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    Ineluctable Modalities of the Sensible

    Thoughts on the Nyaya Buddhist Debate on Perception,

    Conceptualization and Language

    Conor Roddy

    Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our

    conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of

    our conception of them.

    Marcel Proust1

    When we try to pick out anything by itself, wrote John Muir, we find it hitched to

    everything else in the Universe. This is especially true in philosophy, where each

    branch seems to bear on every other, so that one commonly finds oneself at a loss as to

    which fork to take when working on a problem. Metaphysics and epistemology are

    normally thought of as separate disciplines, but issues in these fields overlap to such a

    degree that one cannot say which is the more basic. The Sanskrit wordpramana signifies

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    a means of knowledge, or that by which true cognition is arrived at. Andpratyaksa, or

    perception, is the onlypramana which every school of Indian philosophy, Vedic and

    non-Vedic alike, accepts as valid. Thus it is a pivotal topic in classical Indian thought. I

    attempt in this paper to compare and contrast the Nyaya and Buddhist theories of

    perception, without straying too far into the pathless land of metaphysics in the process.

    Hence questions concerning the nature of the real and the status of the external world

    will be bracketed. Or, to speak somewhat more honestly perhaps, I shall struggle to hold

    off such beasts at arms length. They can, I believe, be kept in abeyance, though not

    entirely at bay.

    Broadly put, there are two distinct ways in which Indian philosophers give an account of

    perception. Analogues to both of them are to be found in the Western tradition. The

    Naiyayikas define it in terms of its cause. Perception is that knowledge which arises

    from the contact of a sense with its object, one reads in the Nyaya Sutra. Furthermore,

    for an act of perception to occur, the mind (manas) must be in contact with the sense

    organ, and the self (atman) with the mind. The first condition is not fulfilled when a

    person fails to pay attention, and the second is not met when a person is in deep sleep.

    The Naiyayikas believe in God, but they hold that he has no sense organs. To cover this

    case the Navya-Nyaya school provides an alternative formulation, which stresses its

    immediacy or directness. Perception is negatively defined as that which does not have

    another cognition as its principal instrumental cause (karana). For humans, despite the

    presence of other cognitive and non-cognitive causal factors, such as memory and the

    sense organs for example, the object itself is the principal instrumental cause of the

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    perception, while for God perceptions are causeless and so, a fortiori, lack any

    instrumental causes. Thus the modified definition applies to both situations.

    According to Nyaya there are two types of perception: ordinary and extraordinary.

    Extraordinary perception is subdivided into three kinds: perception by clairvoyant yogis,

    perception of every particular falling under a universal, and synaesthetic perception

    owing to prior cognitive association. Such varieties of perception, however, need not be

    considered here.

    The second way to characterize perception is in terms of its nature as opposed to its

    provenance. The Jainas distinguish it by virtue of its vividness, which brings to mind

    Humes dichotomy of impressions and ideas. For Vedantins, its essential feature is

    immediacy. Bhartrhari and the Grammarians believe that all cognition, perception

    included, is inescapably pervaded by language. Every thought is composed of latent

    words, from which arises consciousness of the object. No perception is possible apart

    from the matrix of implicit speech.

    The Buddhist understanding of perception is diametrically opposed to Bhartrharis. Thus

    true perception, according to Dinnaga, is completely free of conceptual construction.

    Datum comes from the Latin dare, to give, and it is this pure given, say the Buddhists,

    which is the object of perception proper. As such it is supposed to be untouched by any

    trace of language or thought. All schools of Buddhism, from Therevada to Zen, stress

    direct, unmediated awareness of raw reality.

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    The Naiyayikas, and most other Indian thinkers, try to steer a middle course between

    these two extremes by dividing ordinary perception into two sorts, namely savikalpaka

    and nirvikalpaka, or determinate and indeterminate.

    Gangesa, the founder of the Navya-Nyaya, accepts that even the simplest verbalizable

    awareness has an ontologically complex object. When one sees a pot, so the argument

    goes, this perception can be expressed this is a pot.*

    One sees, in other words, thatit is a

    pot, or an entity characterized by potness. The qualificandum is cognized through the

    qualifier which inheres in it. Thus every object of verbalizable cognition is known as

    instantiating some quality. But given this, if every cognition can be verbalized, an

    infinite regress ensues. For consider the case of the pot, a particular qualified by potness.

