​Western philosophers and Bhagavad-gita 1 – Beyond Cartesian duality

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, Cartesian Dualism and Bhagavad Gita Today we will be starting a series where we will be discussing several prominent western philosophies in the light of the Bhagavad Gita. So, today we will discuss about Cartesian Dualism.
This refers to the idea that this is proposed by Rene Descartes a prominent European philosopher whose many contributions are often neglected or disparaged especially because of his being identified with the idea of Dualism. Now Dualism, there is Monism. Monism is only one substance exists.
Dualism is two substances exist. There are two fundamental realities that’s what the word literally means. But philosophically in the western intellectual context it has come about to mean that there is there is a material side to our being and there is a non-material side to our being and in the western philosophical context the non-material side is also identified as the mind.
So, Mind, Mart and Duality. That means the human person in the Cartesian view of personhood comprises of matter and mind and then these two components to our being are called as are referred to by the word Duality. Now mind is of course here considered as the source of consciousness so in that sense we can equate mind with the soul and to understand where this dualism is coming from and why it was disparaged and how the Bhagavad Gita’s dualism is significantly different.
The Bhagavad Gita also talks about dualism in the sense of two natures. We have the body and we have the soul mind and we ourselves are the soul of the temporary there is no endurance and of the eternal there is no cessation where the temporary and the eternal refer to material and spiritual respectively so here the point being made is that the Bhagavad Gita talks about the existence of our essential self beyond the material level now Descartes he came from a philosophical school of thought which had grown based on the teachings of Catholicism that had been espoused by Thomas Aquinas it had been especially promoted by him and their idea was that the mind and matter or body and soul they are a compound so his idea was that the two cannot exist separate from each other and that’s how there is also the associated idea of resurrection wherein the people will be restored in heaven for all of eternity in their same body which they have presently so he said that I am not present in my body merely as a pilot is present in a ship so a pilot and a ship are two different things and a pilot can go out of the ship and exist separately out of the ship but in the Judeo-Christian tradition the soul is considered to be inextricably linked with the body and this linkage implies that the soul is not capable of independent self-existence beyond the body now moving forward the point about which or for which Descartes made a very important valid contribution is cogito ergo san I think therefore I am now what was he talking about at that time there were skeptics like say Montaigne who was saying that nothing can be known because of the uncertainty and unreliability of sense perception he said ultimately nothing can be known but he wanted to counter that and he said that to claim that nothing can be known is also to claim some state of knowledge and that unknowability of something is also a claim to knowability and that claim to knowability comes from our capacity for knowledge and that capacity for knowledge indicates the presence of consciousness so I think therefore I am means now I may not know whether the world out there exists or not for sure so I may see myself in a house when I am awake and I may see myself in a house when I am dreaming now how do I really know whether the house which I see which of these houses is real and which is false so I won’t go into the philosophical implications over here of realism my realism that means the world is as it appears to be but let’s focus right now on the point that there is so much more to life than the recognition that our senses do not give us reliable picture of reality and to get a reliable picture of reality we need to go beyond sense perception towards perception of reality beyond the senses how can we do that for doing that we need to focus on first things first so we can perceive something so I as an agent of perception have a capacity for knowledge so now this capacity for cognition that is present in me is not present in the things around me I am sitting on a chair near a table now the chair and the table are not conscious of their existence they are not conscious of me sitting on them so in that sense we could say that there is a difference between the conscious and the unconscious and what the Bhagavad Gita calls as the difference between spirit which is conscious and matter which is not conscious now so this would mean that there is a difference between what we call as soul and body or what Descartes at the time would call as mind and matter so here the Christian doctrine including that of Descartes might be called more like not so much as dualism as dual aspect monism dual aspect monism means that there is the idea that the body and the soul matter and mind are inextricably linked together as a composite person just like we may have water now we can say water is made of hydrogen and oxygen but it is not a mixture it is a compound and if we separate hydrogen and oxygen they have their own separate existence but then water itself has no existence and then we cannot really say that water existed so if we separate water into hydrogen and oxygen then is it water that is still existing or is it simply hydrogen and oxygen that is existing and can we say that it is simply the water that is transformed or what is it exactly of course what resulted was by the transformation of water but what was transformed is it water or is it hydrogen and oxygen that means when we mix two things together a mixture means both of them have their self existence still but a compound means both of them get by their interconnection transformed into a third substance so the idea of personhood is that matter and mind are inextricably linked together and we are composite beings we are as the word was used psychophysical unity there is actually Descartes is attributed with the idea of dualism but what he actually propagates is not a dualism but a dual aspect monism that there is one substance but it has two components to it I will come back to this dualist monism little later now one of the major reasons why Descartes idea was rejected was because there was no clear understanding of how such a such two discrete entities matter and mind would communicate with each other how could there be any communication and especially this was the time when so the time when mathematics and science were becoming predominant and because mathematics and science were becoming predominant so it was not easy for people to recognize or attribute themselves understanding that there has to be something more to life than what is normally thought to be there so the Bhagavad Gita explains that the soul is a distinct entity separate from the body and the interface between the soul and the body is done through the mediation of the super soul this mediation was a major problem for Cartesian duality because science especially physics is often characterized by what is called as causal completeness that means physical events can be described or explained in terms of the physical effects of physical laws and physical causes so there is nothing non-physical required to explain the occurrence of physical events also it is thought normally so for example if a batsman hits a ball and then the ball goes flying