Buddhist Theories of Objects

we've been talking about the contrast between realism and idealism and western philosophy i want to turn to the same topic in indian philosophy today we're going to be discussing buddhist theories of objects buddhist theories of objects are also in a sense theories of substance theories of causation theories of a variety of metaphysical topics they really stem from one of two very significant and very different ways of thinking about the nature of what the world is composed of the tradition in indian philosophy is really predominantly idealist idealism was a late comer in western philosophy was really with bishop barkley and various followers most famously including kant hegel in a variety of 19th century and 20th century thinkers that it got started before that everyone was really more or less some kind of realist well that is not all true in the indian tradition indian metaphysics concentrates on the contrast between realism and idealism and in general you might say the dominant tradition has really been on the idealistic side buddhism advaita vedanta the largest and most influential school of hinduism have both been idealist in their orientations now some indian traditions have been realist we've talked about the nia tradition for example especially in epistemology the by sheishika tradition in metaphysics those are realist traditions but it's important to realize that that's been a minority position in india not the majority position as it has been in most of western philosophy according to that idealist tradition everything is mind dependent there's a sense in which everything in the world is in some sense mental nothing is truly out there as the realist thinks nothing is truly independent of mind so idealism holds that what appear to be independent objects things that are outside of us and indeed they appear that way but they're really mental constructions there's something like projections of the mind they are the result of mental processing and so objects as we know them don't really endure in time they don't really have this independent existence they exist only for a moment now that is a way of taking you might say the idealist tradition that has been dominant in india but has rarely been explored in western philosophy western philosophers even people like berkeley or kant or hegel tend to think of objects as having a continuing existence as with hume they tend to think that we are doing perhaps some of the combining but hume is the closest thing we have in western philosophy to the dominant buddhist tradition it holds that things last only as long as a thought lasts that is to say objects are really momentary they come and they're gone and what happens then is that we take all of these momentary things and combine them into objects as we ordinarily understand them so what we take to be objects are really bundles of these momentary entities often in this tradition they're referred to as dharmas the dharmas and by the way in the orig in the early days of indian philosophy that's a term that means duty but it gets taken over by the buddhist idealists to mean something metaphysical the dharmas are something like these momentary mental objects that are grouped together into objects as we tend to understand them so we group them together we do that for our own purposes but what really is there is just these momentary mental episodes the dharmas well the realist schools are much more intuitive to most of us in western philosophy the logic and particularist schools for example nyaya and vaisheshka are realists according to them objects really do have a continuing existence and they're really out there in the world independent of our minds they endure over time they are things well like eyeglasses for example or wrist watches or tables and chairs animals people they have a continued existence all of those things are really mental constructions according to the idealist tradition all that is real is well those momentary mental episodes everything else emerges as a construction out of those well we've talked some about the vaisheshika tradition in detail for example canada for example saying i'm going to enumerate everything that has the characteristics of being and answering the fundamental question of ontology what is there by saying well the best guide to that is what we ordinarily say there is what we ordinarily take to be objects and so indeed they're the people tables chairs animals everyday objects of the ordinary world they turn out to be the fundamental thing and most western philosophers have agreed with that perspective by categories are the categories of those kinds of things the kinds of things we typically find in the world and so we've talked some about what their basic categories are i won't remind you of all of that now we've talked about the additional categories that later in the tradition get added things like universality and inherence individualizers and absences in addition to the substances the qualities the actions but what's significant here is that there's a very different conception of substance that appears in the buddhist tradition so whereas the realists people like aristotle for example in the west or by shaishika and all of the people who make up that tradition in india hold that the world is divided into these various objects that are mind independent called substances those substances bear qualities they stand in relations to one another they have a kind of independent and continuing existence and our goal really in language and in thought is to you might say car reality at its joints find the identity of these substances describe them find how they relate to other substances how they relate to us and so on to describe in other words the properties and relations of those substances the idealist tradition as it's developed within buddhism is very different we divide the world up ourselves into objects the objects aren't already there instead we divide the world up into objects they are just bundles of qualities and these qualities are in particular mental i have these mental episodes and i take some of them and group them together as perceptions for example or as thoughts of a particular thing but i'm doing that grouping the world doesn't group objects into units for example i do that i take this flood of mental episodes that i'm