English
Lastly, Ramanuja agrees with Hegel and the Naiyayikas in recognising the iprior implicit existence of the forms and categories in indeterminate knowledge, which are made ex¬ plicit in the -determinate. But the passage from the implicit to the explicit stage is not, in his ANALYSIS OP EXPERIENCE 140 opinion, due to the inner dialectic of the Idea (as with Hegel), nor the mer.e result of the relating activity of the thinking mind (as with the Naiyayi- kas) but something more—the mediation of experi¬ ence. With Hegel, the ‘ mediation ’ in question is the self-mediation of the Idea, that is, of the content in its ideality of truth. With Ramanuja, however, there is in experience, something arbitrary and thus not implied from the beginning in the nature of the content which is mediated. Hence, there is no such thing as indeterminate knowledge TTR*l) in Ramanuja. All knowledge, so far as it is knowledge, is determinate, and expressible in the typical judgment-form ‘ this is thus ’• ()—corresponding to its European equiva¬ lent in which the ‘ that ’ always implies the ‘ what.’ Even in the indeterminate state some at least of the determinations are present; while in the determiate state, the determinations are multiplied. Thus the distinction resolves, in the end, into a question of * more or less ’ deter¬ mination—that is to say, a distinction of degree only and not one of kind. Here Ramanuja lays his finger on a thorny question in present-day epistemology. Even Brad¬ ley, the ardent advocate of the necessity of im¬ mediate experience ‘ for psychology and meta¬ physics,’ (who complimented Prof. Stout on his similar insistence on the ‘ urgency ’ of it), was not slow to acknowledge * the dilemma that, so far as I know of immediate experience, it does not exist, •and that henoe, whether it exists or not, I co ul d in ^50 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA neither case know of it.’ The inherent difficulty of the notion is comparable to that experienced in introspecting a mental state in its original purity, or that encountered by Samkara in making the wit¬ nessing Self ( an object of the wit¬ nessing consciousness or that realised by Kant in even referring to the ‘ things in themselves ’ (Dinge an sich) as the cause of the sense-manifold, without making a transcendent use of the categories of causality and substance. This very difficulty led Prof. Dawes Hicks to deny roundly (in the introduction he wrote to Prof. N. J. Lossky’s treatise, ‘ The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge ’), the existence of this elusive or nebulous ‘ immediate experience or consciousness of a given object prior to the exercise of any discriminative activity,’ and therewith a distinction between ‘ ‘ knowledge ’ ’ and “ experience ” as drawn by all intuitionalists. Eastern or Western. ‘ ‘ Suffice it to say, ’ ’ so observes Prof. Hicks, “ that so far as I can see not even the crudest, vaguest consciousness of a content can be accounted for, either psychologically or epistemolo¬ gically, without calling to our aid in the exposition the notion of a discriminative activity which is, iu essence, identical with the more elaborate activity which Professor Lossky describes as ‘ knowing.’ ” Here Prof. Hicks appears to have proved his case by a covert petitio principii. If one reads between the lines, it will be found that his very language betrays him. To say that the vaguest conscious¬ ness of a content cannot be ‘ accounted for ’ with¬ out a discriminative activity on our part, is to assert ANALYSIS OF EXPEBIENCE 161 a claim which has never been contested by any advocate of intuitionalism. The point of Prof. Hicks’s criticism derives all its plausibility from a clear exploitation of a peculiar methodological difficulty in psychology and epistemology—com¬ parable to what is known as the ‘ ego-centric pre¬ dicament.’ There is, on the other hand, an ease or naturalness about Prof. Lossky’s procedure, which gives rise to the impression that he did not think it at all necessary to demonstrate the exist¬ ence of such a patent basis of knowledge. Now, the unstable equilibrium in which im¬ mediate experience is always discovered to be, might be regarded as a reason against its existence or reality. The diverse elements that are held together in the non-relational unity, the felt whole of immediate experience, are destined to fall asunder and put an end to the immediacy. This is what Bosanquet means by his assertion that immediate experience is a stage which must inevitably pass away. Bradley, however, thinks that the content of immediacy cannot evaporate all at once, but persists as a point of reference in the background. To quote his very words, “ there is an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one, with which knowledge begins; and, though this in a manner is transcended, it nevertheless remains throughout as the present foundation of my known world. 