across the boundary now the point where the ball falls the distance to which it travels the speed at which it travels the height to which it rises all this can be explained in terms of the laws of physics the ball came in at this force the batsman hit it with this force and that’s why the ball went to this height and this length and with this speed so now for all this laws of physics are adequate enough to explain it this is called the causal completeness of the laws of physics and Descartes postulated that the mediation between the mind and matter or in the Gita Simula you have the soul and the body that happens through the pituitary gland which is a part of the brain which has many important functions but certainly mediation of consciousness from some non-physical source is not one of its functions as is understood today through modern science so because of this mechanism of mediation being refuted and because of no alternative mechanism being proposed within the mainstream intellectual history of the western world the idea of Cartesian duality has been largely falsified or it’s rejected today in fact it’s not just rejected but it’s also ridiculed many prominent thinkers even if they want to propose believe or hold that consciousness cannot be completely explained in terms of brain phenomena still they stress that I am not a Cartesian dualist now for this bad press for it has come primarily because of the inability to explain the mechanism of the location of the mind matter interface as well as the specifics of how the interface can take place in the light of the causal completeness of physical laws of physics basically however these two are not insurmountable problems if we look at things from the perspective of the Gita within the Gita’s world view we see that there is not just matter and spirit but there is also the controller of the two there is the super soul who is also considered to be present in the heart and the connection between matter and spirit is through misidentification so it does not have to violate the laws of physics it does not have to because the misidentification is more of a projection of consciousness so consider to understand this point consider the Bhagavad Gita verse 13.22 at the soul who is situated in matter this whole desire is to enjoy the products of material nature and that’s how the Purusha, that is consciousness gets locked gets lodged and locked in Prakriti Purusha Prakriti Sthohi and because of this experience is good and bad in various species so the point to be understood here is that Krishna is the arranger of this whole system as a super soul so when a person say watches a TV then the person may be sitting in one’s own house and the TV may be depicting a cricket match which is happening far away so what links the two is the projection of the consciousness so the misidentification of the cricket fan or the cricket match watcher which say a particular cricket player on the team and that causes the consciousness to experience various things so for example if the cricket player hits a sixer then the person who is a fan of that batsman that person feels jubilant or that person is beaten by a speeding delivery then this person is the spectator is shaken and if the batsman is clean bowled then the spectator is disappointed or even devastated now if we consider from the causal completeness point of view we could say that the events in the cricket field are causally complete okay the bowler bowled the ball at this speed and the batsman bowled his bat down at this speed and because the ball speed was too much before the batsman’s bat came down the ball just went through and smashed the stumps and that’s how the batsman got clean bowled so the batsman is getting clean bowled can be explained in terms of the the laws of physics now the because of the desire to enjoy that is what Dr. Bowden’s previous verse was 13.21 so the happiness and distress that is experience is so experienced because of the misidentification of the soul with the body so because the spectator misidentifies the particular cricket team that’s why the spectator seems disappointed when the batsman gets clean bowled but suppose it is the spectator’s favourite team is now bowling instead of batting and then if a bowler or beat the bat of the batsman that same event which was earlier called dukkha will now cause sukha so the the pleasure pain experience is because of the projection of consciousness from the spectator to the matter over there and now if we consider instead of watching a spectator’s sports suppose we have some kind of virtual reality cricket match where say the spectator has an online avatar which identifies the particular batsman so when that happens the point of the problem is that there is no easy way to move out of this predicament so the batsman so in a virtual reality sort of game the player moves one’s hands in a particular way and maybe the player moves the fingers or flips the fingers or whatever in a particular way and that corresponds with say the bat of the batsman being moved in a particular way and when the bat of the batsman is moved the ball hits the batsman and that’s how we we can take things forward from there so here now in the virtual reality mechanism the batsman or the virtual reality players of clicking the fingers is not actually is not actually causing the ball to be hit over a sixer so it’s not that the force of the swing of the fingers over here corresponds in a linear one to one correspondence with the force with which the batsman is hitting the ball and the ball is rushing towards the boundary or over the boundary the correlation between the two is more of a matter of projection certainly the flick of the fingers here causes the bat to hit the ball there but the bat hitting the ball and the ball rushing towards the boundary that is controlled by the laws of electronics which are set up the laws of electronics which are set up and which are monitored by the designer of the machine and while being monitored thus by the designer of the machine there is still the understanding that that is a system which is in its own sense independent so similarly the system of the body mind complex that is a system managed by its own laws those laws are controlled by the supreme lord and the arrangement by which the player identifies with the character in the virtual reality game is also made by the manufacturer of the game similarly super soul mediates both these things the consciousness of the soul is projected into the brain and through the brain into the body not through any physical means but it is through misidentification it is a projection of consciousness as it is in the case of a virtual reality screen and a player and it does not violate the laws of physics so if we consider the point of misidentification then the objection to Cartesian duality that it characterized western thought that objection can be circumvented can be removed and as spiritual thinkers we can appreciate the importance of Descartes saying I think therefore I am so our capacity for awareness is our foremost indicator of our existence so if we go from outside in we can say that I see the consciousness oh I am thinking of that thing if I am looking at the roof of my room and I see a light over there in my room above I see that and therefore I understand that I am able to perceive that that means I exist if I did not exist I would not have been able to perceive it so that way our capacity for consciousness can be used by us to infer the reality of the existence of consciousness and the existence of the source of consciousness and that source of consciousness is we ourselves the soul and by such a self understanding we can move onwards steadily and smoothly