    One might now ask, what about this potness? Through what qualifier is potness itself

    known? Potnessness? And is potnessness known through potnessnessness? This is

    clearly absurd.

    It is to avoid such a sorry predicament that Gangesa postulates indeterminate,

    unverbalizable perception. In indeterminate perception, the qualifier is not apprehended

    as anything: rather it is directly grasped. In this way the above regress is effectively

    forestalled. Indeterminate perception is not of the form this is a pot. The particular

    entity, the qualifier potness, and the relation of inherence are all given. But they are not

    given bound by any relation, neither separate nor conjoined. Only at the level of

    * Note that strictly speaking, in Nyaya the perception is expressed by a complex term, not a proposition:an object qualified by potness.

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    determinate perception are the various items synthesized. A verbalizable cognition of the

    form this is a potnow arises.

    Indeterminate perception, for Gangesa, is a purely systemic requirement. At first sight

    (pun intended) it may seem similar to pre-conceptual awareness in Western psychology.

    One thinks of William Jamess description of the infants world as a buzzing blooming

    confusion, and of the following delightful passage from the famous opening pages of

    Proust, where he describes waking in the middle of the night, having lost all sense of

    place, and even self:

    I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker

    in the depths of an animals consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-

    dweller; but then the memorynot yet of the place in which I was, but of various

    other places where I had lived and might now very possibly bewould come

    like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being,

    from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse

    centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts

    with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original

    components of my ego.2

    But a fundamental difference obtains between such familiar experiences and

    indeterminate perception proper. Alone among cognitions in the Nyaya scheme,

    indeterminate perceptions are not apperceptible. They cannot be discovered by

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    introspection, as they occur below the threshold of awareness. They have no

    phenomenological substance, but are merely established by inference.

    Indeterminate perception is used by the Naiyayikas to help explain non-veridical

    awareness. When one mistakes a rope for a snake it is owing to a flaw in the causal

    process. Ropes and snakes do look somewhat similar, and this similarity brings about the

    error. The perceiver has in his or her memory a trace (samskara) of snakehood from

    having seen snakes before. Memory, which is analogical and associative, is activated by

    indeterminate perception, and then, in determinate perception, the qualifier snakehood is

    mistakenly attributed to the rope. The point is that in indeterminate awareness, there is

    no possibility of going astray. The particular rope, its various qualities, and the universal

    snakehood are all indeed present to the mind at this stage. But in the act of becoming

    determinate they are wrongly synthesized. It should be noted here that, for Gangesa, as

    opposed to his predecessor Udayana, indeterminate perception is neither veridical nor

    non-veridical. It is non-erroneous, but only because it cannot be unpacked as an implicit

    claim about the world. A portrait can be a good or bad likeness, but an abstract painting

    cannot be more or less accurate. As an indeterminate perception cannot be put into words

    it is pre-epistemic as well as pre-conscious. It is prior to the distinction between

    appearance and reality. Though they should not be confused, it is akin to the fact that I

    can be mistaken about how things are, but not about how they seem to me.

    Apart from being needed to prevent an infinite regress, and being used to account for

    perceptual errors, the nirvikalpaka pratyaksa doctrine plays an important role in Nyaya.

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    As thoroughgoing realists the Naiyayikas wish to portray pure perception as utterly

    passive. For only in the absence of all construal, can one properly be said to have access

    to the real. In his forthcoming translation with commentary of Gangesas

    Tattvacintamani, Stephen Phillips elucidates this aspect of the issue as follows:

    In wide perspective, the purpose of the theory of indeterminate perception seems

    to be to maintain the position that, despite illusion (and the arguments of

    Buddhist subjectivists), there are perceptual instances where allthe information

    presented comes from the object perceived, that nothing comes from the side of

    the subject, such that the view of cognition as having form of itself (sakara-

    vada) is clearly wrong.3

    The Buddhist logician Moksakaragupta argues against the tenability of maintaining that

    the mere presence of the object is sufficient for a perception of it to arise:

    If determinate knowledge were produced out of an object, then an object such as a jar

    could be seen just because of that knowledge; it would mean that even a blind man could

    see a color-form. But such is not the case.4

    But of course the Naiyayikas do not deny that sense organs are necessary for perception.

