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Indra's Search for the Self and the Beginnings of Philosophical Perplexity in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Matthew Kapstein
Matthew Kapstein
Affiliation:
Department of South Asian Languages and Civi1izations, University of Chicago, U.S.A.
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Extract

In the present essay our concern will be with some of the earliest documents that shed light on the development of Indian reflections on the puzzles of personal identity. These texts are derived from the Upanisads, which exemplify a type of literature that some philosophers may regard as classic, but not as philosophy. What I will be proposing here is that we attempt to regard such very ancient sources of Indian thought more philosophically, more in the manner that some recent writers have begun to re–examine the Presocratics. I attempt to show that although philosophical method was not yet developed in the early literature under consideration (as equally it was not in Anaxagoras or Heraclitus), several important arguments are nonetheless already emerging there in limine. In surveying these proto–arguments, we will also have occasion to remark on their historical and/or conceptual affinities with the developed philosophies of later ages.

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Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 239 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

page 239 note 1 See, for instance, Barnes, Jonathan, The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).Google Scholar

page 239 note 2 Useful surveys of the evolution of the concept of the self in ancient India may be found in: Deussen, Paul. The Philosophy of the Upanishads (New York: Dover, 1965), trans. Geden, A. S.;Google ScholarKeith, Arthur Berriedale, The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925);Google ScholarWillman-Grabowska, Helena, ‘L'idée de l'ātmán du Rig-Veda aux Brāhmana’, Rocznik Orjentalistyczny, VII (1929–1930), 10–25;Google ScholarAbegg, Emil, ‘Geist und Natur in der Indischen Philosophie’, Asiatische Studien [hereafter: AS], X (1956), 60–78;Google ScholarHorsch, Paul. ‘Le principe d'individuation dans la philosophie Indienne’, AS, X (1956), 60–78Google Scholar, continued in AS, XI (1957–1958), 29–41 and 121–42. The early development of Indian reflection of questions pertaining to personal identity, particularly within ancient Buddhism, has been considered in deptgghg in Collins, Steven, Selfless Persons (Cambridge University Press, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 240 note 1 Edgerton, Franklin, The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 25–6.Google Scholar My reflections on the general features of Upanisadic thought are particularly indebted to Edgerton in what follows.

page 240 note 2 For the Sanskrit text of the Upanisads, I have referred to: Radhakrishnan, S., The Upanishads (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953);Google ScholarSrīśaṅkaragranthāvalī, vol. I (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1964); and Raja, C. Kunhan, ed., Daśopanishads with the Commentary of Sri Upanishad-Brahma-Yogin, 2 vols. (Adyar Library, 1936).Google Scholar The translations given here usually follow those of Radhakrishnan, with minor emendation when it appears to me to be required.

page 240 note 3 The use of the word ‘principle’ in the present essay is not intended to suggest that Upanisadic thought involves the application of formal laws of reason. ‘Principle’ is used to underscore only that there are recurrent motifs which do characterize the type of thinking we find here. Significantly, however, the motifs which I here term ‘principles’ have regular analogues in the later systems of Indian philosophy.

page 241 note 1 The traditional commentators often interpret this occurrence of the word ātman as meaning ‘body’ rather than ‘self’, which, in this context, is lexically possible, but uncertain.

page 242 note 1 Plato, , Phaedo, 70d–e. Trans. Hackforth.Google Scholar

page 243 note 1 Cf. my comments in ‘Mi–pham's Theory of Interpretation,’ in Lopez, Don, ed., Buddhist Hermeneutics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), p. 163.Google Scholar

page 243 note 2 Edgerton, , op. Mt. p. 27.Google Scholar

page 243 note 3 See, e.g. Conze, Edward, Buddhist Meditation (New York/Evanston: Harper and Row, 1969), Pp. 95–107.Google Scholar

page 245 note 1 All remaining Upanisadic citations will be from Chāndogyopaniṣad, VIII. 7–12.

page 246 note 1 Philosophical Investigations, II. iv: ‘Der menschliche Körper ist das beste Bild der menschlichen Seele.’ There are, of course, many other ways of interpreting Prajāpati's laconic remarks. ‘The person seen in the eye’ is most often taken by the traditional commentators to refer suggestively to the seer himself.

