agyana: existence or absence
I
I face some difficulties in giving a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to your question because I am not sure how to understand ‘Samsara’, ‘Jnana’ and its Sanskrit negation ‘Ajnana’, and ‘moksha’. It is equally unclear whether there are differences of import between being ‘the root’ and being ‘the cause’, as far as the relation between ‘Ajnana’ and ‘Samsara’ are concerned. ‘Maaya’ is another notion used in the Indian traditions, at times as a synonym for ‘ajnana’ or ‘avidya’, at times as the ’cause’ of ‘Ajnana’.
To illustrate my difficulties, consider two ways of understanding, say, ‘Ajnana’ and ‘Moksha’.
If ‘Ajnana’ is ignorance (understood as absence of knowledge) then ‘Jnana’ does NOT have its opposite nature. The reason is not far to seek: ignorance, because it is determined as the absence of knowledge, does not possess any qualities or properties. (Something has to exist before it can have any properties.) Therefore, ‘jnana’ cannot possess a nature that is the opposite of ‘ajnana’. So, ipso facto, we cannot claim that ‘jnana’ is the only solution. If we insist on speaking about ‘opposite nature’, consider the argument that anything that merely exists has ‘the opposite’ property of ‘Ajnana’ by the facticity of its existence. From this it follows that, if the only way to ‘break’ ajana requires the presence of something that has its opposite ‘nature’, then any and every object that exists in the world can break ‘ajnana’.
Suppose that ‘Ajnana’ is a positive force of some sort. To suggest that ‘only something that has an opposite force can break it’ requires argument, evidence or some kind of proof. One could equally well suggest that ‘jnana’ and ‘ajnana’ meet other and neutralize one another; or that they both destroy each other; or that they combine to produce something that is entirely new; and so on. Each view has a plausible analogue in the world. Therefore, it depends on the plausibility of these analogies in order to accept that ‘jnana’ is the only solution.
Consider now the notion of ‘moksha’. One could argue that this is attainable only at the end of a life of a person. If this position is accepted, then the claim that ‘jnana’ leads to ‘moksha’ has the same status as the claim that ‘Nishkama karma’, or ‘bhakti’, or ‘yoga’ or ‘tapas’, or ‘puja’ or whatever else leads to ‘moksha’ as well. Therefore, one cannot defend the claim that ‘only jnana’ leads to moksha.
Let us suppose that ‘moksha’ can be attained during the course of a person’s life. In that case, ‘moksha’ could be a state of mind, the way one lives, the manner in which one goes about with mundane things, an orientation, or a path one follows, and so on. If this is the case, then one cannot claim that ‘jnana’ is the only path that leads to ‘moksha’: there are multiple ways to arrive at a state of mind, come to a certain way of living, learn a manner of going about with mundane things, developing an orientation or even to tread a path. Even here, arguments are absent to suggest that ‘jnana’ is the only path to ‘moksha’.
You see, the above is merely a hurried sample of the kind of difficulties we face, if we insist (today) on using Sanskrit words while conducting discussions about issues of great importance that the Indian traditions have been tackling over the millennia. Then we would simply (at the very best) reproduce old debates (of centuries ago) without solving any of the problems we confront. Hence my suggestion: let us leave the Sanskrit words aside; let us recreate the problem-situation of yesteryears in the languages and idioms of the twenty-first century. Let us see how many of these problems continue to make sense to us when we accept physics, chemistry, biology, logic, etc. that we know and take for granted. Of course, it is possible that some of these disputes will continue to exist even under such a reconstruction. But, if they do, they will enrich our lives instead of simply leading to semantic difficulties (at best) and linguistic squabbles (at worst) as is the case if you and I discuss in English using Sanskrit words.
II
You ask: “Ajnana is an absense with respect to a single entity *jnana* while shunya or void is an absense with respect to anything or everything. How can they be equated? How can, for example, your absense be the same as my absense?”