    They simply deny that these sense organs contribute anything to the perception beyond

    the bare fact of their enabling it to take place at all, much as a catalyst allows a chemical

    reaction to occur, without itself contributing to the reaction.

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    If the Buddhist subjectivists, that is the Vijnanavadins, scorn the model of perception as

    reception, the early Buddhist schools do not. Indeed, as was adumbrated above, only

    passive sensation counts as genuine seeing for them. Thus nirvikalpaka-pratyaksa bears

    a surface resemblance to the early Buddhist theory of perception. This is the outcome of

    an unwise capitulation to the Buddhists on the part of Vacaspati, writes Arindam

    Chakrabarti. The likeness is only superficial, however, and the partial concession

    doomed to failure, for the Nyaya ontology is too different from the Buddhist for

    meaningful compromise to be feasible. Buddhists would not be happy when they learn

    that the Naiyayika immaculate perception often takes the form of direct acquaintance

    with a universal!5

    Chakrabarti underlines several drawbacks ofnirvikalpaka-pratyaska

    as he sees it. Since things in the world really are qualified, he argues, indeterminate

    perception, which presents the qualificandum and the qualifier disjointedly does notgive

    access to them as they are. Indeed, even if one rejects Nagarjunas argument that no

    distinction can ultimately be made between subject and predicate, it seems strange to

    think of them as being perceived entirely unrelated. The Naiyayika is careful to point out

    that while they are not apprehended as joined together, neither are they grasped as

    separate. But this apparent violation of tertium non datur is something of a logical

    repugnancy. It would seem that two things must be presented as either related or not.

    Further, indeterminate perception may give the impression that determinate perception

    involves an element of falsification, precisely the point, writes Chakrabarti, that

    Nyaya realism has fought tooth and nail notto concede to the Buddhist.6

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    One of the main reasons for postulating indeterminate perception, apart from the baneful

    influence of Buddhism, was the danger of an infinite regress. There may, however, be

    other ways of preventing this from happening. I can think of two such alternatives,

    which I tentatively sketch out here, although I doubt that either would be acceptable to

    most Niayayikas on ontological grounds.

    Further to qualify the universal potness by the more abstract meta-qualifer potnessness

    would indeed be to make a nonsensical move, as was suggested above. But this is not the

    only possible way to proceed. Universals, whether we are realists, conceptualists or

    nominalists about them are employed to gather together in a class particulars which

    resemble each other in some respect. Thus, without committing oneself to any specific

    ontology, one could simply maintain that the universal potness is, by definition, what

    every pot has in common. Of course, this does not lay to rest concerns as to the quiddity

    of this what, but it does at least put them on ice, allowing us to ask other questions

    without getting bogged down in this one.

    So the move from the particular to the universal, from the qualificandum to the qualifer

    which inheres in it, is a generalizing one. The universal, orsamanya, potness can be

    predicated of more entities than the ultimate individuator, orvisesa, this-pot-here-

    ness can. Once this basic point is noted it is easy to see what is wrong with the proposal

    that we qualify potness by potnessness, for here we have a mere increase in abstraction

    with no corresponding increase in scope. Potness applies to a whole host of pots, but

    potness itself has only one instance. Thus potnessness fulfills no logical or ontological

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    function. The distinction between potness and potnessness then seems precariously

    elusive, not to say vacuous, and in danger of imminent collapse.

    If instead we take the more sensible approach of qualifying potness by the more inclusive

    utensility, and this in turn by physical-object-hood it is clear that the regress that ensues

    will quickly bottom out when we reach the most exhaustive universal of all, namely

    existence. Since existence does not demarcate one entity from another, being that which

    every entity has in common, it is not strictly speaking a padartha, or category. But this

    peculiar feature of existence could be welcome in the present context.

