2020-06-21, 12:46 AM
Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem
Miri Albahari
Miri Albahari
Quote:In what he terms the “Hegelian synthesis argument” — named broadly after Hegel’s dialectical method of identifying thesis, antith-esis and problem-avoiding synthesis — David Chalmers (2016a) has recently traced the evolution of the mind-body dialectic through vari-ants of materialism, dualism and panpsychism. The dialectic is head-ing in a direction that places consciousness ever closer to the ground of all being. The most recent position is a brand of panpsychism called “cosmopsychism” that takes the entire externally specified cosmos to be an internally conscious subject. This paper will propose a radical new successor to cosmopsychism that I call “Perennial Idealism”. In outlining its preliminary dialectic, I will not focus on the details of ma-terialism, dualism and panpsychism but will instead identify their key sticking points, with a view to arguing that Perennial Idealism over-comes them. I suggest that the most promising way forward in the mind-body problem — navigating around all the problems to date — is to renounce the pervasive panpsychist supposition that fundamental consciousness must belong to a subject. This extends the reach and scope of consciousness to ground not merely to the inner nature of the cosmos, but everything we take to be the world, with its subjects and objects
Quote:For if the Perennial Philosophy were both true and experientially accessible, we would expect to en-counter multiple internally consistent reports of such experience. This potentially mutual reinforcement of metaphysic and converging data from mystics thus provides further incentive to explore Perennial Ide-alism as a natural successor to cosmopsychism.The position is, of course, not without its challenges, two of which can be identified as primary: one positive and one negative. The positive challenge is to show how the world as it appears to us, with its tables, trees, atoms and people, could conceivably be construed as a manifestation from the ground of aperspectival and unconditioned consciousness. Constructing this in detail will be a substantial meta-physical project, which this paper will begin to advance. The physical world and its subjects will be re-cast as a network of co-arising subjects, which turn out to be dispositional perspectives framed by configurations of cognitive and sensory imagery.5 What is promising about this idealist avenue is that the brute facts to be built upon are in part observable, not straddling cracks that mysteriously bridge conscious minds with a non-conscious physical substrate. There is no hard problem or interaction/exclusion problem. And as our minds will harbour consciousness in virtue of the aperspectival ground rather than other subjects, combination and decombination problems will be averted. The position also promises to accommodate both common sense and scientific data. There is a way to account for the truth of ‘the table is there when we leave the room’ in terms of co-arising subjects,whilst not ignoring discoveries about atoms. Unlike Berkeley or the British Idealists, Perennial Idealism aims to do this without appeal to an overarching conscious observer such as God or the Absolute.
The negative challenge is to avoid a serious objection that threat-ens to undermine the position before it gets off the ground. For the exercise of reconstructing our metaphysic from the words of mystics,in a way that does not cherry-pick only what looks kosher, reveals a deep new fault-line. I refer to this as “the problem of the one and the many”.6 The problem in fact goes back to ancient times, facing such philosophers as Parmenides and Plotinus, and subsequently Schelling and perhaps his forerunner Spinoza. If the ground, “the One”, is as the mystics say it is — completely unconditioned by such parameters as space, time, imagery and hence plurality — how then can it coher-ently interface with what we take to be our world, or its imagistic ap-pearance thereof with its many apparent subjects and objects? Con-ceding the independent reality of a multi-faceted world, even if that world turns out to be complexes of imagery-bound subjects, enforces a boundary between it and the One, undoing the purely uncondi-tioned status of a ground that permits no such boundary. The alterna-tive is austere existence monism, by which the world as we appear to know it does not exist — only the ground does. This would not only defeat the preceding explanation of the world in terms of imagery-bound subjects, but also deny what seems to be the obvious reality of people having experiences. I will suggest a way around the problem that requires a radical rethinking of how we construe reality, imply-ing an unconventional grounding relation between unconditioned consciousness and subjects. The proposed solution takes its cue from mystico-philosophical writings of established figures from within the Advaita Vedānta tradition.