is conscious of both, nor that which is simple consciousness nor that which is an all-sentient mass, nor that which is all darkness. It is unseen, transcendent, inapprehen¬ sible, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable, the sole essence of the consciousness of self ( qcft l < R Hyg u- the negation of the world (qq ^ j \ qaj a ). the ever- peaceful (sjroi), all-blissful (fa*), the one unitary principle regarded as the fourth—this in¬ deed is the Atman.” Critics of Samkara-Vedanta will at once pounce upon a statement like this and * iwwim i sftr- —Com. on Mapdukya Up., Prakarapam I. t Ibi$.