Book Blogs Back!: Responses to Malcolm Keating – Chapters 6-7 (Śrī Harṣa) and Conclusion

My book with a Starfleet Academy mug: both seeking the final frontier?

This is continuation of my responses to Malcolm Keating's excellent blog posts on my book, Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa, which Malcolm wrote in preparation for an event on March 7, 2019.  You can see my previous responses here and here.

In the present post I'm responding to two of Malcolm's posts, which you can find here and here.  As will become clear, this post isn't going to make much sense without reading Malcolm's posts first.

So, here we go!

Chapters Six and Seven:

• As usual, great summary of Ch. 6!

• Fair point on prasaṅga, one that I considered, but didn’t end up articulating in the book. I think the difference is that it’s one of the primary means of argument for the three pillars. Others who use it tend to also include other arguments with positive conclusions, or to use something like prasaṅga but with implicative (paryudāsa) negations. The key difference is this: skeptics primarily use prasaṅga without positive conclusions, while others may use this argumentative technique as one of many.

• On scripture, I guess I see less shade between what I’m saying and what Das and Granoff are saying than it may appear. I even agree with Phillips on this insofar as scripture is provisional (like the other pramāṇas, for that matter, even if śruti is special in its ability to point us toward non-dual experience). Śrī Harṣa certainly does talk about his mystical non-dual experiences and says we might try it, too. But my point is that a thesis like, “everything is non-dual” is never the conclusion of an argument or the thesis of an anumāna. As I hint at in the book, I honestly don’t think non-dualism even in principle could be articulated in the language of philosophers (whether in the classical Indian or contemporary Anglophone contexts) without raising a number of serious (fatal?) philosophical problems. When I really spent some time with Advaita material and Śrī Harṣa while writing these chapters, it occurred to me that a good explanation for his skepticism might be that he understood all the problems endemic to holding non-dualism as a philosophical theory (at least as philosophy is typically understood). Now, it may be, as Ganeri suggests, that Śrī Harṣa thinks we need to try a different kind of philosophy. Or it may be, as I suggest, that Śrī Harṣa picked up what I’m calling Upaniṣadic mystical skepticism and added the types of arguments he explicitly says he was familiar with from Madhyamaka and Cārvāka (and since he says they do not accept the pramāṇas, he’s probably talking about something like my interpretation of Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi, or people like them whose texts may have been lost – it’s always good to keep in mind with classical India that our “archeological record” of available texts is thin compared to what once existed). 

• So, again, my point is really that I’m giving an interpretation that I think makes sense of the text. That’s all I’m trying to do. I honestly doubt we can do anything more when dealing with a culturally and temporally distant tradition based on an incomplete textual record (I personally find it amusing that some philosophers and philologists possess such a high level of confidence about the real meaning of these texts!). I don’t expect to convince many people with this book. But that’s okay with me. I merely hope to get people thinking, to maybe take a look at these texts and traditions in a new way. Maybe highlighting the skeptical aspects of the Indian tradition is a good way to continue the Matilal tradition of trying to show a contemporary audience that classical Indian philosophy is worth taking as seriously as we take the Western tradition (although maybe these skeptics have the right attitude that we shouldn’t take it too seriously!).

Conclusion:

• Thank you, Malcolm! I have really enjoyed your blog posts, and I am extremely flattered that you took so much time to engage so thoughtfully and carefully with my book.

• I do love the image! Thanks! I’m including an image of my book with my Starfleet mug, both because I know you are a Star Trek fan and because Star Trek is about the final frontier and boldly going where no one has gone before (although in the case of my book I am less sure anyone particularly wanted to go where I go).

• That does seem to be a type-o on p. 168, which is either my fault or happened somewhere in the editing process. I checked and it’s correct in the original Garfield source. Thanks for catching that. If there is a paperback edition, I will be sure to change that if possible.

• I’m still not entirely sold on the idea that “with conventionalism, all sins of contradiction are forgiven” (this is a paraphrase of your idea, of course!). Basically: the definition of perception still says what it says, which implies a contradiction even if that contradiction is conventional (so it’s contradictory at the level of conventional truth!). I hope to further explore this issue in an upcoming Author Meets Critics panel at the Pacific APA in Vancouver April 17-20, where Laura Guerrero (one of the critics) is raising a similar issue (as you probably know).