2 ’* And it is to this foundation that all certainty be¬ longs. ‘If we have certainty anywhere,’ says * Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 160. 162 k SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA Bradley, ‘ this seems obvious we have certainty in feeling. Whatever else may be doubted, at least we know what we feel.’ * Thus in our search after truth, we cannot afford to leave certainty behind, and, for the matter of that, immediate experience, as the primary source thereof. That is why Saqakara insists so often on ‘ ambhuti ’ (^ipgf?r, ) as the highest court of appeal, having a functional similarity with immediate experience. Now, so far as Samkara is concerned, the pri¬ mitive datum of experience, is the body of those common judgments as are expressible in the forms I am this ’ or ‘ this is mine.’ “ In mankind,” so observes Sainkara, ‘ ‘ this sort of judgments such as ‘ I am this ’ or ‘ this is mine ’ conditioned by false knowledge in the form of pairing together the true and the untrue is in-born, so that people trans¬ fer the very being and qualities of the one to the other, owing to their inability to discriminate things that are different or discrete in their nature. ”t This pairing of things that cannot be paired, implies the failure of discrimination which, evidently, attests the transcendence of that imme¬ diate or unreflecting stage of knowledge that is con¬ fessedly characterised by the absence of all discrimi¬ nation. This marks the beginning of thought * Ibid, p. 286. Introduction to V.8, ANALYSIS OF EXPERIENCE 153 proper which has the judgment as its proper em¬ bodiment. Thus, every 'judgment, according to Samkara, is both true and false as based upon the principle of adhyasa (*pajro:)or false ascription. What, then, is the nature of this adhyasa which pertains to the essence of all judgment and predication from the standpoint of Samkara- Vedanta? Now, adhyasa (which in the form of illusory perception [*si*nT7sra*T]has been discussed in detail by the Vedanta-paribhasha in its psychological, epistemological and metaphysical aspects) has been defined by Samkara as ‘ the appearance in the form of remembrance of something already experienced in a different content ( )• Psychologically viewed, it is of the form of memory, although the coalescence of the represented object (of memory), as facilitated by perception of similar¬ ity and other subjective defects, with the object of presentation, converts it into an actual perception. The object of this perception, metaphysically view¬ ed, is the direct result of the avidyfi (which is subs¬ tantially one with this principle of adhydsa) that serves in the Vedanta as the principiuum indwi- duationis. As appearing to an experiences it necessarily involves judgment that expresses itself in the form of misattribution, and hence partakes of truth and error; thus, the epistemological question of its validity or invalidity centres round the in¬ dividual who is in the grip of illusion. Viewed in this light, adhyasa or avidya in a narrower sense, may fairly be rendered by the Bradleyan term ‘ appearance ’ which has, according to him, a two- 20 154 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA fold meaning: “ If you take it as implying an object and the appearance of something to some one, then all appearance is at once both truth and error, for appearance in this sense involves a judgment, however rudimentary, but the term is used in a much wider sense, and you have appearance wher¬ ever, and so far as, the content of anything falls outside of its existence, its ‘ what ’ goes beyond its ‘ that.’ ” * In order to elucidate fully the nature of Samkara’s adhyasa, reference may be made to the various theories of illusion current in the different? schools of Indian philosophy. (1) In the first place, the doctrine of akhydti (*r^rrf?r.) that is current among the philosophers of the Mlmamsa and the Saipkhya school asserts that in an'illusion, e.g., of ■ silver - (yeitisj) in a nacre * () there is nothing positive except the experience of ‘ silver '• and experience of ‘ nacre ’ which, as experiences, are real. The illusion is not due to any positive wrong knowledge, but is due to the mere negative factor of non-apprehension of the difference between the two (due to certain subjective defects). This absence of discrimination (*Psnf?K or as the Saipkhya would put it) between the two leads to their con¬ fusion and identification. In the ‘ nacre-silver ’ illusion, for example, what is perceived is the ‘ nacre ’ and the percept revives memory-image of * silver ’ (which it resembles). This memory- image, however, is not apprehended as such, * ii ■ * Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 260. Analysis of experience 165 i.e., as distinct from the percept and the percept also is not apprehended as such, i.e., as distinct from the memory-image.