Using knowledge as the translation of ‘Jnana’, what I say is this. Knowledge is always of something or another, i.e., it is about something specific in the world. Its negation, I use the notion of ignorance as a translation for ‘Ajnana’, suggests that there is no such knowledge. (In the context of this discussion, knowledge is about one’s true nature. It is an answer to the question ‘who am I?’) Many false statements can be given as an answer to this question, but there is NO correct answer to give, if one does not have the correct answer. That is to say, that person does not have (or possess) knowledge. In this sense, knowledge is non-existent as far as that person is concerned. If ignorance is used to characterize the absence of knowledge (or the absence of the true and correct answer), then this ‘absence’ is like the empty set: knowledge simply does not exist (as far as that individual is concerned). All objects and entities that do not exist are on par: one cannot distinguish between non-existent objects because we distinguish objects from each other on the basis of some or another property. However, an object should exist for it to possess or have properties. As a consequence, there is only one empty set. (All possible but non-existent objects sit in this empty set, to put it a bit paradoxically. There are philosophically very interesting works written on non-existent objects; but I am not entering this terrain for the time being. There are also very thought-provoking philosophical writings on ‘negative facts’, i.e., ‘facts’ that are not true. But I do not need them as yet for my research.)
Consider the city of Bremen in Germany today. Neither you nor I are present there; neither is Kannan, or Arun or Divya. In fact, all the human beings who ever lived on earth are absent from Bremen; for that matter, so are all the people who are not in Bremen today. How to make sense of the claim that the absence of these people have differential impacts on the city of Bremen? As far as I am concerned, I cannot. While our individual presence in the city of Bremen would have a differential impact on the city, the absence of all the people who are not in Bremen today has exactly the same impact: nothing. (Of course, some person in Bremen might have taken to excessive drinking because his/her loved one is absent from Bremen today. However, the impact is made by the person who is in the city and not by the one who is absent.) Our respective absences from some place or another might affect different people differently. But that does not mean that my absence and your absence are different KINDS of absences. We are absent. Period.
You further ask: “The biggest problem with considering Ajnana as a positive existence is the dictum – “That which exists can never cease to be”. If ignorance is some sort of existence, then how can it ever be got rid of? Existence can never cease to be but can be transformed. I don’t understand what transforming avidya could mean. I still dont understand why an absense cannot be a cause? I agree it cannot be a material cause but what about instrumental cause?”
In the first place, the notion of existence used in this dictum is technical in nature; it is a term of the art. Second, this dictum is ‘true’ only by virtue of definition. Therefore, argument is not possible: it will be an interminable conflict between ‘my definition’ and ‘your definition’ without there being a way to settle the disputes.
What I am saying about ’causes’ is simply this. If something has to bring something else about, then it must exist in this world. In some senses, I am leaving everything vague, when I make this claim: I am not advancing any philosophical thesis about what it means ‘to bring about something’, what the ‘world’ encompasses, and what ‘existence’ is. I leave them vague because I would not like a philosophical thesis to lay down beforehand what any of these terms mean. I would like theories about the world to start explicating the meaning of these words. Until such time, I work with very loose suggestions that are intuitively communicable but not necessarily true by virtue of that. My intuitive idea tells me that objects, forces, powers, etc. need to be a part of this world (‘exist’, in this intuitive sense), if they have to bring about some change (’cause’, in this intuitive sense) in the world. May be, the physicists will (one day) come up with a theory that this claim is not necessarily true for the Cosmos but holds only for certain domains. Even in such a case, I need a theory about how something that is non-existent can cause a change in the world, if one uses it to account for how ignorance prevents the emergence of knowledge (when ignorance is conceptualized as the absence of knowledge). Until such stage, I would like to work with the idea that if ignorance actively prevents the emergence of knowledge then that is because ignorance is a positive force of some sort and not merely the absence of knowledge.
I am not sure what you want to say with the distinction between ‘material’ and ‘instrumental’ cause in this context. As far as I am concerned, before something can be a cause (in the sense I just explained), no matter what kind of cause, it has to be a part of this world.
III
In some senses, we are wandering away from the question the thread raised: is it the case that there is only one path to the enlightenment, namely through knowledge (of the Upanishads)? More specifically, do the puranic stories simplify the insights of the Upanishads? My answer to it was in the negative.
The questions you raise in your last post, it appears to me, is an attempt by you to figure out from within the framework of some or another system of Indian thinking (let us, for the moment, call it Indian philosophy) what I am saying. I am not sure that such an attempt is going to be very productive. A better way would be to choose common problems and see what the respective answers are and find out which one of them is better suited for our purposes.