experiencing the thoughts feelings perceptions and i carve that up into objects that i can understand i do that in ways that are useful to me but they have nothing to do with carving up joints in the world there are no joints in the world there is just this sea of mental episodes and i try to make sense of it and i divide it up in a way that seems to me to make sense but that's a very different idea it's as if one group here the realist group imagines that reality is like a large bowl of popcorn where the popcorn comes divided up into chugs right into and you have the task of well picking up a chunk and well in that case eating it but you know in general understanding something about its qualities and its relations but the picture in buddhism is not something like a bowl of popcorn instead it's something like a bowl of oatmeal it doesn't have any intrinsic division into spoonfuls or kernels or chunks really the oatmeal presumably did but after it's cooked it's just a big bowl of mush and now it's our job to carve that up and divide that up into units that we find useful so a small child for example might eat that with a small spoon an adult might take a larger spoon but we do things with it as we choose so it's not as if the oatmeal cries out to be carved at his joints saying but no you you broke up the parts of the oatmeal this was the part you should have taken on that spoon it's whatever you want right i mean it's just there it's this sea of oatmeal in something like the way that experience is this sea of thoughts and feelings and perceptions the dharmas that get divided up by us in ways we find useful so if the realist tradition thinks of reality as something like a bowl of popcorn the idealist tradition thinks of it as a bowl of oatmeal a bowl of oatmeal that has no intrinsic division in it and in that sense it's not that the quality qualities are arbitrary the oatmeal has certain qualities and parts of the bowl are related to other parts of the bowl but all of that is really something that we can describe only by talking about the parts and we're dividing it up into the parts the parts don't have any intrinsic identity well what does that mean for the larger picture it does mean that if you want to talk about what the world really consists in well it's hard to say right if the world is something like a bowl of popcorn you can say well what does that consist of what's in there the answer is these kernels of popcorn but if you ask about a bowl of oatmeal we can say well it's oatmeal we can describe the general kind of thing but of course that's not to divide it up into chunks that's to use something like a mass term almost as if we say with respect to the mental objects that the buddhists talk about well we've got the dharmas the mental episodes but even that language can be confusing because after all if we say well what are the dharmas exactly these episodes after all dharma and episode those are count nouns we talk about singular and plural there it's not just like oatmeal or you know a glass of water where we don't have any intrinsic division so how are they divided up maybe they're true divisions at the level of those mental episodes the dharmas budagosa a prominent buddhist idealist thinker tackles that question and says a living being lasts only as long as one thought he says imagine a chariot rolling along a road the wheel of the chariot touches the road for about as long as a dharma one of these mental episodes actually exists so he's willing to talk in a certain sense about the individual mental episodes or about the dharmas but he says look they're really momentary and maybe the best way to think of it is not to think of it as a unit at all not to think well it lasts for 12 nanoseconds or something of that guide but instead to say it's really something we can isolate we can talk about how i felt at that moment of time maybe or what i was perceiving at this time right now but overall that's something of an abstraction really we just have something like this flow of experience and yes i can try to point to one moment in that but really it's just something like a sea of experience and then i am pulling apart chunks of that i do that at the level of physical objects i do that at the level of people animals vegetables and so on but i also do it when i turn inside and think about my thought or my perception or my feeling that does a feeling happen just in a moment well one way of looking at it is to say i i don't know when when exactly that feeling started when that feeling stopped i don't know exactly when i started perceiving this and when i started perceiving that if i turn my head when exactly did i stop seeing the blackboard and start seeing the wall it's not clear to me at all it felt like there was this sea of experience and so i can sort of artificially carve it up into mental episodes into dharmas but the fact is it's more like this master it's more like the bowl of oatmeal more like this sea of experience that i can in some way divide up there's an ancient indian literary text which is absolutely beautiful called the ocean of story it goes on for volume after volume and there's stories within stories it's very complex and very beautifully written a lot of fascinating tales in it but it has that feel to that ocean of story you can pluck a story out if you want but really it's all part of this multi-layered narrative that is going on continually throughout those many volumes and so experiences like that it's not that there aren't any strands exactly there are strands but they're all woven together in complex ways and anytime we try to say well that one even that thought that feeling we're doing the carving up and we are doing a certain amount of abstracting it's as if we are dipping our bowl our spoons into the bowl of oatmeal and taking a chunk of it even to describe it in those terms so in a certain sense to talk about a mental episode or a dharma is already only a way of speaking but how much more is that true for all of the other things we talk about people minds objects in the world all of those are only ways of speaking they are ways in which we divide up the world they don't refer to objects in the world so when the vaishashika thinker says look at language look at the nouns that's a reference to person places or things in other words the constituents of the world but ago