In the previous three parts, the author shows the existence of the soul through its powers of jnana shakti and kriya shakti. He also gives a clear idea regarding the Indian thought on the Self and reality. Further, he lays the foundational basis of Indian logic based on Nyaya with which he refutes western philosophers arguing against the concept of soul and substance in this last part. He also provides a defence to Descartes’ notions who has undergone an unwarranted rejection in contemporary philosophy.

An examination of Hume’s refutation of the existence of the soul

In his books and essays, Hume provides various arguments to reject that the soul is a substance and that it is immortal. Chittaranjan Naik examines each of the arguments in detail and shows that most of Hume’s arguments suffer from fallacious reasoning and a failure to consider alternative descriptions of ‘reality’ not only of the Indian philosophical traditions but also of the Scholastics. Hume considers the notion of substance to be a dogma born out of the fertile imaginations of Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophers. Naik shows that Hume also asserts from dogma.

Hume’s fallacious arguments originate from his inability to apprehend the natures of substance and the relationship that abides between substance and attributes; it also stems from his inability to grasp the natures of ‘universals’ and ‘particulars’. Hume confuses between the soul and the mind in a manner that is characteristic of Western philosophers. He conflates the different changing states of the body and the mind to the unchanging self- a distinctly different substance. In effect, it amounts to nothing more than a dogmatic assertion of Hume’s own position restated as an argument. Briefly, the arguments of Hume and the responses of Naik are as follows:

1. The soul is not a substance because:
2. The idea of substance makes no sense.
3. The definition of substance does not hold.
4. The attributes it possesses cannot be related with one another in a meaningful way.
5. We have no idea of anything except a perception.
6. The idea of soul is not from an impression.
7. No meaningful conception can form of its union with material objects.

The author examines each of these positions in the book and in each case, Hume’s arguments are shown to be untenable. Hume’s entire philosophy is based on the idea that there are only two kinds of things present in the universe: impressions (qualities) and ideas (derived from impressions). There is only one reason offered by Hume, namely that nothing else is in perception other than the impressions, i.e., the qualities such as colour, touch, sound, taste, and smell. And we have the power to contemplate upon these impressions in the form of ideas. These constitute the furniture of the world. All else is the power of imagination.

These notions intimately link to the belief in the stimulus-response theory of perception.  If Hume had considered the alternative thesis, namely that perception is an active process in which the percipient reaches out to the object, and arrived at his conclusions after considering the merits and demerits of both positions, his thesis would have qualified to be a legitimate philosophical position. But the failure to question the premise, and to proceed to draw conclusions without taking into consideration the possible alternatives to the premise, reduces his entire thesis into a dogma.

There is a difference in the way Western and Indian traditions conceive of ‘substance’. The former holds substance the ‘thing’ leftover after abstracting its attributes. But conceiving substance in this manner leaves over a ‘bare individual’ bereft of any distinguishing feature. This gives it no identity to differentiate from others. Such a difficulty does not arise in the Indian tradition because substance (dravya) in the Indian tradition goes along with its attributes; and the essential attribute of substance is existence. Naik shows how Hume rejecting the notion of substance leads to all kinds of absurdities. Hume’s scepticism becomes merely a destructive tool and it leaves the original questions in a barren soil with no philosophical answers.

In the Indian logical tradition, non-existence is a padartha, an object. For an object to be non-existent on the ground of it being unperceived, it must have a prior possibility of it being perceived if it were to exist. If a chair is in front of me, I can perceive it. Hence, if I can perceive a chair it is existent; if I do not perceive the chair, it is non-existent. But I cannot justifiably claim that a chair in the next room is non-existent on the ground that I do not perceive it. Even if the chair were to be existent in the next room, the separating wall obstructs its perception. The very nature of the soul is that of the cognizing subject and not that of an object of cognition. How can one declare its non-existence on the ground that one cannot perceive it or that we possess no impression of it? Hume’s argument to show that the soul is non-existent is ineffective.

The self has a unique characteristic- self-luminosity. It reveals itself. The existence of self-luminosity would be evident if we consider that in every cognitive act, we know not only the object but we also know that we know the object. Thus, there is a kind of knowledge, namely self-knowledge, which reveals itself in every episode of knowledge. Hume fails to consider this aspect of human knowledge because it does not appear as a theme in the philosophical tradition of the West.

