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Aristotle, film, mathematics, mystical experience, Nāgārjuna, Pali suttas, Plato, René Descartes, The Matrix
I recently had an extraordinarily stimulating conversation with two friends who wish to remain anonymous (but they know who they are). The topic: can we ever have certain knowledge about anything? My initial response, not intended to be flippant, was: I’m not certain.
The friends claimed certainty about things that I don’t think we can reasonably be certain about. One claimed to have achieved certain knowledge through the Sufi practice of dhikr; I argued that this could be a feeling of certainty about falsehood rather than about truth, so that one needs standards of truth external to the mystical experience. The other claimed that we could know with certainty that we are awake and not sleeping; I wasn’t ready to grant that. I’m ready to grant the basic point of Descartes’s skepticism: although we can be relatively confident that the things of the world are as they seem, it’s possible they could all be a dream, or the creation of an evil demon – or even the Matrix. (What a gift that movie is to teachers of introductory philosophy!)
Now Descartes himself thinks he can have certain knowledge in spite of all this doubt, or in a certain sense even because of it: he believes that the one thing he can’t doubt is the fact that he is doubting. His doubt would be logically self-contradictory, for its very existence would require the presence of a doubter, namely himself. Thus, “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum).
My Buddhist readers will probably be unsympathetic to Descartes’s argument, and rightly so. Descartes tries here to prove the very thing that the Buddha of the Pali suttas – and the vast majority of later Buddhists – would be at pains to deny, namely the existence of the self. I would argue that a Buddhist critique knocks Descartes down quite effectively. Descartes may have established the existence of doubt, but not of an agent of doubt, of a doubter. That’s an error, a reification. As a popular book on Buddhism has it, there are thoughts without a thinker. Even if one disagrees with Buddhist deconstructions of the self – and I am often skeptical of them – one must surely still acknowledge that they at least cast doubt on the self, the thing Descartes thought could not be doubted.
Nevertheless, there’s a route to certain knowledge that one can still follow from here. The basic Buddhist critique knocks down certainty about the thinking self; it does not knock down the more basic pursuit of foundations and certainty in the face of skepticism. Descartes had a basically sound insight in one respect: while you might doubt the existence of a doubter, you cannot doubt the existence of doubt itself! If Descartes was really aiming for a completely certain foundation to stand on, he would have been better off saying: “There is thinking, therefore there is being.”
It’s there, in thought itself, where I would look for certain knowledge. Thought must be possible; the existence of the idea that thought isn’t possible implies that it is. Even in the Matrix, thought must be possible; it cannot be otherwise. Moreover, the existence of thought seems to require something like Aristotle’s laws of logic; without them, thought cannot make sense. Everything is what it is (the law of identity); and nothing can both be and not be in the same time and in the same respect (the law of non-contradiction). Less sure about his third law, the law of the excluded middle (everything either is or is not); that one’s been quite plausibly challenged by contemporary intuitionistic logic, and before that by Madhyamaka Buddhists like Nāgārjuna. But a denial of identity or non-contradiction effectively invalidates itself.
Here, in the realms of thought and logic, is where I would look for certainty. (Plato’s venture into mathematics is also a plausible place to look: even in the Matrix, one would think, 2+2 is always 4.) The possibility of thought, the law of identity: these things seem incontrovertible. But that’s just the problem: maybe they only seem incontrovertible. Descartes thought that the existence of the self was an ironclad, logically irrefutable foundation; but he turns out to be wrong. As far as I can tell, the existence of thought or the law of non-contradiction are irrefutable. But couldn’t I be missing something the way Descartes was?
If certainty has to do with knowledge then it must be admitted that there can be no such thing as absolute certainty. What is not open to the assault of the determined sceptic is not knowledge. Can there however be assurance which goes beyond knowledge? Descartes found this in the existence of a good god who would not suffer him to be the prey of a demon.
I wonder though if the problem of certainty is not an artefact of the idealist move of focusing on what a realist would call the second reflexion. In effect Descartes considered that as the directly given in experience. The first reflexion according to the realist would be the intuition of being, of suchness. From that we may go on to ask in a second reflexion – ‘is it’, ‘what is it’, ‘is it adequate’ etc. This is the domain of methodic doubt.
The primary intuition of being is what the advaitins call ‘kuthasta’ or the anvil i.e. solid. It is pervaded by selfness or the unity of being which makes perception possible. Buddhism which tends towards the idealism of the second reflexion would reject this but it may be that this position which is an early one could be the result of a desire to create brand difference.
