Bradley, Kant, and the Fourth Skandha
The method of describing the constitution of human experience used by the historical Buddha was to break that constitution down into the five aspects, or skandhas, namely form, feeling, perception, thinking/cognising act, and consciousness (they are of course, translated in various ways to bring out various implications and emphases). The point is that there is to be found, neither in any one of the aspects, nor in their combination, anything that could clearly be objectified as constituting a substantial subject. This, in contrast to the deeply ingrained habit we have of taking a form of consciousness apparent in/with discursive thinking, the ego, as a substantial, really existing, persisting centre.
The fourth skandha, the cognising-act, is often referred to as the one where a lot of the problems and suffering due to disproportionate emphasis take place. It is here in fact, that what has been emphasized in western (and again, that category is purely stated for convenience, there being no more than arbitrarily designated categories of western or eastern) philosophy as logic has it’s ground. Also here are Kant’s categories, as well as his concept for space and time perception. It is in other words, the locus of formal concepts and logical constructions, and the disposition to such discursive thinking.
There’s nothing inherently amiss with this aspect itself, rather in over-attachment to it, over-estimation of it’s proficiency, or believing that it can grasp reality when it is necessarily limited to an aspect, outside of which it can only posit and speculate.
Logic invariably proceeds from and is thus predicated on a basic duality. That formal duality is the intellectual reflection of experience, but experience itself is never in it’s immediacy dual. We are both faced with a world, yet we are part of that world. We are the world, the world is us, and so reality is fundamentally non-dual. What sees and what is seen are not separate.
Even to say immediate experience is composite, though nearer to the fact than saying it is dual, is itself an intellectual abstraction. To insist that everything that appears is an illusion is simply to say that what appears is appearance only and as such, limited by the limiting functions of human perception. From limited perception the fourth skandha assembles logical coherences, which are of practical value, and limited to practical value.
The following is just an example of the difficulty western philosophy has run into through placing too much store by logic and it’s ability to grasp reality;
British philosopher F.H Bradley (whose essay ‘Appearance and Reality ‘ I used to – in fact still do – obscess over!) took issue with Immanuel Kant’s proposition that all phenomena (read , appearances) are relations.
Bradley’s point was that if phenomena are just relations, then what are they relations between? Kant of course finally secures his argument for phenomena as mere relations by positing God for whom there are no phenomena, but he doesn’t begin his argument there. Rather he tries to explain how ordinary understanding is warranted through the categories inherent in human perception and that beyond the appearances of objects, there is the realm of the objects in themselves which is simply unknowable. Here Kant can be seen to exercise a modesty that would recommend him well to Buddhist philosophy.
However, Bradley does present a good objection. If there are only relations then ordinary understanding, however unavoidable and practical, is nevertheless illusory. Bradley deftly goes on to present his argument that goes a good deal further in the direction of Buddhist understanding by describing appearance as inherently contradictory. What he means is that any particular appearance when pointed to is in contradiction to everything else. Appearance is contradictory. Bradley says that the reconciliation of all contradictions, of all contradictory appearances, is an immediate experience of reality as it is.
In the end, therefore Bradley (and F.H Bradley, a neo-Hegelian can be viewed as representing a very high watermark of western logical thinking) arrives at the point where logical constructions meet a boundary which opens back up into simple experience. Bradley’s thinking (and Kant’s too in fact) tarry in the realm of the fourth skandha; the skandha, or aspect of cognising. Just one of five, and they, as we are told in the Heart Sutra, are emptiness.