1. The soul does not exist because one cannot fix a personal identity for it.

Hume’s arguments stem from the Western tradition’s unclear conception of the soul, mind, the world, and the process of perception unlike in the Indian philosophical traditions. Hume also does not believe that things such as universals exist just as he does not believe that substances exist. He takes each temporal instantiation of a changing object to be different object and proceeds to declare that there is nothing in the flux of change that conforms to the notion of identity.

Naik says that this kind of loose reasoning would result in the object presented in each instance of perception requiring a new name and such indiscriminate naming of objects would not only make language dysfunctional but would also result in ‘reality’ becoming amorphous and unrecognizable. Hume also denies sameness between an impression and an idea that corresponds to the impression thus making it impossible to sustain the position that an idea corresponds to a particular impression. Indian traditional philosophy denies this position. In the latter, it is the universal that accounts for the sameness and the difference in the modes of presentation that accounts for the difference. The ‘particular’ or individual is nothing but a crystallization of the universal into concrete form.

2. Memory does not acquaint us with the continuity of a soul.

Hume asserts the absence of perception in deep sleep and after death as evidence for the absence of the soul. From another perspective, Indian traditions hold that it is not the absence of perception but the absence of objects of perception in the field of awareness that leads to the condition erroneously described as the absence of perception. The awareness of the sense of time in deep sleep is evidence for the persistence of self-luminosity even in deep sleep. To sum up, the absence of objects in the field of consciousness cannot be evidence for the absence of the self. Considering that Hume does not consider other possibilities for the non-perception of objects during deep sleep or death, his rejection of the existence of the self does not hold since it is based on insufficiency of reason.

Hume argues regarding a person who performed certain actions that the subsequent absence of memory would make the person a different person. This argument is fallacious. What ought to interest a worthy philosopher investigating the topic of the soul is not so much the absence of memory of certain events but an explanation for the recall of past experiences in memory.  Unless there be a substrate, unique to every person, and which acts as a repository of the knowledge of the past experiences, such recall would not be possible. Personal identity is not from memory; it is from the fact that there is such a thing as memory at all and that such memory has consciousness as its necessary substrate.

3. The soul is mortal because all things in nature are subject to change and decay. Also, the condition required for its existence does not exist after the dissolution of the body.

Hume says: ‘As the same material substance may successively compose the bodies of all animals, the same spiritual substance may compose their minds. Their consciousness, or that system of thought which they formed during life, may be continually dissolved by death.’ Hume illegitimately reasons to extend the properties of one category (material things) to a completely different category (the soul).  Hume finally says that even if we should grant that the soul is immortal, immortality would not have any significance to us. This is obfuscation again since the subject matter of the discussion is the immortality of the soul and not about the implications of its existence.

An examination of Kant’s refutations of the soul as substance and its immortality

Emmanuel Kant describes the transcendental approach as a Copernican revolution in philosophy where he refutes both the existence of the soul as a substance and its immortality as Socrates had suggested. He says that the possibility of experience is by the paraphernalia that lies ready a priori within us. The discovery of such a priori principles which make experience possible was the goal of a new ‘Transcendental Philosophy’. One would expect that a philosopher who advocates such an approach would affirm the existence of the soul as the repository of paraphernalia.  While Kant does not reject the existence of the soul as such, he says that reason is incapable of affirming its existence or its nature as a substance. The existence of a permanent or immortal soul is also indemonstrable.

According to Kant, the use of reason to demonstrate the existence of the self would result in a sophism, or a kind of illusion. Kant says that such reasonings constitute a transcendental paralogism in which the form of the argument may be correct but the conclusion is false and illusory.

The reasoning for the existence of the soul, says Kant, rests on the single conception ‘I think’. But such a science, says Kant, is only a pretended science as it rests solely on the statement ‘I think’ from which it must develop its entire science. It cannot rely upon even the smallest object of experience, for the presence of such empirical content would change the science from a rational science into an empirical science and would render it incompatible with its object, the soul.

Chittaranjan Naik examines the paralogisms in detail that Kant presents to show that the existence of the soul is a pretended science and that its arguments are sophisms.