another idealist say no it isn't really there are only ways of speaking the world has no intrinsic division at all if you want to get some idea of what this is like think about the two nouns person and passenger in a certain sense if we're talking about airline passengers for example you might say it comes to the same thing more or less right i mean let's forget for the moment about dogs cats companion animals of various kinds and just think about human beings we could say well people and passengers yeah they're basically the same thing right i mean uh all the only passengers are people and so well that's not true not everybody flies on an airplane but at least we talk about people who fly on airplanes we can say yeah it looks like person passenger kind of equivalent but actually that's not true we divide them up differently so imagine that somebody is traveling between houston and austin let's say short airline flight you get on the plane you fly to houston then you fly back to austin well you're one person intuitively speaking at least we act like yeah you're the same person when you leave austin and then again when you arrive in houston then again when you leave houston come back to austin it's all the same person but if the airline is counting the number of passengers carried what do they count they count two they count two passengers one from austin to houston one from houston to austin and so imagine the gene to take a real case flies from austin to houston and then back she's one person but she's two passengers so here's one way we might think about that well yeah that's weird right i mean jane the two in one nearly god i mean two passengers in one person say well that's silly that no it's much simpler than that um she's one person but passenger is just a way of counting it's just a way that southwest airlines let's say counts people and adds up the total number of trips and so on and so yeah i don't take that seriously there are people in the world but there aren't separately passengers in the world and way more passengers than people that's silly no what's going on here is simply it's a way of counting well according to buddhigosa and other buddhist idealists every noun is like passenger person is like that too so is truck so is eyeglasses so is cat and so forth all of them are really like that they are just ways of counting even dharma even mental episode is something like that it's just a way of counting it is just a name an appellation just something we introduce for our own convenience not because it reflects the basic structure of the world in this way the idealist perspective is very different from the realist perspective you find in an entire tradition in the west it starts with aristotle it goes all the way up through medieval philosophy it continues in contemporary philosophy indeed most of the philosophers for the last century or more within english-speaking countries have viewed themselves as analytic philosophers and they tend to think of language as perhaps not the only clue but nevertheless a really important clue to the nature of reality well according to the idealist that's completely the wrong way of thinking about it that's not what language is doing language is a tool we use for our own purposes it's not meant to reflect the structure of the world as if it's some kind of mirror we're holding up to reality instead it's a tool and just as the hammer doesn't have the same structure as a nail and the screwdriver doesn't have the same structure as a screw so there's no reason why our tool language should actually match the structure of the world there's no reason to expect that at all it's doing something very different compare the spoon that we dip into the bowl of oatmeal and the oatmeal itself there's no structural similarity between the spoon and the oatmeal that would seem absurd even if it looks like once we take this out there is a sense in which the shape of the little bit of oatmeal we get matches the structure of the spoon that can tempt us to think ah oatmeal is shaped like spoons but of course it's not doesn't have any intrinsic shape at all well the buddhist says really that's the situation with us language is a tool it doesn't reveal the structure of reality it shows how we find it useful to think about things and that's all that's going on there's a terrific dialogue called the questions to king melinda that makes the same point king melinda is actually a historical figure um in greek he's referred to as menander he was a great king and ruled everything from well really the entire middle east all the way up through persia and to the borders of india including much of what today would be pakistan and even northwest india in any case manander or melinda comes along riding on a chariot and encounters a buddhist monk nagasena and what follows is this wonderful dialogue where the king says so who am i addressing and he says well i'm called nagasena king but but really that's a mere name an appellation a way of counting there is no ego here to be found there is no not ghana and the king is amazed and starts talking to him how can there be no longer saying if there is no nugget saying who am i talking to and he goes along and essentially they said well okay um so i'm not talking to nagasina well what would be this nagasena if uh if there were a nagasena and then they go through all the possibilities and then it gets turned around because nagasi nagasana says to the king well tell me king how did you get here and he said well i got here on did you walk no i got here on a chariot um well uh i in my opinion chariot is merely a name merely an appellation it's a way of counting there is no chariot here to be found and they go along on this discussion saying exactly the same thing in both the cases in both nagasana and the person but also in the case of the chariot the question is well okay let's suppose there is an ego here to be found let's suppose there is such a monk as nagasana let's suppose there is an object like the chariot well what is it ah and now the dialogue is a very similar form because they go through a list of elements and it turns out no one element is the whole well maybe it's the form maybe it's all of those things taken together maybe the combination and all of them get rejected in various ways so it goes something like this i mean there is no