Despite the above reservation, here are my answers to your queries. I shall use a slightly different format for my answers this time.
You say: “But the point is this – who is making the statement “people are in ajnana”? it has to be a jnani. if everybody were ajnanis then there wouldn’t be a concept of ajnana. So only a jnani can make sense of ajnana.”
The above claims are entirely context dependent. In some kinds of contexts, one can say that ‘people are ignorant’, include oneself in the category of ‘people’, without having knowledge. That is, one can speak about ignorance of ‘people’ (including one’s own) without requiring that one has knowledge. For instance, in statements of the following sort, ‘we do not know much about how the brain works’; ‘we do not have an understanding of the mechanisms for the spread of cancer’; ‘we do not know whether elementary arithmetic is consistent’ etc., we do speak of ignorance without it entailing that the speaker has knowledge. In other kinds of contexts, one can speak only of other’s ignorance even if one is more ignorant than the other: ‘he claims to be a physicist but does not know much about physics. Witness how he fell flat when I asked him to explain (this or that)”. In yet other kinds of contexts, one’s knowledge is the basis of characterizing other’s ignorance: “Even though he speaks Kannada fluently, he does not know its grammar. He could not parse words according to Kannada Sandhi rules.” And so on.
When you say that if everyone were to be ignorant, there would be no concept of ignorance. I am not sure how to interpret this sentence. There are many domains I am ignorant about, and I know I am ignorant about those domains. You seem to suggest that the logic of the word ‘Ajnana’ entails that there can be no knowledge of one’s own ignorance (or about the limit of one’s own knowledge). It could be the case that the notion of ‘Ajnana’ has this logical and semantic property; I do not know. In that case, I would be very curious to discover why the theorem ‘p knows X entails that p knows that p knows X’ would be invalid in Indian philosophies.
Or, it could be the case that you are suggesting something entirely different. ‘If I do not know the true nature of my ‘self’ then it entails that I do not know that I do not know’. If this is the case, then it has more to do with the nature of the ‘I’ (and the ‘self’) than with either knowledge or ignorance. Even here, there is a problem: how do we understand the quest for our ‘true’ nature then? I can ask myself the question ‘who am I?’ and go in search of answers precisely because I do not know the answer and know that I do not know (the answer).
You say further only the knowledgeable can make ‘sense’ of ignorance. I lose you here. If ignorance is the absence of knowledge, what does it mean to make ‘sense’ of ignorance? Absence of knowledge is neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘nonsensical’. Ignorance itself is not a sentence (or a proposition) even if we use a sentence to speak about someone’s ignorance.
Your analogy is not a happy one. The relationship between boredom and the TV does not mirror the relationship between ‘Jnana’ and ‘Ajnana’. The latter is the negation (in logical terms) of the former, which is not the case with respect to TV and boredom. You can draw a logical conclusion using an analogy and apply it another domain, if the (logical) relationship between the elements in the former mirrors the logical relationship between the elements in the latter.
You say, “To such a jnani, ajnana which is an absense of what he possesses (jnana) can very well be a cause.” I do not see what makes you suggest this. Note that the absence of knowledge about some X could also mean the presence of wrong ideas about that X. So, when the ‘Jnani’ explains the ‘Ajnani’ in terms of ‘Ajnana’, what he is doing is the following: he explains the ‘Ajnani’ in terms of the wrong ideas s/he has but not by appealing to the ‘causal powers’ of what is absent. That is, the ‘Jnani’ says of the ‘Ajnani’ that the latter believes, for instance, that his/her body is his/her ‘true’ self, or that s/he thinks that s/he is the agent, or that s/he identifies her/his ‘true’ self with money, beauty, power, etc. The ‘Jnani’ might even ‘summarize’ the explanation thus: s/he acts that way in the world because of ‘Ajnana’. But this summary is exactly that: a summary and not, in itself, an explanation which appeals to an absence acting causally in the world.
IV
Neither your analogy nor your argument is apt but I shall simply accept both for the time being.