1. First Paralogism:  Kant says that though the ‘I’ which thinks must be always a subject, there is no data discovered in thought to warrant the conclusion that the soul is a self-subsisting thing. Kant’s entire argument rests on a notion of what it is that constitutes data. For Kant, data is necessarily an empirical content as given in an external intuition. Intuition is nothing but cognition, so the data required must be present as a target object of perceptual cognition. But consciousness is absent as a target object in any such cognition.
2. Second Paralogism:  Kant rejects the idea that the soul may be a substance on the ground that such a conclusion derives merely from an analytical judgment and not from a synthetical judgment. Analytical judgments as those based on the conception of the object alone. The judgment that all bodies have mass is an analytic judgment.  An analytical judgment is a priori not appealing to facts of empirical experience. A synthetical judgment, on the other hand, requires knowledge from beyond in the conception of the object. One would need to appeal to experience, in the form of perception, before one can obtain such knowledge (like to judge that the car in the parking is of any one colour). A synthetical judgment may be a priori or posteriori.

According to Kant, an analytic judgment is confined to the sphere of conceptions. It can therefore only point to possibilities and not existences in ‘reality’ or in phenomena. The existence of a thing with legitimacy must base on some feature presented to us a posteriori. This is the crux of Kant’s argument; for he argues that the inference of the soul as a substance is based entirely on conception alone, that is, as an analytical judgment and that therefore it can only assert a possibility and not an actual existence.

1. Third Paralogism: The identity of the soul, says Kant, must derive from a synthetical judgment that shows the identity of a person persisting within all the change and variation of circumstances. According to Socrates, consciousness is the same in all beings, there is no distinction between the consciousness of one being and the consciousness of another being. In that case, Kant asks how can the soul have an identity as the individual soul of this or that person?

Naik shows that Kant’s arguments stem from an inadequate grasp of the nature of consciousness and thus do not hold true. After a detailed examination of Kant’s arguments, Naik shows that the paralogisms of the reason that Kant cites are not sophisms but legitimate arguments (syllogisms), and that Kant’s confusion regarding them stems from two factors:

1. He fails to make a distinction between consciousness and mind and thereby ascribes to consciousness the characteristics that quite properly belong to the mind. The confusion primarily springs from a failure to discriminate between the objects of the mind whose presence in thought is determined by one’s volitions and consciousness whose ubiquitous presence in all experience is beyond the power of one’s determinations. Accordingly, the consideration of consciousness in a proposition is the consideration of an aspect of reality that is outside the realm of thought and which is indeterminable by individual beings and thereby makes the proposition into a kind of synthetical proposition.
2. He fails to consider consciousness in a manner that is commensurate with the unique nature it possesses, namely of it being self-luminous. He thereby fails to recognize that consciousness can know itself without it being present in thought or in the realm of ideas and that the unique thread of experience formed by the series of self-cognitions in time confers identity to the soul.

On the Immortality of the Soul

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that the reasons Socrates offers to show that the soul is immortal are not adequate and that there is nothing to prevent the soul, even if it should be held to be a simple being (as Socrates said), from diminishing in its powers and eventually disappearing. The author raises the following responses to the various objections of Kant:

1. There can be no temporal variations in the properties of the soul because the soul is not part of phenomena.  Kant considers only one aspect of Socrates’ statement – that the soul is a simple existence – and ignores the other – that it is not part of phenomena; and he thereby commits a category error by treating the soul, which is outside the realm of the temporal, as a changing thing, at least in so far as its intensive properties are concerned.
2. A simple existence cannot change either extensively or intensively because change requires a compounding of ultimate simple substances.  How then can a simple object which has no parts and which is indivisible change either extensively or intensively?
3. A simple substance cannot change into nothing by gradual loss of powers because such a thesis would amount to nihilism.
4. Consciousness is the essence of the soul and it has no creation or destruction because it is the ground of phenomena. The manifestation of degrees of consciousness is not due to the soul’s loss of its essential powers but due to the degrees in the densities of obstruction to its manifestation.  Kant’s unreasonable hypothesis about the soul becoming non-existent due to a gradual loss of its powers arises essentially due to him misconstruing the meaning of the expression ‘degree of intensity’ or ‘degree of power’ as ‘degree of reality’.