    We see the particular pot as qualified by the universal potness. But how do we see this

    potness itself? According to orthodox neo-Nyaya, we grasp it not via any further

    qualifier, but immediately and indeterminately. Since, in the end, the argument goes,

    something must be thus perceived, why not simply grasp the nettle at once rather than

    protracting the agony? Well, there may be something strange about cognition, and this

    strangeness may be ultimately irreducible, but that is no reason not to shed as much light

    as can be shed on the issue. Why not simply say that we see potness as qualified by

    utensility? And utensility as qualified by physical-object-hood and so on until the

    process terminates in perception of existence, which is not grasped via any modality. For

    a realist about universals, there should be no serious objection to this, if the furniture of

    the world, as he or she believes, is actually arranged in such nested structures. Granted,

    our apprehension of the most general of genera, existence, ends up being unqualified, and

    hence a bit mysterious, not to say mystical. But surely one can be more easily forgiven

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    for a little mysticism about existence itself than in the case of the relatively mundane

    potness? Nobody will disagree that there is something very special about existence, so

    we should not be too surprised if the way in which we grasp it is likewise unique.

    Perhaps in the end we cannot escape falling into some obscurity, but this hardly warrants

    a leap in the darkbefore we lose our footing. It might even be urged that since existence

    is not a category, and is thus indeterminate, it makes perfect sense if perception of it is

    indeterminate too.

    If this proposal is at all tenable, it requires a certain blurring of the distinction between

    the qualifcandum and the qualifier. For what serves as the qualifier at one stage of

    analysis becomes the qualificandum at the next. Thus potness is a qualifier when

    considered with respect to the pot, but a qualificandum when examined from the point of

    view of utensility. Anotherto my mind more radicalproposal involves an even

    greater blurring of the distinction, but assuming one does not find it repugnant for

    ontological reasons, it represents a significant advance in terms of elegance.

    The solution proposed above is hierarchical. The qualifier becomes the qualified, but

    only when one moves up a level. What if a similar solution were to be attempted without

    introducing any regress? Consider for example a blank page of paper. Assuming that

    one looks straight at it, one perceives a white rectangle. According to the standard

    analysis, the paper is the qualificandum and the color and shape are qualifiers. These

    elements are grasped pre-consciously, directly and indeterminately, before being

    synthesized in an act of determinate perception.

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    But there is no need to insist that qualifiers, such as color and shape, are apprehended

    simply as such. One sees the color because of the shape, and the shape because of the

    color. Neither is explanatorily prior and neither is grasped independently of the other.

    Thus one could with equal justification claim that whiteness is the qualificandum and

    rectangularity the qualifier or that rectangularity is the qualificandum and whiteness the

    qualifier. The qualification is mutual. If ontological assumptions about underlying

    substances are bracketed, such a scheme might well be workable. We dispense with any

    postulated substratum, and make do only with phenomenological tropes. It is similar to

    some adverbial theories of perception that have recently been advanced. One sees the

    rectangle whitely, so to speak, and the whiteness rectangularly. Thus nothing is

    perceived unqualified, but no qualification is absolute, since one could just as well see the

    same rectangle in red, or the same white in the shape of a circle. Instantiations of abstract

    particulars can only be perceived in conjunction with certain other instantiations. Thus,

    for example, in the visual field, color, shape and size are never separate.

    The thought that unverbalizable, concept-free perception is somehow more pure than its

    opposite, directly in touch with reality somehow, smacks of a variety of mysticism that

    the Naiyayikas find distasteful. They distrust the gnomic doctrine that those who know

    do not speak. The Buddhists, on the other, place no great value on that which can be

    articulated. Let us take a look at the reasons for their suspicion of conceptualization.

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    The image of the mirror is common in Buddhism as a symbol of the enlightened mind.

    The perfectly smooth and well polished mirror is free of all distortion and obstruction. It

    neither rejects nor clings but simply reflects whatever is placed before it. A similar

    metaphor is that of the still pool, which accurately manifests reality too. Discursive

    thoughts are likened to waves on the pool, which impede its ability to present a clear

    picture. But this is an analogy, not an argument. There is noprima facie reason to accept

    it as an apt one. One might contrariwise compare cognition to a cloth, which polishes the

    surface of the looking glass! Indeed the view of the mind as a mirror, which could be

    called the mimetic theory of the psyche, is not at all as popular as it once wasin

    Western philosophical circles at any rate. What induces the Buddhists to espouse it?

    The early Buddhists were empiricists, and thus valued the senses over the intellect.

