Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyaya Dualist Tradition

Abstract

"Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyaya Dualist Tradition" by Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti is reviewed.

Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyaya Dualist Tradition. By Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 309.

This book is an exposition and defense of classical Nyaya-Vaisesika psychophysical dualism, the theory that mind and matter are ontologically different and irreducible to each other. Traditionally Naiyayikas are substance dualists, holding that the self (atman) is a permanent, immaterial substance that possesses perceptible qualia like cognition and desire. However, Nyaya substance dualism is importantly different from Cartesian substance dualism; it is also different from other forms of Indian substance dualism, like Samkhya.

In fourteen chapters Chakrabarti explains Nyaya dualism's ontological presuppositions and expounds the many arguments that Naiyayikas offer for their theory. Chapter 1 briefly outlines the background Nyaya ontology and epistemology. Among the seven fundamental categories admitted by the Nyaya are substances (dravya) and qualia (guna). Substances can be physical (bhautika) or spiritual (cetana), and the self is held to be a spiritual substance. Conscious states are qualia of the underlying self, which can exist without them. Nyaya epistemology is causal-reliabiIist and admits perception, inference (inductive and deductive), and testimony as reliable means of knowledge. In order to justify their dualism Naiyayikas utilize a set of arguments that draw upon all of these recognized means of knowledge.

Chapter 2 distinguishes Nyaya dualism from Cartesian dualism, arguing that Nyaya interactionists do not have Descartes' interaction problem because (1) they allow that the immaterial self has location although not extension, and (2) they embrace a "Hume-like" account of causation. This is debatable. First, I agree that a plausible dualism needs to allow that immaterial minds are located, even if they have no dimension. Moreover, there is a sense in which this concession just takes a little further the implications of Descartes' own belief that the nonspatial mind worked through a particular material place in the body: the pineal gland. However, if the im material-location claim is to be intelligible, the dualist also owes us a developed ontology of immaterial points that are distinct from material points, even though the spatial properties of the two kinds of points are indistinguishable.

Second, while it has often been noted that Descartes has no interaction problem if causation is nothing but Humean constant conjunction and we can observe both mental and physical events, many philosophers have well-motivated reservations about such a general account of causation. Moreover, it is unclear to me that the Nya.ya theory of causation really is "Hume-like" (p. 26): there seems to be a distinctly non-Humean type of (non-logical) necessity implied by the Nyaya insistence that a cause is an invariable (niyata) and non-superfluous (ananyathisiddha) antecedent of an effect.

Chapters 3 and 4 explain the Nyaya view of cognitions and other internal states as qualia of an immaterial substantial self. The internal states discussed in most detail are cognition, pleasure, pain, and desire. Chakrabarti suggests that the Nyaya account of these states may loosely be called "functionalist" in that their nature is explained in terms of their causal roles. The self (as an immaterial and extended substance) is then introduced in a functionalist fashion in order to explain the kind of contact that has a causal role in the origin of an internal state like pleasure.

Chapters 5 through 10 expound the Nyaya view of the self and its relation to the body, presenting a battery of traditional arguments. The Nyaya view of the self as the permanent substratum of the fleeting internal states is antithetical to the kind of "bundle theory" espoused by Indian Buddhists (and by many modern Western philosophers). Accordingly, Naiyayikas have always felt the need to argue extensively for this part of their theory. Since they hold that the self is not perceived, they try to build an inferential case for its existence. First, they argue that the self is a permanent entity, then that this permanent entity is a substance. Finally, they try to show that this permanent substance is immaterial. The complex Nyaya arguments for these controversial theses often invoke various epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions, which Chakrabarti helpfully makes explicit.

Chapter 11 briefly discusses the Nyaya causal argument for the existence of God as the supreme self. This topic is not only tangential to the main theme of the book, but has already been treated at length in several other recent monographs. Accordingly, although the material presented here is interesting enough intrinsically, the book would have been better if it had been dropped.