In the light of a detailed examination of Kant’s arguments, Naik says that Kant fails to dislodge the arguments provided by the ancient and medieval philosophers for the existence of the soul, as well as for its immortality, from the foundations on which they stand. While Kant was certainly an astute philosopher, not recognizing consciousness as a separate layer of reality and with the status of a permanent substance reduces his entire philosophy into a kind of Nihilism. And this being so, Naik says that Kant’s labours to erect a magnificent edifice of transcendental philosophy would amount to much ado about nothing!

An examination of the refutation of the validity of Descartes’ argument for the existence of the soul

The question of the soul’s existence has received little attention after Hume and Kant. While the soul does exist as a theme in the works of many philosophers, it does not seek answers to the ontological question of the soul’s existence. And in contemporary philosophy, with its intense aversion to Cartesian dualism, the question has all but disappeared. The soul’s lack of substantiality is a foregone conclusion and often, selfhood is a kind of illusion.

Naik contends that these narratives stem out of a dogmatic rejection of Cartesian dualism. There is no reasonable basis to reject Descartes’ argument for the existence of the self. Indeed, the argument proffered by Descartes – that we may doubt everything else including the existence of the world but we cannot doubt the doubter himself – is an ancient argument in Indian philosophy; more particularly in the philosophy of Vedanta. What then is the basis for the rejection of Descartes’ argument?

The author says that there is no fault in Descartes arguments. The reasons given by Hume and Kant rejecting the soul as a substance do not stand scrutiny as seen in the previous sections. However, there has been at least one attempt by Gregory McCullock says in his book ‘The Mind and Its World’ to find fault directly with the syllogism adopted by Descartes which Naik examines here.

Gregory McCullock’s Argument

Descartes writes: “I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist…From this I knew that I was a substance whose whole essence is to think, and which does not depend on any place or material thing in order to exist.”

McCullock says Descartes appears to intend the following argument:

1. I can pretend that the material human René Descartes does not exist
2. I cannot pretend that I do not exist
3. So, I am not the material human René Descartes.

The first premise is by Descartes’ evil demon thought experiment. Briefly, the idea is that a very powerful demon or hoaxer might cause Descartes to mistake nearly everything, including whether he has a material body. The second premise is from the thought that if one tries to pretend that one does not exist, then reflection reveals that the supposition cannot be true, since how could one pretend without existing?

Apparently, these premises do not entail Descartes’ conclusion as illustrated by the counter-example:

1. I can pretend that Stalin was not a Georgian
2. I cannot pretend that the only Georgian dictator of the Soviet Union was not a Georgian
3. So, Stalin was not the only Georgian dictator of the Soviet Union.

The premises seem true for the same sorts of reasons as do Descartes. Unfortunately, even though premises 1 and 2 are true, conclusion 3 is itself false, showing that the Argument form is invalid. This in turn undermines the Cartesian argument 1–3, since it has the same invalid argument form. This means we can accept the premises but have here no reason to accept the conclusion.

Naik’s Response

Even though Descartes’ argument seems correct when we reflect upon it, the negation is on the ground that it has the same argument-form as that of another argument that concludes falsely. It is the syntactical (the construction) form of an argument that lends the power of preserving the truth-values from the premises to the conclusion. What is the relation between the syntactical form of a sentence irrespective of the semantics (meaning) with respect to the world?

If we go by meaning, the value ‘true’ would be conformant with what is present in the world and the value ‘false’ is not conformant with what exists in the world. How would the syntactical form become a determinant of such conformance or non-conformance? There is no basis for the principle. It is just a dogma that has taken root in contemporary tradition. The prime consideration for erecting this principle seems to be the need to make logic topic neutral, that is, applicable over all domains of human knowledge. The mere syntactical form of an argument cannot ensure the preservation of the truth-value because no such relation exists.

Logic necessarily is about objects and their relations and this precludes the possibility of logic being ontology-free. The argument to preserve the truth-value must express the cognition that apprehends the object along with its relations. So, if the expressed arguments of logic are necessarily ontology-dependent, by what means does logic achieve its goal of being topic neutral? Such a goal would be achievable only if the meanings of logical arguments should follow the general formal structures present in all objects.