(from Intro. to ‘Being and Nothingness’ /Sartre section iii on the Pre-Reflective Cogito)
Thanks, Michael. Interesting points. I guess I’m really not persuaded by realism in this sense; I think it’s a dangerous move to give epistemological primacy to sense data, to “the directly given in experience.” We are all familiar with dreams, hallucinations, misperceptions (rope-snakes). If the priority is only chronological – intuition literally comes first – I might have less of a problem with it, though I’m not sure how accurate that is as an account of child development.
As for the reflexions… I would probably agree with the Advaitins that to account for the things we think we perceive, we need to admit being itself. Existence exists; that’s one of those necessary logical foundations. But… so does thought. That’s just as necessary. To allow for existence to be perceived, there must be perception and thought. And those don’t seem like the same thing as existence – especially because they do contain illusion.
So I think the Buddhists have logical reason not to go along with the Ved?ntic One. More than that, I don’t see it as brand differentiation either; Buddhism really predates Advaita. Sure, the Upani?ads themselves (at least the B?had Aranyaka and the Ch?ndogya) come a long time before Buddhism, but they can be read in many different ways; by the time Śaṅkara came along to express Advaita ideas clearly, people were calling him a crypto-Buddhist.
Hello Amod, Michael,
I just can’t help but think of Kant. Now, I’m not familiar with his work directly – a horrible failing for one who has any pretense to philosophizing! – but didn’t he try to tackle this problem directly? Being, as you’ve mentioned, Amod, is self-evident, but the self is not (I have to confess, I’ve never been able to catch it). But if the self exists, wouldn’t that be in the realm of the supersensible?
The old no-self/not-self debate rages on…
Now that you mention it, I’m not entirely sure what Kant said about the self as such; I know his practical philosophy reasonably well, but that’s part of the theoretical philosophy where I’m still hazy. I do know about his theory of free will, which seems closely tied up with self: we can’t actually know whether we have a free will or not; what we know is that we can’t know. BUT – the idea of our acting in the world makes no sense unless we assume that we have free will. So, since it is possible that we have free will, we must assume that we have it. And this assumption is indeed made in the supersensible realm, the synthetic a priori.
I’m not sure that I buy Kant’s view. But turning back to the self itself… a lot hinges on what we mean by self in the first place. Many people identify the self with continuity of memory, and memory is something that can be detected by the senses – we can test whether something is remembered. But I think a more important ingredient in the self is continuity of consciousness, and that is in some sense supersensible – consciousness is not sensed, it does the sensing. (That’s why people with strongly empirical bents often deny the very existence of consciousness; see Ryan Overbey’s comments to these posts for an example.) But… that consciousness is rooted not only in memory, but in a body; the idea of transferring a mind from one body to another is the stuff of cartoons, barely even of science fiction. Bodily changes (such as drugs and fevers) affect consciousness deeply. It would still seem to me, then, that the self is a mix of sensible and supersensible factors.
Hi Amod,
I’m going to leave aside the question of the freedom of the will for now (let’s just say that I’m not entirely convinced either that it exists or that we ought to assume it does).
I suppose that I have always considered the Buddha’s anatta doctrine to essentially be saying something not dissimilar to what some, such as Kant, have said later; no matter where you look, you find you cannot “find” your Self in empirical reality. The soteriological function of this interpretation is obvious and I don’t think that it was meant to be taken much further than that. The thoughts without a thinker notion has always seemed to me like it describes the phenomenon pretty well. Of course, I know that I’m running the risk of Buddhist heresy.
Regarding empiricism, I have to admit that I have a certain tendency towards it. I have suspicions that most everything that goes on in the human mind can be boiled down to brain functioning. Except, of course, for consciousness. But then I run the risk of a sort of epiphenomenalism, which I am not yet ready to grant (because if consciousness doesn’t have any causal efficacy, then it couldn’t be an object of thought, now could it?). A conundrum.
I wonder, are you terribly familiar with David Chalmers? I have a copy of his “The Conscious Mind” buried under a pile of books that I’ve been meaning to get to.