page 246 note 2 This point, of course, is one which mind–body identity theorists have always and everywhere accepted as an entailment of their position. Gassendi, a proponent of mind–brain identity, writes, for instance: ‘For you yourself are perturbed when it is perturbed, and oppressed when it is oppressed, and if something destroys the forms of things in it, you yourself do not retain any trace.’ Quoted in Margaret Wilson, Dauler, Descartes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 178.Google ScholarPubMed

page 246 note 3 Some of this tension seems to be involved in the disputes, inspired by Martin Heidegger, over the proper sense of the Greek aletheia. See Heidegger, Martin, ‘Plato's Doctrine of Truth’, in Barrett, William and Aiken, Henry D., eds., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 173–92;Google ScholarFriedländer, Paul, Plato: An Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 221–9.Google Scholar

page 247 note 1 Barnes, , op. cit. pp. 106–7.Google Scholar

page 248 note 1 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 11. xxvii. 26: ‘Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there, I think, another may say is the same person. It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit, and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery… whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to the present self by consciousness, it can no more be concerned in than if they had never been done: and to receive pleasure or plain, i.e. reward or punishment, on the account of any such action, is all one as to be made happy or miserable in its first being, without any demerit at all. For, supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference could there be between the punishment and being created miserable? And therefore, conformable to this, the apostle tells us that, at the great day, when everyone shall receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open.’ Curiously, it is characteristic of the ancient Buddhist Jātaka tales, stories of events in past lives, that the hero's undergoing retribution for a past misdeed is always accompanied by a recollection of the original misdeed.

page 248 note 2 Kripke, Saul A., Naming and Necessity (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), esp. Pp. 144ff.Google Scholar

page 248 note 3 Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand, Principia Mathematica to *56 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 168–72.Google Scholar

page 248 note 4 On this attribution see Wilson, M. D., op. cit. p. 190.Google Scholar

page 248 note 5 M. D. Wilson, ibid.; Rorty, Richard, Mind and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 55–6.Google Scholar Given, however, a Chisholmian view of intentional attribution, it is not clear that Wilson and Rorty are entirely correct about this point.

page 249 note 1 Of course, one might wish to argue that ‘subjection to infirmity’ cannot be made sense of without reference to some modal property or other, e.g. ‘being possibly such that it dies’. However, I do not think that such monadic modal properties vitiate the application of Leibniz's Law.

page 249 note 2 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York/London: Longmans, Green, 1925), pp. 422ff.Google Scholar James maintains, in essence, that while mystical states are ‘absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come…No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.’

page 250 note 1 The term which I here render as ‘enjoyable’ (bhogyam), i.e. worthy of enjoyment, is glossed by the great Vedāntic philosopher Saṅkara with the term phalam, ‘fruit, reward, end, goal’. Radhakrishnan translates it as ‘good’, but though I concur that the term is valuational, I do not think that it is so decisively an axiological term as English ‘good’, or Greek agathón, or, for that matter, the Sanskrit śreyah.

page 251 note 1 Broad, C. D., The Mind and its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925), pp. 487–91, and pp. 500–4.Google Scholar

page 253 note 1 The sceptical, materialist and determinist traditions, e.g., the Cārvāka, Lokāyata, and Ājīvaka, would have been among the dissenters here; but these were never so important as the Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jaina schools, all of which concur on this point.

page 253 note 2 Tattvasaṁgrahapan¯jikā, pp. 6–7. (Bauddha Bharati Series edition.)

page 254 note 1 Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill, trans., Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and other works on the Theory of Ethics, 6th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1927), pp. 218–19.Google Scholar

page 254 note 2 For a thorough discussion, see Beck, Lewis White, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 265–71.Google Scholar

page 255 note 1 A striking exception is this passage, from Udāna, p. 80 (Pali Text Society edition): ‘There is, O monks, that which is unborn, unbecome, unmade, uncompounded. For, O monks, if there had not been what is unborn, unbecome, unmade, uncompounded, then the passing beyond what is born, become, made, compounded, would not be known here.’

page 256 note 1 See Halbfass, Wilhelm, Indien and Europa (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1981), pp. 145–53Google Scholar, and passim, especially on Bhattacharya, K. C., pp. 338–42.Google Scholar

page 256 note 2 Cf. Deussen, Paul, op. cit. pp. 45–50:Google Scholar ‘[The] three essential conditions of man's salvation – God, immortality, and freedom – are conceivable only if the universe is mere appearance and not reality (mere mâyâ and not the âtman), and they break down irretrievably should this empirical reality, wherein we live, be found to constitute the true essence of things.’

page 256 note 3 I wish to thank Professor Philip Quinn, Department of Philosophy, The University of Notre Dame, and Professor James Van Cleve, Department of Philosophy, Brown University, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thoughts on this subject-matter also drew much inspiration from several conversations with Professor Donna Marie Wulff, Department of Religious Studies, Brown University. It hardly needs saying that the bhrānti is all mine.