The Concealed Art of the Soul by Ganeri Jonardon;

Author:Ganeri, Jonardon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Nietzsche also said that ‘truth is an illusion we have forgotten is an illusion’,35 that we can come to know that our concepts fictionalize and distort the real nature of things, the implication being that we can somehow sneak round the side of the veil of ideas and compare our conceptual scheme with reality perceived from some impartial vantage point. What the early Nietzsche forgot is that our concepts might be the only window we have on reality; there is no catching them from the side on. And so, as Bernard Williams says, ‘it is trivially true that “snake” is a human concept, a cultural product. But it is a much murkier proposition that its use somehow falsifies reality—that “in itself” the world does not contain snakes, or indeed anything else you might mention’.36 Similarly here; even if person is a human concept, a human-centred way of grouping and classifying experience, it would not follow that ‘in itself the world does not contain such things as persons, that a person is ‘an illusion we have forgotten is an illusion’. The Buddhists need concur with Nietzsche only partly in his saying that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything’.37 They might say that the doer is the deed. Nor indeed need they say that because there is something human-centred in what we decide to count as a heap, it follows that heaps are ‘merely fictions’.38 Indeed it is their Nyāya critics who are the ones persistently to press these Buddhists into an admission that the identity of persons is, for them, an illusion like that of the circle of light generated by a swinging lamp. This is a pressure they just as consistently resist. Their insistence on the objectivity of persons, albeit different in kind from that of more fundamental sorts of entity, is unwavering. The admitted fact that persons are not objective in some absolute sense (paramārtha-sat) does not preclude their having objectivity in some other degree (saṃvṛti-satya).

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