Chapters 12 and 13 distinguish the Nyaya view from the rival Samkhya and Advaitin accounts of the self. Nyaya rejects both the Samkhya view that our cognitive states are unconscious, being mere transformations of buddhi, and the Advaitin view that an all-inclusive non-intentional consciousness is the only reality, with matter being ultimately unreal. In this connection Chakrabarti correctly notes that the Samkhya purusa-prakrti dualism is not really a mental-physical dualism. However, he also claims that prakrti cannot be described as mental or physical because both "material objects and internal states come out of the same basic stuff, which is beyond the physical/mental division" (p. 178). This claim is unpersuasive. Instead, a simple continuity argument suggests strongly that prakrti is indeed physical because some of its evolutes (the bhutas, for instance) are paradigmatically physical, and hence, presumably so, too, are its other "subtler" evolutes (including the antahkarana).

The concluding chapter recapitulates the main points of the argument and claims a resolution of the conservation-of-energy problem for dualism. However, the supposed resolution consists merely of denying that mental causation involves energy transfers (p. 215), and there is nothing novel in this. Dualists have often pointed out that changes in the pattern of energy distribution (and hence causal changes) can be brought about without supplying any energy, and hence mental causation of physical effects need not violate the conservation-of-energy principle.

A lengthy appendix provides a useful annotated translation of selected passages from Udayana's Atmatattvaviveka. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Chakrabarti uses the standard diacritical marks for Sanskrit words, titles of Sanskrit texts, and Sanskrit names of philosophical schools-but not for the names of individual philosophers. I do not see the point of this irritatingly inconsistent practice. Chakrabarti's proffered explanation is that "some to whose names they would have been applicable do not like them" (p. xii). But this argument can hardly be used to justify overthrowing modern practice for citing the classical Sanskrit authors, since their preferences are unknown to us!

Overall the book attempts three distinct, although often intertwined tasks. First, Chakrabarti offers an exposition of the classical Nyaya-Vaisesika theory of mind and the self. Second, he provides a host of arguments for this theory, mostly extracted from old Nyaya sources. The number and variety of these arguments clearly refute the all too common assumption that the ancient Indian philosophers made no attempt to offer rational justifications for their psychophysical dualism. Third, he attempts to juxtapose the Nyaya dualist theory against modern Western physicalist theories and argue for its superiority to the latter.

Chakrabarti does a very good job of the first two tasks. This is the clearest and most extended discussion of the Nyaya philosophy of mind available to date. One marked strength of Chakrabarti's exposition is the inclusion of his own translations of lengthy excerpts from old Nyaya texts, connected together by his philosophical commentary. This provides the reader with a well-chosen sourcebook of translations from the classical Nyaya primary texts on this topic. However, as Chakrabarti warns (p. xii), this is not a purely historical work, and hence historians of Indian philosophy should not expect any attempt to compare different interpretations of the original Sanskrit texts or to trace the historical development of the Nyaya theory. Instead the author's self-avowed aim is "to present the views of a major school of Indian philosophy in a clear and compelling way that should make it easy for a student of philosophy to understand and appreciate them" (p. xii). It seems to me that he succeeds admirably in this aim.

However, when Chakrabarti attempts to argue for the superiority of Nyaya dualist theory against modern Western physicalist theories he is rather less convincing. True, he is a bit wary about claiming explicitly that this is something he has succeeded in doing. Sometimes he suggests that all he is trying to do is to show that the Nyaya position is "plausible and that it can be argued for" (p. xii), comparing his own sympathetic approach to the Nyaya texts with that of the great Advaitin commentator Vacaspati Misra. But at other times it is hard to resist the impression that Chakrabarti thinks the arguments he presents add up to a case for the rational superiority of Nyaya dualism to Western physicalism.

