Self-Knowledge, and Understanding

I am continuing here the point I was pushing in the previous chapter: the remoteness of serious understanding, and the problem, raised in the chapter on dialectic, of taking an honest stand about your stand regarding it. The honesty relates to the struggle towards genuineness, and it is sadly amusing to bring together two statements of Lonergan, one about the historian “at pains not to conceal his tracks,” the other talking about the self who “keeps matters some entirely to oneself, and refuses even to face others.”135 The “outer rind of the persona” 136 may well be eager to take a stand on the importance of understanding’s “bloody entrance,”137 but some hidden layer rejects this and, oddly, that hidden rejection can be quite manifest in that self’s attitude towards the effort to seriously understand, even going to the extreme of a certain stand about the inevitability of C.P.Snow’s two culture, a stand that fits nicely with “the substitution of pseudometaphysical myth-making for scientific inquiry.”138 So, one talks of feelings with disdain for chemistry.  

Such an exclusion of serious understanding is presently supported by the dominant traditions of contemplation, which are anaphatic. The new systematics, on the other hand, is to be increasingly kataphatic. Systematic searchings, in a later maturity, will, as a “Language of the Heart”, “as central feature of the world of sense, intimate its finality, its yearning for God.”139 (Philip McShane, http://www.philipmcshane.ca/method-02.pdf p. 77) 

The active synthesizing nature of intellect in Sankara

What enables us to synthesize disparate sounds and to comprehend their meaning? Here is the solution of Prabhakara (and also Bhatta):

Words are combinations of letters or rather syllables (varna). But how can we understand words and sentences when each syllable vanishes the moment it is uttered? The solution can be found either in our intellect or in sabda itself. For Prabhakara, it is found in the latter. Varnas have each an (eternal) potency of leaving a semantic impression which, combined with that of other varnas brings about the meaning of words and sentences.... (De Smet, Guidelines p. 219)

Sankara was dissatisfied with this solution

because it is too particular to the understanding of a series of syllables. We should have a general solution which would explain our understanding of other kinds of series too (line of ants, of trees, of soldiers, etc.) Besides, in any case the impressions left by the varnas must be synthesized by the intellect. Hence, the solution must be found in the intellect. In fact, it is simpler to admit that our buddhi functions as intellectual memory, i.e., has the power of synthesizing elements apprehended at successive moments of time. This function is samasta-praty-avamarsini buddhi (intellect looking back on past experiences as a whole). Cf. Brahma-sutra-bhasya, 1,3,28. (De Smet, Guidelines p. 219)

Yet more evidence for the active nature of intellect in Sankara.