nagasana here to be found i mean what could nagaseina be is naga saying on the head it's not a saying of the eyes naga's saying of the tongue the teeth is not the same of the fingers the arm the legs well no not obviously none of those is it the general shape well no right i mean i could change my appearance i might gain weight i might lose weight i might grow taller as a growing up as a young person or growth shorter i might gosh in one i might lose a body part it would still be me so all of those things seem like yeah it's not those it's not even the combination i mean clearly the combination could change and it would still be me what about well what else is there right it's not any given part it's not really any set of those parts it's not even all the parts taken together because they could change and it would still be me it's not the general shape or form so what is it that makes me me and the suggestion is there's nothing that makes you you remember lock asking that fundamental question or personal identity what is it that makes me me the answer in this dialogue the questions to king melinda is there is nothing that makes you you because why there is no you you are just a way of counting you're just an appalachian you're something like passenger okay we take a bunch of mental episodes and we call them you that's it and it's the same with the chariot are the horses the chariot well no the wheel's the chariot no ah just the base of it the chariot no the reigns is that a chariot no well is it the general shape of the chariot no we can change that is it all of those things taken together no a wheel could fall off we would replace the wheel it'd be the same chariot so what makes it the same chariot oh gosh nothing there is no chariot here to be found it's really just a name an appellation here's the point if we think look here are some of the characteristic substances of the world people physical objects like chariots won't do it right try to take that seriously and say a person is a basic substance a chariot is a basic substance you might say well a chariot is obviously some kind of compound but just take the horse an animal or just take the reins or just take the wheel it doesn't really matter what you take here ask the same questions about it is just the rim the wheel no is it just that center thing that's the wheel no is it the spokes that are the wheel no it is the is it the combination that seems much better but but look if one of those things breaks and we replace it it's still the same wheel isn't it yes so it looks as if we could i i don't know i can't tell you what it is to be that wheel there is nothing that makes it that wheel conclusion that wheel doesn't exist okay that wheel isn't a substance in the world and for the same reason nagasada is not a substance in the world neither is the chariot neither is any other physical object so that's a rather dramatic conclusion no one element is the whole the combination isn't the whole the parts could change while this the whole the object remains the same and so in the end we can't identify what it would be to be that chariot or to be that monk nagasana or to be that king melinda it turns out none of those are really things we can characterize at all but neither do we say it's some hidden soul or something else like that we just say i guess they're real this is not a substance this is not a constituent of the world now heraclitus in ancient greek philosophy before socrates would have said i i know what's going on here everything's constantly changing the world is just this well in his case river of change you can't put your foot in the same river twice everything's constantly changing and becoming a different object heraclitus says nothing can have contrary qualities just as the same thing can't be both hot and cold at the same time or tall and short at the same time it can't be both raining and not raining outside in the same place at the same time so he says nothing can have contrary qualities but change involves contrary qualities it having a certain property here and then changing so it no longer has that property here but the same thing can't have the property and not have the property so it's not the same object so every time you move every time you have a different thought you're a different person every time the chariot changes in any way even because the horses move it's not the same object and buddhism basically agrees with that that's right something can't have contrary qualities so every change is a change in qualities contrary qualities are there has the quality now doesn't have it has a different quality then can't be the same object so the only things that could be the same object are these momentary things that are not changing just start changing because they only occur at a moment they occur at a point rather than over a span of time and so the momentary dharmas those are the only things that we could say have any identity at all but even they we might worry don't really have an identity well all of this gets reinforced when we adopt the atomic theory of matter because until then this might seem rather fanciful like oh well you know what aristotle said oh here's what's characteristic of substances they can have contrary qualities and so it looks like we could just deny that premise and say yeah that conception's wrong it's the same person look at it there is such a person's nagasana there is such a thing as the chariot and yes it's very hard to define exactly what makes nagasayna nagasana or that chariot that chariot but come on i mean these are parts of the world and if you don't like the chariot or even a human being because it seems too composite then go down to something much more specific then we can say that's a constituent of the world and maybe we say that with respect to the atoms themselves ultimately but wait if the atomic theory is right it suggests that actually nothing we ordinarily see in the world is really a constituent it's always a composite it's always a compound and once people began to adopt and take seriously that atomic theory that everyday conception of objects began to fall apart dignaga a 15th sorry a fifth century buddhist put it this way though atoms serve as the causes of the consciousness of the sense organs they are not its actual objects like the sense organs because consciousness does not