David Hume 1711 - 1776

Loga-3: Here emerges the distinction between Hermeneutic Logic and the linear Deductive Logic (with induction as well) of the West or at least that which Hume presupposes. The Logic announced in Tolkaappiyam (but misunderstood by the Naiyayikas and hence the Buddhists and Jainas) is Hermeneutic Logic and which is recovered in Meykandar in the body of SJB. In Hermeneutic Logic there is no deducing proving demonstrating and so forth but only of CLARIFYING for one self and for others (tan poruddu anumaanam , piRar poruddu anumaanam) so that AGREEMENT is possible among different individuals. It is circular in way but more helical for the proposition (pratiknja) is RECOVERED as the truth (Nigamana) i. e. as something agreed upon between the interlocutors.

GCM3: But hermeneutic logic is deliberately and explicitly based upon presuppositions. Both Heidegger and Gadamer have said a great deal about this. That it is a necessary logic I agree, and I have actually referred to it a number of times when I wrote about the logic confined to only judging INTERNAL CONSISTENCY within a tradition. It is the logic one uses to understand the world one is thrown into. The presuppositions thereof are given or forced upon you whether you understand them or not. It applies to such questions as “What does ‘God’ mean?” or “What does Aeschylus men when he says ‘Suffering educates’?” It applies to studying an ancient text in modern times when one puts one’s modern presuppositions in brackets while one tries to understand the presuppositions of the author or sculptor or painter. Andre Malraux in METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GODS takes as a common thesis in all art, “the museum without walls” that he says came to be in the 19th century, wants to put something about their creation outside time, into immortality which is precisely and literally timeless so it does not accord with the normal Western notion of immortality of the soul. But “what” the artist wants to put into immortality differs radically from culture to culture. The ancient Egyptian sculptor of Zoser wants to put the memory of the person Zoser permanently into this static immortality, and the style itself is static. Vermeer may want to put his daughter into immortality or the specific livingness of a particular action of hers, but this implies a livingness in immortal stasis. This is hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics necessarily starts from presuppositions that are not judged as to their strict logical truthfulness or fitting accord with immediate everyday reality. In other words, whether they are fictional or fact is something hermeneutic logic cannot account for. Heidegger and Gadamer show this specifically with the writing of history as well as David Hume, although this is not as well known. But Hume actually had to put his hermeneutic logic to hard labor and had to solve constant contradictions between accounts to arrived at a COMPROMISE ‘like’ truth. That is what hermeneutics is all about, reaching a compromise between conflicting elements that have an approximate claim to truth but never to truth itself. “Truth itself” has no grand aspect superficially, at least in the 21st century, rather it is incredibly trivial usually to the hermenutist. Real truth is considered now a decent to the building blocks we supposedly “always already” understand, sense impressions, imagination, memory, emotion. There is nothing inspiring to great heights of divine revelation in that. But that is the only possible ground divine revelation can rest on – if it can. Hermeneutics can only apply to objects, objects created from sense impressions by the imagination and memory.

Loga-3: Here the notion of TEXT along with DUALITY of Structure, the Deep Structure (DS) and Surface Structure (SS) are important. The SS is the commonly perceivable, the DS is that which is the DEPTHS of SS, serves as Agentive Cause and which has to be wrested out from the depths and appropriated as part of consciousness by way of understanding the object. A common analogy given in the Indian texts for this Anumana - going from the explicitly given to the HIDDEN (maRaipoRuL) is that of the smoke in the hill and from which one concludes the presence of the FIRE there but invisible to the eyes.

GCM3: Abhinavagupta, in the third and last stage of his life when he wrote about aesthetics, came to the conclusion, that the santa rasa of literature was far superior to the religious ecstasies of the yogis. The yogis are trying with tremendous effort to achieve real experience of God and get comparatively poor results when they are successful, Abhinava says, and Chinmayananda says when the yogis fail under this great strain that often they go beserk either as crazy or vicious. Abhinavagupta attitude is in some basic ways like David Hume’s, that is, relax and enjoy the beautiful, let the beautiful lead you to an uncompromised bliss. Reading bad poetry does not send you into utter despare. And it is something anybody and everybody can enjoy. Now, Abhinavagupta is far more profound than the average play-goer. He has been through the stages of religion and philosophy and, I ASSUME, dropped them for the greater overall validity of aesthetics, a boon to hermeneutics. But those stages brought him to exactly that same place of profound bordom I quoted from Heidegger. In A TRIDENT OF WISDOM (Paratrisika Vivarana) he says what brings an ordinary person to utter despair brings him to joy. To Abhinavagupta, religion is an aesthetic sub-category, and I think that can be plainly seen in the evolution of his thinking. I have written a number of letter early on at the Abhinavagupta site precisely upon this.

Loga-3: In the act seeing, the seer is given already as the one who sees. Now from this primordial act of seeing there is a generation of a TEXT with a duality of structure - the DS and SS. The ‘rock’ is seen in the seeing of a person and such seeing of the same rock may differ from individual to individual. We may institute MEASUREMENTS so that over and above the differences in the individual seeing, there can be a sameness for e. g., the density size porosity and so forth. In such cases the primordial act of seeing is re-constituted as the positively objective seeing - the sensorial seeing and nothing else and hence as that which allows measurements. This is the kind of seeing on which Hume (and the bulk of Western philosophers) remain fixated.