    Reason for the Buddhists is deeply fallible, as apparent rationality is so often mere

    rationalization in disguise. We begin from what we already hold to be true, and search

    for arguments in support of that belief. We rarely sit down with no preconceived notions

    and just dwell on some theme disinterestedly, following one inference after another to see

    where logic leads us. And what of the choice of the theme on which to dwell? What part

    does reason play in that? The Buddhists are in agreement with Plotinus that it is desire

    that engenders thought. Or as Hume put it centuries later, reason is the slave of the

    passions.

    When confronted with a particular sensory stimulus, the mind attempts to organize it into

    the simplest meaningful thing that it can. Gestalt psychology furnishes extensive

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    evidence of this principle. Meaningful here means much the same as relevant, and

    relevant means related to our projects. What we call objects are pragmatic constructs, the

    result of systems of classification which are subject to our specific purposes. A leaf, for

    example, can equally be regarded as a plurality of cells, a single folium, or a component

    of a tree. It is both one and many, both part and whole, depending on what we want to do

    with it. One cannot carve up nature at the joints, for one can never know whether those

    joints are there in the things themselves or are merely the scars of old cuts made by

    generations of our predecessors.

    Granted, perception is indeed a means of knowledge. But how does one prevent what

    one knows from influencing what one sees? Such a feat would seem to be virtually

    impossible. A literate English speaker cannot look at the front page ofThe Times without

    reading the words. To remain at the level of awareness of the shapes of the letters is

    beyond us. One cannot subtract knowing from seeing.

    So, if under normal circumstances, it is impossible to prevent what we know (and I use

    this word without any great epistemological weight, implying no apodictic certainty,

    merely everyday knowledge, as in I know English.) affecting what we see, can we

    prevent what we think doing so? And what we want? And fear? To what degree do

    needs and values alter our view of the world? Empirical psychology suggests that they

    do so to a considerable extent, as the following passage from Robert Ornsteins

    Psychology makes clear:

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    Bruner and Goodman (1946) conducted an experiment in which they compared

    the perceptual experiences of children from poor and well-to-do families. When

    shown a certain coin, children from poor homes experienced it as larger than did

    the richer children. This finding has been repeated in other cultures, such as that

    of Hong Kong (Dawson, 1975). In another study, students in a class were asked

    to draw a picture of the teacher. The majority of honors students drew the

    teacher slightly smaller than the students in the picture. But the pictures by less-

    than-average students depict the teacher as much taller than the students

    (Hochberg, 1978).7

    Perception of absence is only possible against a backdrop of frustrated desire. I do not

    discover the lack of a pen on the table until I need one to take down a note. And our

    expectations also play a shaping role in what we perceive as being present. Imagine

    sitting in a room waiting anxiously for someones arrival. One keeps hearing that

    longed-for knock on the door before it actually happens. Of course, it could be replied

    that in the case of the pens absence, an unfulfilled need merely revealed what was

    already the case. And falsely hearing the knock could be dismissed as an insignificant

    mistake; psychologically interesting, perhaps, but philosophically trivial. In short, though

    certain cognitive and affective states seem sometimes to influence our perceptions, what

    support is there for the conclusion that they necessarily interfere with them?

    Is my experience of Arabic script really more accurate than that of a reader of that

    language, simply because I cannot decipher it? Or is it not just different? I know nothing

    about wines, the wine taster does. Who tastes the wine more accurately? My

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    unfamiliarity with free jazz means that Ornette Colemans soloing sounds like a

    cacophony to me, though a friend who is a connoisseur of modern music assures me that

    she hears in it the most subtly beautiful melodies. Who hears best? Must the answer not

    be her? Oliver Sacks relates the story of a patient with neurological damage to the visual

    cortex, who could see things quite clearly as purely abstract shapes and colors, but had

    trouble discerning what they were. Its as if, when it came to the visual realm, he could

    perceive things only as particulars, never as instantiating some generic kind. His

    articulate and accurate description of objects seems to indicate that, in some sense, he

    saw them perfectly well. Maybe his failure to figure out what he was looking at is a

    failure of visual thinking:

    A continuous surface, he announced at last, infolded on itself. It appears to

    havehe hesitatedfive outpouchings, if this is the word. .... Later, by

    accident, he got it on, and exclaimed, My God, its a glove!8

    Does not the romantic Zen celebration of the freshness of beginners mind begin to

    sound a little naive at this juncture? The possession of a greater arsenal of concepts

    allows me to make finer subdivisions and thus to experience more than a person who is

    unequipped with such mental provisions.

