ineluctable modalities of the sensible: thoughts on the nyaya buddhist debate on perception,...
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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.