GCM3: Anthony Criffasi at the Heidegger Spoons site has made this problematic for me since he argues quite well that nous operates as a kind of innate knowledge which I disagree with but he does distinctly make problematic that knowledge must come in some kind of form outside simple sense impressions. It is the problem of what perception really is when we take that away from optics and physiology. It is tied to the fictional but yet necessary concept of the self in Hume where Hume has come to a crux in his basic principles possibly contradicting each other, and one of the particular issues resolves into, Is there a concept of “wholeness” in Hume? A lot of people would love to find such a concept in him for their own personal purposes. Yet there may be a legitimate place for it. After all, he found a legitimate place for God in THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION which eventually became “transcendence” in Kant and Heidegger.

Loga-3: This kind of positive objective seeing FIXATES the seeing to the ROCK in itself making the person forgetful of the seer of the seeing. Of course this has the advantage of disclosing what the rock is from within itself, free of the emotional aesthetic and such other subjective correlates of the seer.

GCM3: Well, you know what I think of that.

Loga-3: The disadvantage of course is the cutting of the self as the seer and hence a blindness towards the self-constitution of self as the objective seer devoid of emotions aesthetics and such intention related aspects that he brings along with in every act of seeing. The deductive inductive logic and so forth is a product of such self-constitution but without an awareness of such a self transformation.

GCM3: Wittgenstein: “I must be redeemed before I believe.”

Loga-3: In contrast to this Hermeneutic Logic avoids this blindness by taking everything seen as a TEXT in a way - something written (or read) by the seer and retaining the seer as part of the what is seen. The SS of the rock seen, and as seen by a person is a reading of that person and one can go into the DS by a process of logical thinking called Anumana and UNDERSTAND better the SS so that our UNDERSTANDING is improved upon- we LEARN more about it and has a better understanding of it.

But the attention can shift also to the seer the producer of a text as such and such and why different individuals generate different texts of the SAME ROCK (i. e. read differently and write differently). With such a turn to reflective thinking, the seer, the self that does the seeing becomes the TEXT again with a DUALITY of structure DS and SS. Here the SS is the intentional self, the Asat-Self and DS is the Sat-Self, a distinction that Sankara (or for that matter all Indian idealists) never understood. Now as a second order and genuinely metaphysical reflections when the Sat-Self itself is appropriated as a TEXT only then we can understand the presence of BEING as the DS of this Sat-Self, BEING as the Cosmic Dancer and who dances even deep within.

GCM3: You get into the “existential solipsism” of Heidegger here which cuts two ways: A) Each unique person perceives a text from their personal presuppositions, the history of their private life; B) Perception itself as sensed is absolutely private and can only be communicated by words which, much of the time, is like trying to explain a bulldozer by comparing it to apples. Not much enlightenment occurs.

Dear Eric, Thank you! Your letter is both enlightening and encouraging! It has been a while since I have dealt with Damascius but I still think that an understanding of him (though he himself was historically detached from being an influence) shows the importance of how Neoplatonism could have helped create the region in which Hume, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein could think. I would appreciated hearing more from you!

Gary

ericparoissien <msrhood@aol.com wrote:

Dear Gary, i just joined your group, a unique place for nondual enquiry, and with your enlightening presence; now in the phase of reading messages and references, i will take more time for introduction later, sorry; while i am reading it please consider the following corrections in "Des premiers principe1. doc" in the "files" section of the list.
(the plural applies in the title: "Des premiers principes1. doc")
- there has been a mistype in the original french not "... Et sue les points difficiles de sa pensée" but "... Et sur les points difficiles de sa pensée" lettre 'e' and 'r' being next on the french keyboard too. Please consider the new translation i propose after your two original paragraphs here below:

7) Cependant ce n'est pas sur les événements de sa vie qu'il nous renseigne, mais plutôt sur les tendances de sa pensée. Nous savons par lui qu'il était très attaché à Jamblique et n'hésitait pas à reconsidérer sur bien les points la doctrine de Proclus . C'est l'inquiétude philosophique et, semble-t-il, la passion non seulement de la recherche mais de la difficulté qui nous sont présentées comme les traits dominants de son caractère . Et sue les points difficiles de sa pensée – sur la question du temps – Simplicius nous confie qu'il n'arrivait pas à le suivre .

However it is not of the events of its life that he informs us, but rather on the tendencies of his thought. We know from him that he was very attached to Iamblicus and did not hesitate to reconsider the doctrines of Proclus20. It is his philosophical concern and apparently the passion not only of the research but of the difficulty that is presented to us like dominant features of his character21. And to know the difficult points of its thought - on the question of time - Simplicius tells us that he was not able to follow him22.

My translation: (sticking to yours where possible)

However it is not of the events of its life that he informs us, but rather on the main lines of his philosophy. We know according to him that he was very attached to Iamblicus and did not hesitate to reconsider the doctrines of Proclus on many points. What is presented to us as dominant traits of his personality is his philosophical enquiring mind (restless philosophical questionning) and apparently, a passion not only for research but for difficulty as well. As about the delicate (tricky/thorny) points of his philosophy - on the question of 'time' - Simplicius confesses that he was not able to understand him.

[i introduced heavier expressions which might not be better translations like "main lines of his philosophy" or "understand" instead of "tells us", (please note 'passion for') to make the meaning more explicit to me, english is not my native tongue but french is.]

Eric