A Philosopher's Ruminations

  For Advaita Vedanta but not for Madhyamika, everything except Brahman is unreal. Why is it unreal? Because they lack a self or an essence. What lacks an essence has no genuine identity, because what is dependent on another cannot also be identical with itself. A chariot, for instance, is nothing over and above its parts arranged in a certain way. It has no essence, no existence that is not dependent on the parts. It has no existence outside of human conventions that treat these myriad parts as a single entity. These conventions have no foundation in reality, and everything is a conglomeration of parts to which we ascribe an essence. For Advaita Vedanta, everything different from the self or anything that is or can be an object of the self is unreal. The Self is something that necessarily exists and is unnegatable, while the existence of the world is transitory and is negated in Brahman-realization, like dreams are sublated upon waking up. Why does the world appear to us if it is ...

Psychologism conflates a genetic account of the acquisition of concepts with the truth of those concepts. In other words, it regards how we come to consider something as true as an explanation of the truth of the belief. This reduction of epistemology to psychology depends on an ontological reduction of the object of thought to the underlying psychological process of thinking. The account is irremediably circular, as can be seen in Hume’s psychologistic reduction of the relation of cause and effect. According to Hume, the philosophical relation of cause and effect is reducible to a natural relation consisting of the feelings of facility in moving from one idea to another and vivacity that compels the mind to believe that something is present to consciousness. Consider a person who regularly sees smoke wherever there is fire without any counterexamples. This leads him to associate the two together and regard one as the cause and the other as the effect. The source of the idea does not ...

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (henceforth JK in short) uses the term ‘conditioning’ in three inter-related senses: a) Mediation: in this sense mind is conditioned because a mental state is part of a chain of cause and effect. The existence of any mental state is dependent on a previous one which is to say that the present mental state is conditioned by its predecessor. Whatever is mediated is also limited because it has an opposite and whatever is limited is finite, b) Habituation: in this sense mind is a cluster of habits of thinking and acting which are formed due to memories, past experiences, culture and tradition. To every new challenge that the world throws upon us the mind responds in accordance with its limited array of acquired responses, so while the challenge is always new, the response is always dependent on the past. Acting according to a pattern makes the mind dull and insensitive, c) Teleological: human beings act for a reason and they have a purpose or a goal for the sake of...

  LOVE AND RELATIONSHIP In the following passage we find JK linking thought, identification and possessiveness, the sense of me-mine that is at the root of all conflict: “It is thought that is breeding violence – my house, my property, my wife, my husband, my country, my God, my belief, which is utter nonsense. Who is doing this, creating this everlasting ‘me’ opposed to the rest? Who is doing it? Education, society, the establishment, the church are all doing it, because I am part of all that.” “Thought must inevitably divide; look what has happened. Thought says ‘Nationalism is pretty rotten, it has led to all kinds of war and mischief, let us have brotherhood, let us be united’. So thought forms a league of nations or United Nations, but thought is still operating separatively and maintaining separation: you who are an Italian, you keep your Italian sovereignty and so on. Talk about brotherhood and yet keep separate, which is hypocrisy; that is a function of thought to pla...