I don’t know Chalmers’s work well, although it sounds to me like it’s closer to the truth than reductionist accounts like Dennett’s. I’m generally not an empiricist, because I think empiricism tends to put the cart before the horse, so to speak. Scientific experiment tells us a great number of vitally important things about the causal processes of the empirical world; but for it to make sense, we must logically assume a number of ideas that make experiment on causal processes possible, including the existence of causality, truth and thought (the latter being a part of consciousness). As Michael notes below, existence cannot be a perception, but a ground of perception; so too, perception is a ground of empirical knowledge and experiment.
Where the Buddhists differ from Kant is in denying that the self (especially free will, at least in Śāntideva’s case) exists at a transcendental level. For Kant, the knowledge of free will is in a certain sense more certain and fundamental (because undisprovable) than anything we could know empirically. For Buddhists, if we have any such knowledge of the self, it is only at the lower, conventional level, for the benefit of those who haven’t got to the real truth yet.
Amod, James,
What Descartes took as the direct experience of reality was the deliverance of the contents of his own consciousness. Because this was all that he knew, as he saw it, there was nothing to be true to, it could only be true to itself so no real concept of error could arise. But consciousness itself could not be denied. Sartre’s point is that this is not knowledge and therefore could not be an axiomatic first step in the creation of a chain of reasoning. A realist has to live with error but he can know it.
Existence or Being cannot really be a perception as such but rather the ground of perception. Here there is a hint of Kantian transcendental thinking viz. how things are fundamentally for things to appear as they do. Kant on the unity of apperception or the transcendental unity of self-consciousness offers the counter to the popular Buddhist idea of a thought without a thinker. There is a bewildering clarity to Kant that I first discovered when I read the Critique of Pure Reason on a bench in a graveyard long ago, the nearest I have ever come to a Tantric experience. It produces great dispassion or madness.
My interim position on the atman/anatman controversy is that what is denied by one is not affirmed by the other. The Brh.Up. and Ch.Up. are replete with the idea of the pervasiveness of the self which is in every state of consciousness but cannot be identified with any particular state or extracted from it. Many analogies are given to in order to make accessible this profound mystery. Early advaita was influenced by Buddhism as is clear from the karikas of Gaudapada on the Mandukya Up. Shankara though in his commentary on the Brahma-Sutras engages in vigorous battle with Buddhist thought offering cogent rebuttals of annica/annata, vijnanavada etc. The crypto-Buddhist smear and the epithet mayavadin comes from the Dvaitin school.
Hi Michael – I’m not sure I get Sartre’s point. Why is the recognition of consciousness not knowledge, and so why can it not be axiomatic?
Amod writes:
Hi Michael – I’m not sure I get Sartre’s point. Why is the recognition of consciousness not knowledge, and so why can it not be axiomatic?
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Hi Amod,
Elsewhere in the section which I quoted he writes:
What I take Sartre to mean is that the Cartesian cogito is not primative but consciousness looking at itself. It is in the realm of knowledge and so is not foundational of itself. It does not establish itself.
Really the whole section needs to be read to get the flavour and feel of his somewhat anfractuose though profound thought. My seeing in the pre-reflective cogito a ‘kuthasta’ may be no more than the yellow Toyota syndrome – when you buy one, you begin to see them everywhere.
So as I understand it, Sartre’s point is that thought and being must be separate, so that thought cannot be foundational for being, but only the other way round? I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems to me that when one looks for foundations properly, one establishes being and thought at the same time – because one establishes that thought exists. And I’m not sure it’s a huge leap from there to say that at that fundamental level, being and thought are the same – whether one expresses that point by saying “brahman is sat, cit, and ?nanda” or “the real is rational and the rational is real.”
Amod,
It’s a complex argument and I hope I have not mangled it too much. It’s not so much discursive, apodeictic thought that Sartre is talking about but consciousness as such which he identifies with being. If I might risk a simplistic assimilation, the vritti or mental modification is distinguished from pure consciousness in an analogous manner. Of course Sartre’s being consciousness is human being consciousness.
All certainly aside…
One of the most entertaining aspects of certain kinds of epilepsy (mine is Temporal Lobe) is the complete lack of certainty in existence. Tuning out and seeing one’s surroundings, not through a glass darkly, but through a glass much too bright is the regular experience of folks like me. What that does, of course, is make speculations about “certainty” or “reality” or “epistemology” interesting mental games to play in those moments when the world looks as if it exists. Those who want to know what certainty is should include a few epileptics in their conversation just to keep things on an even keel.
Welcome to the blog, Harold. This is very interesting – could you say a bit more about your condition? How does your perception of the world differ from that of other people you encounter, and how does that affect your view of certainty?
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