• Overall excellent summary as always! I do hope some of my more speculative thoughts on metaphilosophy will encourage others to think more deeply about metaphilosophy: what are we doing as philosophers? One odd thing about the discipline of philosophy as it currently exists is that the discipline does not generally encourage the pursuit of deeper metaphilosophical questions.  This is part of why I felt I should put this material at the end of a book rather than say, in a journal article or conference presentation. As I say in the book (but maybe not as clearly as I should have), I think we desperately need serious metaphilosophical reflection to help answer 21st century criticisms about the alleged uselessness of philosophy. Roughly: If we try to enter a game with other areas of human inquiry (especially science) about getting results, answering questions, obvious economic impact, and so forth, we are going to lose that game pretty quickly. I think we should be honest with ourselves and admit that we've already lost that game. Yet perhaps the uses of philosophy lie elsewhere. And the three pillars can help us think through what those alternative uses might be, free as they are from the burden of thinking philosophy answers its questions in the first place.

• One more thing that came up during the event on March 7 but that I think is relevant here: I have often wondered (and a few people have asked, including someone at the March 7 event), if I agree with the skeptics about philosophy (at least as I interpret them), why and how do I do philosophy? After all, I am a philosophy professor, so teaching, researching, and writing about philosophy is a big part of my life. The three uses of philosophy I articulate in the book are part of it (fun, cognitive skills, and lessening dogmatism), but I’m also inspired by the Academic skeptic Carneades (at least as Cicero presents him). For Carneades, there is an idea of a “plausible presentation” that is “truth-like” or something the skeptic does not quite fully assent to in any dogmatic sense and would be ready to give up, but which seems to be likely given their mental state at the time. This is basically how I make sense of my own thesis in this book or anything else I’ve written (I say something like this on p. 174). It’s how things seem to me, but I am the first to admit that I could be wrong. When it comes to matters as difficult as philosophy, having any more confidence than that seems odd to me. As I quipped on Twitter recently, “The longer I do philosophy the more puzzled I am that any philosophers have strongly-held philosophical views about anything.”

• Also, I was going to point out that I come dangerously close to answering your original question about the definition of philosophy or the target of the skeptics in my conclusion with the (admittedly very impressionistic) stuff on deep and shallow knowledge (around p. 174-176). I also just remembered that I said something about this topic in endnote 16 on p. xxxiv-xxxv. Or, a more amusing answer to the question, “What are skeptics about philosophy skeptical about?” would be à la Marlon Brando in Rebel Without a Cause, “What’ve ya got?”

• On tradition, I don’t think I ever argued that this is a “tradition in the stronger sense.” But maybe I have a somewhat weaker sense of tradition than most, especially most people who work in Indian philosophy where a stronger sense of tradition is largely taken for granted. Part of what I’m trying to do is to encourage people to rethink whether we should take the stronger sense for granted.

• On Nāgārjuna, your point is well taken. But I’m not sure anything I say implies that he’s limiting himself to only philosophers. There is plenty of attachment to svabhāva to go around. Philosophers aren’t the only ones with that disease. It’s more that professional philosophers are his direct audience, because those would be the only people (until the last couple hundred years, perhaps) who would be reading these texts in the first place. (I at least raise this issue in endnote 37 on p. 97 in the book).

• On Śrī Harṣa, I think we simply disagree. I don’t quite understand what sense it makes to call scripture a means of knowledge if it is overturned in non-dual experience along with everything else. Maybe it’s provisional? But then it could be roughly the same as perception, inference, etc., which function in the conventional realm and are overturned later.

• I find your take on Jayarāśi to be interesting, because I think it demonstrates that a lot of what we think we know about Nāgārjuna and Śrī Harṣa comes from how they are placed in a school. Looking at the text itself, Jayarāśi says about as much as the others about what he’s up to (Nāgārjuna praises the Buddha, but never says he’s trying to found a new school, and Śrī Harṣa never explicitly claims to be an Advaitin). All of which demonstrates, I think, that a lot of our interpretation of classical Indian figures comes from extra-textual clues or how they were taken by later figures (this is especially true as classical Indian philosophers generally give little in the way autobiographical details, preferring to get right to business). And on universals, purely in textual terms Jayarāśi both says they do and don’t exist in different contexts so I have no idea which of those would be his “real” position (I think Franco made this case pretty well in his 1984 article – see p. 81-82 of my book).

• I am definitely keen to get more scholars interested in Jayarāśi and Śrī Harṣa! I think both of them have a lot of philosophical riches that have yet to be explored in contemporary scholarship. As much as I like Nāgārjuna, he has gotten quite a lot of attention in recent decades (one might dare say too much attention).

• Again, I want to thank you, Malcolm, for such careful and critical attention to my book. I truly appreciate it!

So there you have it!  If you are so inclined, here's more information about my book.  And remember to check out Malcolm's blog!