Back to Mind and Consciousness: Various Approaches
Abstract of "The Mind-Body Problem in Three Indian Philosophies, Sankara's Advaita Vedanta, Gangesa's Navya Nyaya, and Aurobindo's Theistic Monism" By Stephen Phillips, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712 USA
Self-illumining consciousness, a consciousness that knows itself "non-dualistically"
(a-dvaita), is central to the long-standing Indian school Advaita Vedanta whose
chief proponent is Sankara (c. 700). Sankara would avoid the mind-body problem
by denying third-person, externalist access to this consciousness. Language
cannot express it but only indicate where it is found (language as upalaksana,
not visesana). And there is no call to explain the world in relation to self-illumining
consciousness, for any explanation would have to employ externalist, attributive
terms. Thus Advaita appears compatible with all science and externalist theory
except that which would explain self-illumining consciousness itself. Self-illumining
consciousness is self-authenticating, unlike other conscious states in having
exclusive access to itself. Only it has the right to pronounce on itself, so
to say. Trespassers invariably get their putative explanandum wrong. But Gangesa's
Navya Nyaya (c. 1300+), a second classical philosophy, attacks the self-illumination
thesis by denying self-authentication and by clarifying the indicator/attributer
distinction that Sankara relies on. Nyaya is itself dualistic, or pluralistic,
finding nine types of substance and several types of property as distinguishable
ontological items. An awareness is a psychological property distinct from physical
properties. An awareness rests or occurs in a self, and only for an instant
before giving way to another awareness, each indicating an intersubjective object
or objects other than itself. But awarenesses are also causally continuous with
their objects--in the one direction, through the operations of the sense organs,
sight, hearing, and so on, and, in the
other, in guiding action. Thus Nyaya has been interpreted as avoiding the mind-body
problem through its view of causality between mental and physical items supplemented
by its understanding of the inductive method
whereby causal laws are found. But, as I shall show, Nyaya has its own variety
of the mind-body problem which is especially evident in its theory of sensory
connectiveness. Such connectiveness is a main focus of the
arguments of the modern spiritual philosopher, Aurobindo (1872-1950). Aurobindo
proposes a new type of connectiveness and is able to tie up his theory with
a notion of consciousness as intrinsically self-illumining,
though he does not embrace Advaita indeterminism. This paper concludes with
scrutiny of his purportedly finding the mind-body problem in his opponents'
views while avoiding it in his own.