January 8th, 2022

“The second feature of the Advaita analysis of consciousness lies in its insistence that consciousness is always distinct from the object of consciousness. The things, therefore, should on no account be identified with the consciousness which makes them its objects. From this [it] follow[s]…that consciousness cannot be its own object…” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 119) 

“The most important and far-reaching of [Sankara’s] contentions is to be found in what may be called the foundational character of knowledge or consciousness. It ought to be accepted as a universal rule, he insists, that there can be no object of knowledge without knowledge. None can prove something that is not known, and the attempt to prove it would be as absurd as to maintain that there is no eye though the form is apprehended. The objects may change their essence, but consciousness cannot be said to change inasmuch as it witnesses all objects irrespective of the place where they may happen to be; the fact-of-being-known is thus implied by all objects without exception. Even when something is supposed to be non-existent, this very non-existence cannot be proved in the absence of knowledge.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 118) 

“Consciousness, when regarded in this light, is the ultimate principle of revelation for which alone the world of objects has a meaning; it is not a relation between two elements, on the contrary, it is the light which manifests all objects. It is “the center of the whole world comprising the objects, the senses and the mind, and it has neither inside nor outside, it is altogether a mass of knowledge.” This is generally known as the center theory of self; conscious self, according to it, occupies the central place of the universe, inasmuch as all objects owe their meaning and significance to the relations in which they stand to the self that essentially is consciousness….To put it in the language of modern idealism, existence-for-self is the highest category to which must conform all objects. Matter, mind, electron, proton, etc., have meaning for us only insofar as they stand in relation to the conscious self whose reality, therefore, has to be presupposed by every intelligible entity. In this sense, consciousness is the prior principle or the foundational fact which cannot be reduced to something other than itself except through a confusion of thought.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 119) 

“The internal paradox of the contemporary theories of consciousness may best be exposed by enquiring whether the elements…into which consciousness is reduced are themselves unknown or known. The former alternative would evidently render them undistinguishable from pure nothing or mere naught, and, as such, they must repel all predicates. And in that case they cannot be brought in for explaining anything. The only alternative, therefore, would be to admit that they are objects of knowledge and, as such, presuppose the reality of knowledge or consciousness….All objects, no matter what they are in detail, are, insofar as they are appealed to in explanation of something, known objects, and must have their prius in “I think,” “I know,” or “I am conscious”….[T]he majority of modern theories of consciousness have unwittingly pledged themselves to an altogether unwarranted postulate. This postulate, to put it simply, is that consciousness is an object, and as such can be investigated and explained in the same way in which we explain all other objects of the world….[T]he indubitable reality of consciousness provides a brilliant instance of a reality which, though incapable of being known as an object, is yet a foundational fact…Consciousness, according to the Advaita thinkers, being the ultimate principle of revelation, cannot stand in need of a more ulterior principle for its own revelation. That which is the prius of the knowable objects cannot itself be conceived as an object among other objects much as the light which reveals everything does not require a second light for its own manifestation.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 127-130) 

“That which reveals every object and illumines the entire world of things cannot itself be apprehended as a “this” or a “that”. The nearest analogy to it in the physical world is furnished by the light which, therefore, has been frequently appealed to in illustrating the peculiar character of consciousness by the Indian as well as the Western thinkers. The light which manifests all material things cannot be appropriately said to be here and not there, it is not a particular thing existing by the side of other things; yet it is the condition of the revelation of the particular things. Hence arise the difficulties which our psychologists experience in defining consciousness, the reality of which they find it necessary to emphasize; it is something, they say, that can be defined only in terms of itself.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 131-132) 

“The fact is that all [Hume’s] difficulties about the self, as put by Dr. Haldar, are “due to his identification of it with its content”. And once this identification is assumed to be true, it would be a comparatively easy task to condemn the self as a gross fiction, a mere monster, or a mere metaphysical chimera….The conclusion that emerges out of these considerations is that no theory of consciousness is likely to survive the light of critical thought which leaves unexamined and unchallenged the identification of consciousness with what is presented to it. And it further follows that consciousness cannot be dismissed as a mere chimera simply on the ground that it cannot be known as an object….From the dictum that there is no consciousness…to materialism, there is but a short way. The latter does not deny the fact of consciousness, but accepting it as an indubitable fact, materialism considers it to be a product of matter. But none the less materialism and the doctrine of no-consciousness meet on the confusion of consciousness with the content…” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 135-137) 

“The distinction between mind and matter, observer and observed, appears now to be one that falls within knowledge itself and assumes it as already there. Any particular activity in knowledge is found to proceed by way of abstraction downwards from what is most concrete, that is the actual.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 4) 

“If the main thesis of the Greeks and of Goethe is a true one, it carries with it far-reaching consequences in the adoption of method in philosophy. For it imports that what we must start with as our basic fact is first of all the world as it seems to us, the concrete, many-sided world, with the whole of its riches, that appears present in our every-day experience. We must not begin by trying to find elements out of which this world of actuality is put together and pieced up. As soon as we try to start explanations of this kind we fall into the fallacy for which Aristotle criticises his predecessors, the fallacy of the abstract mind. Our experience is no passive awareness put together out of isolated elements of sensation that exist as self-subsistent entities in independence of each other. The ideas of such entities are themselves arrived at only by abstract methods, and give us merely phases within a larger entirety in which they stand in everchanging relations which are integral for the whole. All such relations are therefore internal, that is they are inseparable from the reality of the phases into which they enter. What are termed “external” relations, and are treated as severable, are themselves abstractions, without reality independent of the whole in which they have meaning. Meaning, indeed, enters into reality everywhere, and is of its essence. Now the character of meaning is that of mind. Meaning imports the presence of mind and has its home there. It is beside the point to say that such mind is always the mind of a particular individual. For such an individual himself has only meaning as an object within the world as it is for mind. Knowledge as such therefore comes first.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 5-6) 

