Arunandi's Disconstruction of Materialism - 2
One of the central principles of the materialists then as of now is the denial of the categorical distinction between the psychical and physical, the mental and the brutal. They practice a kind of REDUCTIONISM , that of reducing the mental to the physical and thereby denying also the truth of metaphysical experiences that constitutes the essence of religious life.
What can overcome this reductionism is the practice of science as Hermeneutic Science, the kind of sciences practised extensively in the Tamil country and perhaps also all over India within the Agamic or Tantric traditions. It may also be possible that it is the development of the Hermeneutic Sciences that is quite distinctive of Indian Civilization as a whole.
In the following verse AruNandi provides his disconstruction of the physicalistic view of the mental and reductionism that accompanies it by showing there is INTENTIONALITY and that because of that the anma is TEMPORAL , its understanding of historical with the attendant three ekstases of time (as noted by Heidegger), the past, present and future.
Of particular importance here is the notion of KuRippuk Kaalam of Tolkaappiyar, the consciousness of TIME that comes along with INTENTIONALITY, also called the psychological time and so forth. Human understanding reaches OUTSIDE itself only because of this inherent intentionality and it is only because of this, there is the-tic consciousness, consciousness of things in terms of 'this' and 'that' thatr Meykandar calls cudduNarvu. This phenomena also shows that the anma is distinct and NOT to be confused with the product of the material processes.
The existence of the mental phenomena is a fact of life and the Lokayata's reduction amounts to explaining it away rather than explaining the phenomena, so contends AruNandi
42.
aRivu puutamatu ennil veeRu
puRattu aRintamai kaNdilam
ceRivu taan udalattu enil cava
maana pootu udal teerumoo
kuRikoLaatu udal vaayuvaanatu
kuudidaamaiyin ennin nii
piRitaraatu niRka njaanam
uRakkam en piRavaatatee?
Meaning:
Lokayata! You say that intelligence is just another one of physical products generated by the combination of the basic physical elements. Then how do you explain that living creatures are INTENTIONAL and in that they perceive something as a " that" and which is external to themselves? Now if you deny this externality and say that such mental processes are internal (biophysiological) and happen within the body , then how to you explain that at the point of death while the body is still intact there is no intelligence as such? Now if you say such consciousness related processes become unavailable because of the departure of the WIND, then how do you explain the fact that during deep sleep while there is still breathing but there is NO consciousness?
NOTES
This constitutes one of the fundamental objections of Arunandi to the materialism of the Lokayatas which is essentially REDUCTIONISTIC, the denying of the categorical and ontological difference between intelligence and non-intelligence, a distinction that is accommodated with the hermeneutical way of looking at things. The hermeneuts would see the living things as TEXTS in which the psychological would be seen as the Deep Structure and the biophysiological as the Surface Structure. While it is true that INTELLIGENCE as such cannot be understood as they are independent of the physical embodiments, categorically they are NOT the same. For the living creatures are characterized by INTENTIONALITY and they do not simply sense objects in the world but SEE them, a process that requires grasping as it is something outside themselves.
Of course such phenomena have biophysiological correlates -- brain processes of various kinds in which the information that reaches the brain through the five senses are processed and an object is recognized as such and such. But all such perceptions emerge as 'a tree over there', 'a pain in my foot " etc. A close examination of such processes indicate that perceiving is NOT simply translating the sensorial input into object identities. There is a SELECTION mechanism at work and unless such selections are operative there , the singling out and synthesizing a mass of sensory input into that as pertaining to a particular object will NOT take place.
And when we look at the SELECTIVE mechanisms we can see that it is psychical, there is actually a psyche, a non-material spiritual thing which does all these. The INTENTIONALITY is that which makes the psychic entities go beyond the internal psychobiological processes and grasp an object in the world and as in the world and hence outside the internal cognitive processes that disclose its presence. That seeing as such is psychical and NOT merely psychobiological is shown by pointing out that when a person is dead, the body is there intact but seeing is no more and hence also perceiving. The dead person does not perceive despite the presence of all the biophysiological mechanisms.
Now Lokayata in admitting the presence of INTENTIONALITY, tries to explain it away by saying that it is simply the function of the WIND that which is the cause of the breathing processes, the inhaling and exhaling, the fundamental biophysiological processes that maintain LIFE as such. As against this, Arunandi notes that while during deep sleep while breathing goes on as usual , there is ABSENCE of conscious prehension, the functioning of INTENTIONALITY even as dreams. We have here a situation where there is breathing for the person is NOT dead but nevertheless is NOT conscious and hence experiencing anything INTENTIONAL including the dreaming which may indirectly be related to intentionality. This shows that the proposed correlation between breathing and consciousness does not hold.
written by,
ULLAGANAR
( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )
( Image from wikipedia, with thanks )
No comments:
Post a Comment