Bhartrhari on meaning and utterance

From Bhartrhari, Vakyapadiya, I, 45-49, cited in De Smet, Guidelines, p. 214:

Some of those who follow the ancient path say that sphota and nada are different in nature. Others say that we divide by thought what is really one into two. Just as the flame of the firestick is the cause of other flames being produced, so the sphota in the buddhi is the cause of the variety of sounds we hear (nada). It is first thought out by the mind, then associated with some object, and then grasped as sabda. Nada is produced in succession; but sphota has no before or after. Although not successively produced, it appears as if gradually made and thus appears divided. Just as a reflection [of the sun, for instance,] seems to take on the motion of the water in which it exists because it is subject to that motion, so also is the relation of sphota and nada.

This text has echoes of Augustine on the inner word; or at least, it hovers around the same area. Nada is the utterance - also known by others as dhvani; it bears all the marks of manifold particularity (difference of pitch, accent, etc.). Sphota - also known by others as artha or meaning - is the sense-giving internal cause of nada.

We see Bhartrhari struggling with the relationship between sphota and nada: some say they are different; others say they are one. [But the problem is not really the relationship between meaning and utterance; the problem is the relationship between intelligere and dicere, the moment of the insight and the emergence of the inner word.]

Sphota is "first thought out by the mind", "then associated with some object", and "then grasped as sabda." First thought out by the mind is fine; what is "then associated with some object"? Is it the moment of identification / objectification? Or does B hold here for some simple application of the eternal sphota to some concrete individual? And what is "then grasped as sabda"? What is sabda here?

"Nada is produced in succession; but sphota has no before or after." Very much like Augustine describing the inner word as beyond any particular language, etc.

At any rate: B holds clearly for a distinction between sphota and nada.

The problem is that he has a theory of eternal sphotas, rather than sphotas / meanings that are actively grasped in data.

Bhasya and Quaestio

In his Guidelines in Indian Philosophy, p. 208, De Smet makes the interesting observation that the bhasya method developed by the 'schoolmen' of India is almost identical with the method of the quaestio developed independently by the medieval Schoolmen of Europe.

In the bhasya method, each topic is to be explained and settled in 5 steps: (1) the object (visaya) of the sutras concerning that topic is declared; (2) the doubt (samsaya) regarding that object; (3) the prima facie view (purvapaksa) which has some plausibility but which contradicts the tradition of the bhasyakara; (4) the final and authoritative opinion (uttarapaksa or siddhanta) is explained and defended and established; (5) this accepted opinion is then applied to other passages (samgati) which both confirm and are explained by it.

I find it exciting that questioning and dialectic is once again, in India as in the West, the road to truth.

Lonergan on judgment

Thomas Chacko, SVD, arrived yesterday to discuss some points about his doctoral dissertation on Lonergan's notion of judgment as grasp of the virtually unconditioned. He has been working on this in Dharmaram, under Saju Chackalackal, a Kant scholar. I had been asked to give some feedback on the matter.

I was surprised to learn that there is, actually, no other attempt to study this important and seemingly obvious topic. Tom said that he had confirmed this during his six-month stay in Toronto with Bob Doran and others. Doran seems to have said that the only study on the matter is an article by Giovanni Sala.

We discussed the distinction between the criteriological and the critical questions that Lonergan makes in chapter 2 of Verbum, a distinction that he certainly carries into Insight. Roughly, I would say that the criteriological question is to be found in chapter 10 of Insight on 'Reflective Understanding,' while the critical question is approached in chapters 11, 12 and 13 and finally clinched in chapter 14. The former question deals with the mechanism of judgment: what makes us 'feel' that we have arrived at a sound judgment? The latter deals with the validity of this process: what do we arrive at when we reach such a point? This critical question is really what was handled by Aquinas under the rubric of wisdom, which was, fittingly, the virtue of right judgment.

I believe that Aquinas' and Lonergan's notion of judgment accounts beautifully both for the (often minor and insignificant) certitudes that we all have, that are vital for the conduct of our daily lives, and whose validity is upheld by the survival of the human species, and for the fragility of the human attainment of truth in many other spheres such as the personal and interpersonal, the moral, the religious, etc.

