Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 62

Some Clarifications
scope for logical decision. Whatever decision one takes is either existential or pragmatic.
To turn now to the third question (c) asked in p. 40, as to whether consciousness is at all realizable in dissociation from mental states. Many philosophers in India and the West have denied this possibility. They cannot understand how there can be mere consciousness which is not some cognition, some feeling or will. According to them, these states are them. selves modes of conscionsness, and they are modes exactly in the sense in which red, blue, yellow, etc. are modes of colour. There is no mere colour, they say, apart from these modes, and so is the case with consciousness.
The Advaitin would reply that such a thesis could at all be entertained if consciousness=subjectivity were regarded as an object-to be more precise, an objective character of mental states. But that it is not so is clear, as we have seen, from the analysis of introspection as subjectivity proper realizing itself as freed from the mental states that are introspected. The Advaitin has also shown that the apparent objectivity of these states is really either their objective phosphorescence or introspection remaining undistinguishedly fused with them.
In other ways too the Advaitin has sought to demonstrate, this transcendent character of consciousness. One of these is the analysis of dreamless sleep, another of the phenomenon that we sometimes know a thing as unknown, a third the analysis of error detected as error, and so on. From the commonsense objective point of view, none of these phenomena are as intelligible as they should be, involving as they do inescapable consciousness from that standpoint, and the Advaita idea is that a correct analysis of these phenomena that could keep aloof from the contradictions would go to prove that there is consciousness dissociable, to various extents, from mental and semi-mental states. Let us see how.