“Those who try to reduce reality to isolated and self-subsistent sensations encounter the difficulty that the nerves, and the brain itself which receives stimulation from without, and so builds up the external world which has to be accounted for as inclusive of all these, must be assumed to be present before we can conceive ourselves as having any sensations to build with. Just so the fact of individual experience has to be presupposed before we can make any departure at all. But those who thus start with experience as already there are at least free from a fatal obstacle which confronts the subjective idealist and the materialist alike.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 6-7) 

“If I look at the people who are crowded into a room, listening it may be to myself who am speaking, there is a fact that confronts me. Into the sensations produced in their respective brains, by the electro-magnetic waves of light or the atmospheric waves of sound which stimulate their optic or auditory nerves, I cannot enter. These produce sensations which belong exclusively to the individual in whom they are awakened. I, the speaker, know and can know nothing directly of these sensations. They cannot come within my immediate awareness. Nor can the audience enter into my own sensations. But yet we are certain that we see the same room and hear the same words. How is this possible? Only in one way. What we know in common cannot consist in immediacy of feeling, which is excluded from everyone excepting the person whose private feeling it is. But there may be knowledge in common of a kind that is logically quite different from mere feeling, the knowledge in common which arises from thinking about our private experiences in identically the same conceptions as others employ, and thus giving to our respective sense experiences an identical meaning. It does appear as though what those present have in common is not sensation but knowledge about sensation. Apart from interpretation such sensation amounts to nothing at all. Yet without material to set for itself into objective form, the thought would be an abstraction which had no objective or individual character in which to make itself real. If it can so set itself in individual form the form becomes symbolic of the conception through which it is fashioned. Neither the lecturer nor his audience in the lecture-room seem to separate the two aspects which their individual experiences present. These vary with the individual. But in the differences there is pervading identity, and it comes from the identity of form in thinking. The particularism which is the other aspect has the character of a “happening” in space and time. But no conception used in interpretation appears to be any such happening. It belongs to a different order, one which is concerned not with events, but with what is required before events can have the meanings that have to be inherent in them if they are to belong to reality.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 6-7) 

“Those assembled in a lecture-room have thus identities before minds which differ numerically only in that the organisms in which they express themselves differ numerically as objects in space and time. But these objects are individual, that is to say they are actual objects only insofar as judgments through universals as much as the particularism of feeling enters into their character….The particular of sense could have no meaning at all for us, and therefore no existence, but for its setting in universals imported by some mode of reflection, however slight. In this fashion concepts enter into the constitution of reality. Because of the distinctions with which the particularism of the actual is so endowed, mere logical identity becomes identity in difference, or correspondence. It is correspondence in our conceptions thus based, not on “happenings” which are necessarily diverse, but on identity of thought, that makes us experience the same lecture-room, the same sun, moon and stars, and, generally, the same world. A single world is before us by reason of an identity in our thinking apart from which it would not be there in common for us. It is for such thinking and only for such thinking that space and time themselves are present and are possible. Such reflection appears to be foundational for the very possibility of an object world, and of ourselves as in that world.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 9-10) 

“The thinking in which the world of objects has its foundation is no event to be looked on as a particular object among others in the world to which it gives the significance of reality. Nor can it be an attribute or activity of the self as an object in that world. Such a self is made present to itself as object only in abstraction which does not yield the whole truth. The entirety appears to be that activity of knowledge within which not only object but subject for which it is object arise. The genuine subject aspect within this entirety remains intact in the abstractive process which segregates the object but cannot reach that for which it is there. It is only by watching thought develop itself in its own self-implications that we can discover its nature. The process must be in its essence one of mediate inference. For in what we call self-consciousness we are always tending to make the abstraction which identifies the self with the thinghood in which it expresses itself even for the mind that it is aware of itself as knowledge. From that knowledge, from what experience implies and reveals, we start. We assume it as our point of departure and behind it we cannot get by any direct inspection. But although we cannot by analysis resolve our experience into further elements out of which it is constructed we can by analysis study its nature conceptually, as we do in logic. Only the logic must be one in which the facts are simply made free, through the exclusion of what is foreign to them, to do justice to themselves by revealing their own implications. Something of this kind we seem to approach whenever we are brought to the sense of the fullest reality, in poetry, in art, in religion.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 13-14) 

“The doctrine that the origin of knowledge may be found in habitual association in contiguity has to encounter this initial difficulty. How is a series or aggregate of contiguous impressions possible except as presupposing the knowledge within which it is presented? Assume such knowledge as conceded, then the association principle becomes very useful as showing uniformities in the ways in which ideas treated as external phenomena suggest each other. But it is of no value in throwing light on the genesis of a knowledge which it has already presupposed for its foundation. Sensations, even if we could conceive bare sensations, would not bring other sensations into being by suggestion. For it is only ideas that are suggested. We are thus forced back to the subject, which is itself no event happening in externality, for the explanation of the world as it actually seems to us. By subject we mean here neither a thing in space nor an activity in space. We mean that for which such things and activities are, and apart from which they have no significance and no reality. Thus interpreted the presence of the subject aspect of reality, of knowledge as that to which reality is essentially relative, is everywhere apparent, even in what, looked at superficially, we take to be a mere object world.” (Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, 15-16) 

“I may add that whatever might be my conclusion if it were possible for me thoroughly to examine Dr. McTaggart’s special argument—a matter not of a few days—I can have no hesitation in saying that I completely sympathise with the doctrine which he proposes to sustain, “the idealism which rests on the assertion that nothing exists but spirit”.” (Bosanquet, The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy, xii)