The complexity of Lonergan's position deserves to be properly highlighted, both as it is presented in Insight, and as it finds another presentation in Method, especially in the (for many, irritatingly banal and inconclusive) functional specialty, Dialectic.

The intersubjective in Buber and Lonergan

I am reading through Anthony Sumer's dissertation on Buber. It strikes me that Lonergan adopted the language of the I-Thou when he talked about primordial intersubjectivity, or of the subject-subject relation, which he contrasted with the subject-object relation. Of course, Lonergan's nuances will be different; he would not go along with Buber's sometime Kantian basis, and with Buber's probably Kantian understanding of object as Gegen-stand...

I think Lonergan's distinction between experiential and explanatory conjugates is also relevant here. The intersubjective would be in the sphere of the experiential - whether it is interhuman, or human-divine (religious experience). But, in Lonergan's thinking, this does not invalidate the move to the explanatory; and hence the place of doctrines, dogmas, etc. which Lonergan places clearly, not on the level of experience, but on the level of judgment. Buber, expectedly, would not like to have much to do with dogma.

I would need to get back to my Rome 2001 paper on Religious Experience and Expression and revisit these topics.

Indian philosophy at Divyadaan

Our Indian philosophy syllabus in Divyadaan is very much a reproduction of what was being done in Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, when we were students there. It is thus heavily weighted in favour of the written tradition, which is also the dominant tradition of Brahminic Hinduism for the most part - except perhaps the last part, the Contemporary Indian Philosophy, which draws on a mixed bag.

It is also rather strictly restricted to the 'philosophical' aspect of the dominant tradition, leaving aside the 'religious' aspects, the itihasas, the puranas, the folklore, the rituals, the stories, the myths, the legends, all the spice of Hinduism. That, I suppose, JDV used to relegate to the theology department, and we in a small way to the course called 'Religions of India.' (In this sense, Religious Hinduism, ed. Neuner and De Smet, was more balanced.)

We would need to integrate: the 'religious'; the political and economical (Chanakya, for example); the aesthetic; and so on.

And we would need to look out for the subaltern basis / context upon which all this arises. Maliekal used to do a good job on this in Karunapuram.

Linguistic spheres not monadic

Habermas writes that hermeneutics shows that linguistic spheres are never monadically shut but are, rather, permeable from without as well as from within. From without, because a language is open, and can in principle express everything that can be said and understood. its horizon therefore is in continuous expansion. From within, because linguistic agents can distance themselves from their own expressions in order to interpret them, reflect on them, etc. All this, Habermas learned from Gadamer: that language can transcend itself and thereby exhibits potential for rationality.

This in contrast to Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein's thesis that linguistically constituted life forms were closed, as if each agent were monadically trapped in its language world, Habermas discerned traces of positivism.

(Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1994, 130)

The thrust of thinking in Divyadaan

The other day two young philosophy students asked me a good question: why is there so much of Lonergan in Divyadaan, and why is Divyadaan against postmodernism?

Or perhaps they said: people are saying that there is too much of Lonergan, and a distaste for postmodernism.

Is there, and is it, I ask myself.

Perhaps. Naturally, also. I believe that the only way to get out of a religion or a philosophy is to either rise to the heights or plumb the depths. Only when one becomes a mystic or an adept might one arrogate to oneself the right to pass judgment.

So: plumb the depths of - whatever: Lonergan, Derrida, Heidegger, Vattimo, Rorty....

The point is to plumb the depths. The point is to read, really read, and think, allow oneself to be challenged, stimulated, provoked.

Does Divyadaan really read and think? Or is it content to mouth platitudes, commonplaces, Selbstverstaendlichkeiten?

And nothing like the original texts of thinkers to stimulate one's thinking.

We need to recover the art of reading.

Then reading would become an aesthetic experience: something that calls for leisure, in contrast to the hurry and haste to 'finish'.

Then we would have conversation, dialectic, dialogue.

Then there would be life.