You say, to begin with, that there could be no concept of ‘blindness’ if all were to be blind. I do not know what makes you say this. We are not telepathic, our physics tells us that telekinesis is not possible, or that we cannot levitate, and so on. But that has not prevented us from having concepts about any of these. Since when do facts about the world act as restraints on human imagination? (Our Puranic stories are the best illustrations of my claim; just read about the powers that Rishis are supposed to have.)
And then you talk about blindness as a fictitious force. I lose you here. Why is this ‘fictitious’? We are ‘blind’ to (i.e., we cannot see) infrared rays, electric and magnetic fields, and so on. In what sense is this blindness fictitious? This blindness is not a force, fictitious or otherwise. It merely spells out the limitations of human vision. Consider this. We hear sounds only on certain wavelengths. The dogs can hear sounds that we cannot. So, when a dog trainer blows a whistle that emits sounds we cannot hear, am I to assume that the dog reacts to ‘fictitious’ sounds? Or that our deafness for this whistle is a ‘fictitious force’?
It is not at all clear to me what you are defending, why you are defending what you are, and what would happen if it turns out to be indefensible.
V
Your posts continue to puzzle me. On the one hand, you make absolute claims about the limits of human imagination, namely, that it “CAN ONLY be a permutation and combination of our experiences”. On the other, you contradict yourself by speaking about the 4th dimension, which is beyond our experience, and which, you say, human beings cannot imagine. How did anybody come up with the notion and the mathematics of 4 dimensions if it could not be imagined?
Would you like to say that quantum physics, the n-dimensional mathematics, etc. are not products of human imagination and that, say, they are products of human creativity? That is to say, are you defining ‘human imagination’ as that which cannot go beyond the macro-experiences we have? If this is the case, there is no point to a discussion because it becomes a dispute about definitions of words.
However, even under this interpretation, we CAN HAVE NOTIONS of blindness and vision (as products of human creativity) in the same way we have so many notions (and theories), which far outstrip anything our macro-world experience can provide us with. Thus, I am puzzled.
VI
X says: “Lets suppose there is a prisoner who has been in prison all his life. To him, that is how things are. He does not feel any limitations on freedom. He is free as it can be. Now to an outside observer, this prisoner ‘seems’ to be constrained. But
this ‘constraint’ which is the cause of his limitation is only in the outside observer’s mind not prisoner‘s. So, there is ‘constraint’ from a certain frame of reference which is ‘causing’ limitations to the prisoners freedoms. But this can only be an
*appearance* of a cause and not a real cause because the ‘constraint’ comes into existence only from a certain frame of
reference (outside) but not to the prisioner. So this ‘constraint’ is both existence (from outside) and absence (for the prisoner). how can such an entity cause? I think it is just an appearance of a cause in the descriptions from a certain frame of reference.”
With the example of a prisoner, you are confusing issues. There is a difference between (a) the existence of things; (b) a particular description of the world which provides us with ’causes’; (c) and some other description of the world. We might, if we so choose, take something that exists and identify it as a ’cause’. You seem to suggest that something or another is a ’cause’ accordingly as whether or not there exists a description, which shows that something is a ’cause’. For the sake of argument, I am willing to buy this. In that case, though, you cannot speak about ‘apparent causes’ and ‘real causes’. (You cannot, because the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ has nothing to do with whether or not something is a cause in a particular description of the world.) Nor can you speak about their ‘existence’. (Because, the notion of ’cause’ is defined with respect to the place some concept occupies in a description of the world and NOT with respect to its position in the world.) You will have to say: something is a cause, if there is a causal description that makes something into a cause. The confusion is simply this: you speak as though the ‘presence of a concept AS A CAUSE’ is identical to the ‘existence of an entity’. This confusion arises because you use the word ‘existence’ in two senses: (a) as that entity which is; (b) as that concept which occupies a particular place in a description. The PRESENCE of some concept in a particular description does not guarantee the EXISTENCE of an object named by that concept anymore than the absence of that concept in another description of the world furnishes us with proof about the absence of the said object.
I am interested in understanding the Indian traditions. I would like to know whether I can formulate their problem is such a way that I can also recreate their debates. In one sense, our discussion suggests that it is possible: you recognize my formulation problem enough to come up with a defence of ‘jnana’. I suppose that is enough for the time being. As you say, we will continue our debates when we meet each other.