Western Questions Eastern Answers: A Collection of Short Essays - Volume 4 by Ashish Dalela

Author:Ashish Dalela [Dalela, Ashish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Religion & Science, Science, Philosophy & Social Aspects
ISBN: 9789385384226
Google: dyxVzQEACAAJ
Amazon: 9385384228
Publisher: Shabda Press
Published: 2020-02-16T18:30:00+00:00

It is true that reason and experience are recognized as valid methods of knowledge, but the underlying metaphysical assumptions in Vedic philosophy are quite different.

The first difference is that the world is idea-like rather than object-like. So, the problem of Platonism in Western philosophy does not arise because we don’t have to look to a transcendent world in order to obtain new ideas. We can in fact look at the present world and we can derive ideas from the observation of this world. This is also the reason why the empirical method appears to work in generating new ideas. These ideas are not being generated as free creativity of the mind. Rather, they are perceptions of the mind by which the mind is able to see ideas within this world. To understand this solution, however, we have to recognize that the mind is also a sense; it is called the sixth sense in Vedic philosophy. By the five senses we perceive the sensations such as taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight. And by the mind we perceive ideas such as table, chair, house, computer, human, car, etc. So, there are two types of empiricism in Vedic philosophy—the first of the senses and the second of the mind.

These are involved in the perception of two different kinds of entities that combine to create experience. Therefore, when we say that we are generalizing the individual things into concepts, it is not necessary to simply come up with an idea freely. We can also generalize through the mind. For example, when we call some things as dogs and others as cats we are not generalizing. We are actually seeing by the mind and we are seeing the common or shared form between different individual members. So, the notion that the ideas exist in this world and we are able to perceive the ideas by the mind resolves the problem of generalization in empiricism and the problem of Platonic world in rationalism. Now the issue is that we have to develop the mind to correctly perceive the similarities of form. Therefore, doing science or acquiring knowledge becomes a process of how we develop the mental faculty of perception.

The second difference in Vedic philosophy is that the space and time of this world is like an inverted tree rather than like a box. Remember that by the senses we can see individual things, but by the mind we are seeing commonalities between things. If there is objective commonality then how the same thing appears in many individual things needs to be explained. For example, how does the idea of color appear in many types of colors such as red, blue, green, etc.? The answer to this problem is that color is like a branch of a tree from which many individual twigs such as red, blue, and green are manifest. So, the idea that is shared across more ideas has a higher position on this inverted tree, just like the trunk of the tree is common across many branches, but the branch is common across fewer leaves.

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