    Perhaps. But to all of this the Buddhist would reply that the perils of such

    connoisseurship are great indeed. Familiarity breeds contempt. When we think that

    weve seen something before, we pay little attention to its particularity. When we have

    assigned a person or thing a place in our taxonomy, we are liable to think that we know

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    all there is to know about that person or thing. We have exhausted the being of that

    being. We have done with it. We havegotit. But of course, this is a mistake, because

    classification, by its very nature, cannot capture uniqueness. There is no net so fine that

    it can do this. And the finest net of all is just a veil; namely the veil of maya. Language,

    and any discrete combinatorial system can get infinite variety from a finite set of

    elements, but it still makes the uncommon common in Nietzsches words. Language,

    the sign itself, deals only with what is repeatable and reproducible. The fleeting, the

    singular, eludes it. This is what the Daoists mean when they say that the five colors blind

    a persons eyes.

    How can one best characterize the relation between concept-formation and language? To

    which should one attribute explanatory priority? Do words depend on thoughts, or do

    thoughts depend on words? The traditional, commonsense view of the matter

    subordinates the word to the idea. Language, writes Samuel Johnson, in Lives of the

    English Poets, is the dress of thought. But the alternative view has been advanced also,

    and, unsurprisingly, is especially popular among poets. This is expressed by Shelly in his

    Prometheus Unbound:

    He gave men speech, and speech created thought,

    Which is the measure of the universe.

    This view has become increasingly popular in recent times. The linguistic turn in

    analytic philosophy, and the influence of structuralism in the continental tradition both

    tend to put language in the foreground. In the field of linguistics itself, the Sapir-Whorf

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    hypothesis, a version of relativistic linguistic determinism, became very popular in the

    first half of the twentieth century. The thesis is briefly summarized in the following

    famous passage by Whorf:

    We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories

    and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there

    because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary the world is

    presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our

    mindsand this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut

    nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely

    because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this wayan agreement

    that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our

    language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms

    are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the

    organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.9

    Or as Wittgenstein put it, The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,

    which amounts to a translation of the Kantian project to map the bounds of reason into

    the linguistic idiom. The idea is taken up by George Orwell in Nineteen-Eighty-Four,

    where the institution of Newspeak renders the thinking of subversive thoughts literally

    impossible. But this is a highly implausible scenario. Stephen Pinker presents three

    arguments against such a notion in his book The Language Instinct. Firstly, he insists

    that mental life is independent of particular languages: concepts can exist nameless. If

    thought was not prior to language, how, when speaking or writing, could one ever feel

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    that is not what I meant to say? Quines skepticism notwithstanding, translation is

    indeed possible. Secondly, there are more concepts than words: existing words gain new

    senses all the time. And thirdly, children are linguistically creative. This is a matter of

    empirical evidence. An artificial language such as Newspeak would be creolized in a

    mere generation or two. So the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is no longer

    accepted by very many. And the weak version is weak indeed. The language we speak

    influences the way we think. Sure. But this hardly constitutes a profundity. Owing

    mainly to the work of Chomsky, the traditional view is making a comeback. Thought

    does seem to be more fundamental than language, and partly independent of it. But not

    only does language change the way we think, it changes the way we see. Chakrabarti

    admits that this may be so, but contends that words only reveal what was already present:

    Even if training in a language does enable us to see differences and similarities that go

    unnoticed by speechless brutes and babies, the resulting concept-applicative perception is

    not knowledge of the word any more than seeing of a book lit up by a candle is seeing of

    the candle. Like the candle, the word or its memory is at best an aid to the senses.10

    Granted, seeing of the book is not seeing the candle, but it is seeing it by means of the

    candle; it is seeing reflected candle light. The book appears to have a yellowish tinge that

    it doesnt have when viewed in daylight. Not even the most avant-garde post-

    structuralist claims that wesee words, not things. Only that we see things by the light of

    words. Our perception is colored by our language.

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    If one pursues this analogy further it suggests that just as seeing is impossible without

    light, so is perception impossible without language. And if the word can act as an aid to

    the senses, why not also as a hindrance? Words reveal; they also conceal, and in

    revealing one thing they may conceal another, just as the sun which lights up the day

    occludes the fainter stars. Think for a moment in this context of the following famous

    lines from Shakespeare:

    Whats in a name? That which we call a rose

    By any other name would smell as sweet.