represent the image of the atoms so the atoms are the causes of perception but they're not its actual objects they are not the objects represented in perception because we're not aware of the atoms we don't see the atoms they don't have any reality really what's there when i'm perceiving the chariot according to the atomic theory is this cloud of atoms but i don't see the atoms the chariot i see that's not really a constituent of the world but the same is true when i look at the monk nagasena he's just a combination of atoms and so nagasena isn't really a constituent of the world either and so the atoms end up looking kind of like these dharmas that the buddhists had been talking about all along so the buddhists attempt to say see we told you we told you that people animals physical objects around you in the universe we told you they're not real they're just combinations composites of other things that are carved up by us into those units for our own purposes see the atomic theory now gives us scientific support for this the realist might say well yeah okay maybe but but look the atoms then are the real thing in august oh we're not going to say that dignolga says no they're not he says consciousness doesn't arise from what's represented in it they don't exist these objects as represented in consciousness don't exist in substance they're just like the double moon in other words they're like an illusion thus both the external things are unfit to be the real objects of consciousness both the external things well the things as represented the objects and people and other things that we take to be constituents the everyday world they turn out really not to be the actual objects of the world even though we treat them as objects of consciousness because the atomic theory says they're composites they're not the real constituents but what about the atoms well wait that's just a theory that we constructed to try to explain these appearances and so that's something like us constructing this theory of dharmas or mental episodes we're positing those we aren't discovering those either and so they're unfit to be taken as real so dignaga says we can't treat the atoms as real we can't treat the composites as real we're stuck without anything we can really treat as an ultimate constituent of the world so we're in a situation where we look at the moon and we see two moons for some reason an odd illusion maybe we got water in our eye or maybe there's an odd sort of thing going on in the sky but whatever it is is the case there aren't really two moons there and our theory tells us like eddington's two tables there's really the atomic theory object and then the object is represented but neither one is really fit to be considered a basic thing in the world the things that are produced by consciousness well they're obviously not according to the atomic theory they are something like well a mental projection on the basis of all that but what about these they're just things we posit on the basis of those projections so they're actually kind of doubly far removed from reality well that nyaya vaishaisha conception then is there are continuing substances qualities in here in them our talk of substances is a good guide to metaphysics they're basic constituents of the world they have essences properties necessary to them and that preserves their identity through change it's a very common sense view to most of us the buddhist conception is different in every single respect to summarize there are no continuing substances everything's momentary substances are just bundles of qualities our talk of substances is a convenient fiction there really is no nagasana or no chariot to be found in fact substances so-called are conceptual constructions there is nothing at all that gives them unity they have no essences except as constructed we can say well i'm going to call this a spoonful of oatmeal but that thing itself has no essence considered in itself it's only as constructed that we can talk about anything being necessary to it here's maybe a way of putting it as a joke yogi berra is famous for saying outrageous things and so here's one of the classic exchanges in the new york bar here's your pizza mr barra would you like me to cut it into four pieces or eight so yogi responds better make it four i don't think i can eat eight of course it's the same pizza right it doesn't really make any difference how you carve it up it's the same amount altogether either way that's the joke but in buddhism well the world is like that pizza and all of our dividing it into objects is rather like cutting it into four pieces or eight it's up to us it doesn't tell us anything about the nature of the world so in aristotle the causes of perception are the objects of perception but that's exactly what dignaga is denying the causes are the atoms but the appearances are those things that appear in consciousness they're something like the internal objects and they are different things the actual objects in the world well yeah i guess according to atomic theory they're the atoms they're the things that are postulated by us as the things that are in the world underlying our perceptions but of course what they're like we don't know because we can't actually encounter them in experience and the internal objects we do encounter well they're just appearances they aren't the real things at all so the causes are the atoms we don't see them only their effects and what we see doesn't really exist in reality it's a fiction it's something like an illusion so can we tell what aspects of those illusions those representations match the world no we have no idea and in fact if we think seriously about consciousness we realize what it's doing is very complicated it's not just like one little spoon dipping into the oatmeal in fact in buddhigosa there are 89 different kinds of consciousness nothing unifies them and makes them all consciousness they're only streams or strands of consciousness absolutely nothing unites them nothing unites past present and future nothing unites anything even us into anything like an object everything instead emerges as some kind of complex or compound and it's up to us to try to make any sense of it and use our concepts use language as a tool for dividing it up into chunks we can understand

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021