PHL 348

Spring 2003

Notes on some of Ramanuja’s arguments against Advaita positions and in defense of his own Visistadvaita Vedanta.

Brahmasutra 1.1.1 (the paragraph numbers correspond to those indicated in the summary by S. Phillips also available on the web).

Para. 2: The central theistic Vedantic position: “Brahman is the Supreme Person whose auspicious attributes are unlimited.”

Para. 3-18.5: Among the prerequisites for knowledge of Brahman is practice of dharma (as taught by the Exegetes, Mimamsakas). Wrong is the position of the Advaitins that understanding the Upanishads without knowing and practicing dharma can result in Brahman knowledge.

Best argument (para. 12ff):

The knowledge of Brahman that ends spiritual ignorance is meditational, not (as Advaitins seem to presume) testimonial or verbal.

Supporting premise: Subliminal impressions have to be dispelled or purified, and verbal knowledge does not have the power but only immediate experience.

Para. 18.5-27: Advaita purva-paksa (reasoning put in the mouth of an Advaitin opponent that will be refuted in an upcoming siddhanta, para. 27ff).

Best Advaita arguments:

Every presentation of experience is subject to “sublation” (a defeating revealing it to be illusory or wrong), EXCEPT “realization (avabodha) of Brahman.”

Para. 19: Counter what Ramanuja asserted: Perception does not get trump status in every case of conflict between knowledge sources. For example, we know by inference that a flame is not an enduring substance, inference trumping the perception that it does endure.

The Brahman cognition generated by the Shastra being what it is (Brahman as distinctionless, eternal, pure, etc.) cannot be sublated.

Para. 20: We are not committed to the view that the Shastra is everywhere consistent. The later Shastric teaching about liberation is the ultimate sublater (or defeater) since it is about “Brahman without qualities” (Nirguna Brahman).

Para. 21-22: “Brahman is the real, true knowledge, the infinite (sacchidananda)” is a statement where each term (“the real,” etc.) refers to Brahman, not to an attribute, since Brahman as homogeneous transcends the attribute/attribute-bearer distinction.

Many Upanishadic statements are to be taken in a secondary, i.e., “indicatory,” sense (compare the ostensive definition, “Red is the color of ripe apples,” and the indicatory statement, “Devadatta’s is the house where those crows there are hovering”).

In everyday speech, we resort to secondary and indicatory meaning when a sentence does not make sense when its words are all construed denotatively.

Para. 23-24: Nyaya and other views (such as Visistadvaita, which agrees with Nyaya on many points) in assuming that things are fundamentally distinct are wrong since such distinctness is unintelligible. Distinctness is understood as distinctness-of-Y-from-X (X as the countercorrelate). But there is no way to keep these X and Y apart. If there is a distinctness D between them, then there would have to be an infinite series (between D and X and D and Y and so on). Therefore, even perception illumines just non-distinct, i.e., homogeneous, being (Brahman).

Being remains as object cognized through all dispersals of illusion.

Para. 25-26: There is no experience of experience. A finger cannot touch itself. Experience is self-established, self-proved. Nothing can be proved without it. Thus there can be no prior absence of experience (in the manner of the prior absence of a pot before the pot is produced). Anything of which there is no prior absence is eternal. Therefore, experience is eternal (Brahman).

Para. 27: Experience is not a cognizer with respect to itself. “How could agency belong to the changeless witness of all change whose nature is homogeneous being?”

The insentient ego makes consciousness manifest. Experience is the ego’s substratum.

Consciousness illusorily manifests itself (vivartate) as distinct things.

Ramanuja’s answer (siddhanta):

Para. 28-29: There is no knowledge source in support of the claim that there is a distinctionless (homogeneous) Brahman.

All knowledge sources reveal objects as distinct from other objects.

All experience reveals an object known in some way or other beyond mere existence.

Testimony depends on the operation of distinct sentence parts (words with distinct meanings). Thus the claim that testimony makes known that reality is distinctionless is contradicted by the very nature of testimony as a knowledge means.

Even the simplest perceptual cognition reveals something (Bessie) as qualified by something else (a broken hoof, “Bessie has a broken hoof,” as known perceptually).

Inference depends on perception and makes the same distinct things known as does perception.

Para. 30-31: Against the Advaita contention (para. 23) that perception cannot make known distinctness but only homogeneous being since distinctness cannot be defined, well, sorry, perception makes known generic characters (cowhood and the like) that differentiate things. If what you Advaitins say were true, why should not a person looking for a horse be satisfied with a buffalo? Remembering could not be distinguished from perceiving, because there would be only the one object (being). And no one would be deaf or blind. Furthermore, Brahman would be an object of perception and the other sources (prameya).

With regard to what was said about the defeater/defeated (epistemic) relationship (para. 18.5), well, there seems to be confusion. The relationship of exclusion, which holds among things independently of cognition, is not the same as the defeating relationship, which holds between contradictory cognitions. A piece of cloth is not a pot. A cognition of a snake as existing here and now, and another cognition of there being no snake but a rope now at that same location, are contradictory, and perception is capable of generating a defeater cognition (“That is a rope”) that defeats a defeated, wrong cognition (“That is a snake”), given that there is indeed a rope.

Para. 32: The Advaitin claims that consciousness is self-illumining. Is my cognition illumined, i.e., known by you? Clearly we make inferences to what other people are doing, for example, perceiving, inferring, daydreaming, etc. How about experience of one’s own past experience (“At the time I was seeing M”)?

The ways we ordinarily use words are based on differences between experiences, which we talk about in just certain ways, and things that are not experience, which we talk about in other ways.

Experience has a certain nature, different from pots and other things. It is essentially an illumining of an object or a self-illumining with respect to the self.

Para. 33-35: The Advaitin argument about prior absences and no prior absence of consciousness is wrong. Similarly the Advaitin understanding of a-vidya (not-Knowledge), which is the absence of spiritual knowledge, is incorrect.

“If the distinction between spiritual knowledge and spiritual ignorance is unreal, then spiritual ignorance and the self are one.”

Para. 36-37: Consciousness is known through differentiating properties (such as “being-consciousness,” “not-being-a-pots,’’ and so on).

Consciousness is itself the property of an agent who is conscious. This agent, the self or person, endures, as is proved by the type of cognition called recognition, e.g., “This same object was experienced by me previously.”

The ontology of qualification (the layer-cake view) is given perceptually with such perceptions as “I am cognizing X” in that the “I” indicates a property-bearer and “am cognizing X” a property possessed, namely, the cognizing.

SEE THE EIGHT OBJECTIONS SUMMARIZED AT THIS POINT.

Para. 38-39: The self has consciousness as an essential property (in the way that Bessie has essentially cowhood). Unlike other things known, the self’s illumination is not dependent on auxiliary causes such as the light of a lamp. Cognitions of other things depend on the self who cognizes. (This is the grain of truth, badly misrepresented, in what the Advaitin says.) But notice that I know my pleasure directly because my cognition of it qualifies myself; others do not in this way know it. This knower cannot be illusory like the silver illusion induced by the shininess of mother-of-pearl. What could the substratum be (as the mother-of-pearl is the reality misperceived, the substratum of the falsely attributed silverness property, in the case of the silver illusion) other than the self itself?

Para. 40: Brahman changes to become us. Only such a self that is essentially changeless can assume the nature of a plurality of knowers such as us who are changing all the time.

OTHER ARGUMENTS TO BE IDENTIFIED AND DISCUSSED IN CLASS.