    Of course, Shakespeare is being bitterly ironic when he puts these words in Juliets

    mouth. The point is that names are all important, Romeos family name does matter, it

    does alter peoples attitude to him. The implication here is that it does so wrongly. And

    yet... Would a rose smell as sweet if it were called a stinkweed? Would we ever find

    out? This is the point: we cannot discern what our use of words and concepts blinds us

    to, precisely because the form of our usage blinds us to this very blindness. We dont

    miss what were missing. Against the Indian philosophers I would say that ignorance is

    exactly that of which we are ignorant. We tend no longer to observe precisely where

    words fail us, writes Nietzsche, because it is hard then to think precisely.11

    We know

    thatwe dont know, but we dont know whatwe dont know. If we did, wed be on the

    way to knowing it.

    The mistrust of language in Abhidharma Buddhism is a direct corollary of Abhidharma

    nominalistic atomism. The world is composed of momentary particulars which words are

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    powerless to express. But the situation in the Mahayana is somewhat more complex. For

    the ontological reading ofpratitya-samutpada as dependent arising, and the Saussurean

    model of language as a system of differences without positive terms appear to have a

    great deal in common. Words, for Saussure, are just like entities for Nagarjuna; each one

    considered in isolation is devoid of essence, and relies on the being of others for its

    meaning. The reason for the Mahayana disparagement of language is related to the

    emptiness of emptiness. If one takessunyata too seriously as ontology, one has failed to

    properly grasp it. So, attempting to compare the structure of language with the structure

    of reality as was done above is misguided. There is a degree of correspondence, but the

    simple point is that the world is far more complex than the word. As long as this is borne

    in mind, language is harmless, beautiful and very useful. The Mahayana suspicion of

    language is not total: it is just an admonishment to attend to its limits. Thus Roland

    Barthes comments on the haiku:

    It is not a matter of crushing language beneath the mystic silence of the ineffable,

    but ofmeasuringit, of halting that verbal top which sweeps into its gyration the

    obsessional play of symbolic substitutions.12

    There is a real tension in Mahayana Buddhism between the doctrine of emptiness and the

    doctrine of suchness. The emphasis on the particular smacks ofsvabhava, and is

    probably a relic of Abhidharma atomism. Think again of the musical example given

    earlier. Couldnt one say that, from the point of view of Mahayana, (and of common

    sense) that particular piece by Coleman could not be understood, and thus not rightly

    heardin isolation. It is not some thing in itself, but a node in a net of relations. Just

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    like a word, it only makes sense in context, and the context in this case is modern jazz.

    For it is defined as much by what it is not as by what it is: unless one knows what notes

    Coleman chose notto play, one cannot appreciate those that he did. The Buddhist point

    is just that the human tendency is to go too farfrom what is present at hand. Conceptual

    thought and language are the chief culprits here: what Barthes calls the infinite

    supplement of supernumerary signifieds.13

    Both concept-bound and concept-free

    cognition have their uses. In order to function on the conventional level, conventions

    must be followed. Since classification is unavoidable, it behooves us to do it as well as

    we can. The Naiyayikas are surely right about this. Better to draw careful and delicate

    distinctions than rough and ready ones. Only we must be careful not to fall into the trap

    of thinking that those distinctions are final or exhaustive.

    1 Marcel Proust,In Search of Lost Time, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin and

    revised by D.J. Enright, vol I, pp. 4-52 ibid.3 Stephen Phillips, unpublished manuscript4 Moksakaragupta, Tarkabhasa, in Yuichi Kajiyama (translator), Studies in Buddhist Philosophy, p. 2295 Arindam Chakrabarti, Against Immaculate Perception: Seven Reasons for EliminatingNirvikalpakaPerception from Nyaya,Philosophy East and West50:16 ibid.7 Robert Ornstein,Psychology: The Study of Human Experience, p. 2248 Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, p. 159 quoted in David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p.1510 Arindam Chakrabarti, Experience, Concept-Possession, and Knowledge of a Language, in The

    Philosophy of Peter Strawson, p. 31911 Nietzsche,Daybreak, section 11512

    Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, p. 7513 ibid.