Interestingly, it is full-blooded substance dualism that Chakrabarti is seeking to establish the plausibility of, not the more modest property dualism that various modern Western philosophers are willing to defend. From the Nya.ya point of view such a property dualism fails to account for personal identity. Naiyayikas are nonreductionists about personal identity, which they ground in the simplicity of the self. Without positing the existence of such a simple self, they argue, we cannot explain the phenomenon of memory, which presupposes such an identical self. Such a self is then inferred to be a permanent immaterial substance since nothing else in the Nyaya categorical framework could do the job.

This argumentative strategy, however, highlights a major difficulty in assessing the success of the Nya.ya arguments for dualism: often they seem far too theorybound to persuade anyone not already convinced of the truth of dualism and the inescapability of the Nyaya categorical framework. In a sense this limitation is to be expected, given the Nyaya conception of philosophical inquiry. The Naiyayikas are constructional ists concerned with building an elaborate and complete philosophical system out of a relatively small number of basic entities. They are also holists, believing that the worth of their philosophical system is determined ultimately by its overall explanatory power, rather than by the individual correlations between its terms and those of common sense. Accordingly, their arguments for psychophysical dualism will often seem question-begging to a philosopher already attracted to physicalism as a simpler metaphysical hypothesis.

In order to negotiate an intriguing way out of this apparent deadlock Chakrabarti introduces two very interesting methodological principles. The first is "the general acceptability of inductive examples" (GALE), a principle of Indian logic that presumably derives from that tradition's debating origins. According to GAIE, "all the examples brought in support or critique of an empirical generalization should be acceptable to both sides in a philosophical or scientific debate" (p. xii). The second principle is "the flaw of uniqueness" (p. xvi), according to which a unique property of an inferential subject is inductively inadequate to prove that something else is true or false of that subject.

Utilizing these two principles, Chakrabarti tries to shift the onus of proof away from the dualist. The first principle prohibits the physicalist from invoking any premises supported by examples not acceptable to both parties to the debate. The second principle prohibits the physicalist from, for example, assuming that brain states (unlike other physical states) are subject to privileged access because they are uniquely more complex. Chakrabarti stresses that both principles are supposed to be neutral with respect to all parties in the debate, and hence the dualist is also prohibited from using examples unacceptable to the physicalist. But since contemporary debates about the mind-body problem often proceed from the assumption that it is the dualist who is on the back foot, accepting these two principles would significantly alter the terms of such debates.

Is there, though, any reason to accept the constraints imposed by these two methodological principles? Certainly, Chakrabarti offers no independent arguments for them that are irresistible. He points outs that the GAlE was formulated by Gotama, the author of the Nyjyascitra, and that the mere fact that the principle is not well known in the Western tradition should not be a ground for disregarding it. He also claims that "more often than not something like GAlE is honored by empirical scientists" (p. xiii). Finally, he suggests that such an epistemic principle fits well with other aspects of Nyaya epistemology. But none of this provides any overwhelming reason to accept the two principles. Indeed Chakrabarti himself frankly admits that there is room for disagreement about both the GAlE principle (p. 8) and the flaw of uniqueness principle (pp. 138, 214), a disagreement that he does not propose to settle in this book. Finally, if we assume GAlE itself to be a true inductive principle that is also self-referential, then it will never be reasonable to accept GAlE so long as there is any disagreement about it.

However, in the absence of appeal to such methodological principles, it seems we are just left with our original problem. To most modern Western philosophers of mind the Nyaya substance dualists will seem committed to a degenerating research program that they are incapable of defending in any way that is not question-begging. These Western philosophers will object that, holistically considered, the alternative physicalist research program looks much more promising, notwithstanding various admitted anomalies the program has yet to explain.

I conclude, then, that while Chakrabarti has done an impressive job of presenting the classical Nyaya theory of mind, he has been much less successful in demonstrating that it is more plausible than the rival modern physicalist theories. What he has unequivocally succeeded in doing, though, is writing a book on classical Indian philosophy of mind that is well worth reading.