This vital purpose, of enabling the meanings of logical expressions to conform to the generality of structural form present in all objects, is by the categories– the most basic and irreducible word-objects, called padarthas in Indian logic, that language can express. The topic neutrality of logic derives not from logic being ontology-free but from it expressing its arguments in conformance with the most basic generic elements that comprise the structural forms of all objects and their relations. It is for this reason that Indian logic holds the knowledge of the padarthas (categories) to be indispensable for the proper employment of logic.

Descartes’ argument, based on the cognition that the cognition of illusion requires a cognizer as the support for the illusion, is impeccable. For, if the cognizer were to be non-existent, the illusion would have non-existence as the support and this would amount to nihilism- not a reasonable proposition.  Nihilism makes a spurious nexus between non-existence and existence. It would invalidate logic itself as a thing appearing magically without any causes.

Indeed, it would mean many things: a false premise could lead to a true conclusion; a false premise points to the non-existence of the condition required for the conclusion to be true, and the true conclusion would point to a state of affairs being existent without the condition required for it to be existent. Nihilism would make an utter mockery of the human pursuit of knowledge itself. Therefore, a case of deductive reasoning should be on the merits of the argument alone instead of bringing in extraneous reasons such as the conformance or non-conformance of its argument-form.

In the case of Descartes’ argument, the conclusion of the deductive reasoning follows from an analysis of the conceptions of the premises alone. So, when the conclusion in the case is from the premises alone, it is superfluous to make a comparison of the argument-form with the argument-form of another argument to judge whether the argument is valid or not. If therefore, all these factors considered, the argument of Descartes should still be challenged on the ground that the argument has the same argument-form as another argument that concludes falsely, then it is imperative to challenge the validity of the principle-based on syntax (argument form) and not semantic content (meaning) . The only justification provided for it is that it works. For, how is it established that the principle works? If one argues that it is seen to work, then we reply that the word ‘seen’ implies that it is cognized and this makes cognition and not the argument-form the primary factor in judging whether an argument is valid or not.

It may work within a limited domain in which the objects are restricted to a certain class of objects – as in mathematics, but it cannot be extrapolated to confer the status of a universal principle of logic applicable to all kinds of objects, especially to objects in the domain of philosophy which deals not only with concrete objects and mathematical objects but also with metaphysical objects like universals and particulars, substances and attributes and the unique relation of inherence that abides between metaphysical objects.

There is also another basic flaw in the comparison that Gregory McCullock makes. A careful reading of Descartes argument will show that the premises and conclusion in the argument are about the same object, namely the self or thinking being.  In Gregory McCullock’s argument, the two premises are a predication about the reference of the word ‘I’, that is, about the thinking being. But the conclusion is a prediction about Stalin and not about the ‘I’, the thinking being, at all. How can a conclusion drawn from an object in the premises be about another object? A colossal blunder indeed.

Descartes’ argument and the second argument presented by Gregory McCullock are not analogues cases. The predilection with argument-form as a determinant of logical validity seems to have blinded Gregory McCullock to the fact that he is comparing a soundly reasoned argument with a bad argument. One can ignore such attempts to prove the invalidity of Descartes’ argument because, apart from being based on nothing more than a dogma, it is also a case of bad reasoning.

Conclusion

The nature of consciousness is the biggest debating point in western traditions and sciences. The overwhelming consensus remains that it is secondary to matter and arises as an epiphenomenon. There are a few who believe that consciousness is primary and irreducible. However, such a paradigm also faces logical inconsistencies and conundrums when the scientific understanding of the nature of perception stays intact. The stimulus theory of perception (indirect realism) is incompatible with the proposition that consciousness is primary.

Naik says that the problems in western philosophical traditions arise due to many factors: the conflation of the concepts of soul, consciousness, mind, and the self; the confusion of the relation between mind and matter; and making philosophy subservient to scientific dogma. One major addition is the persistent refusal to look at any alternative viewpoints arising from non-western traditions. This is an unfortunate stance since any thinking human being from anywhere can reflect on existential problems and speak for the entire humanity.

Indian traditional philosophies, with slight variations, is extremely clear on the primary irreducible nature of Consciousness (also called the Self, Brahman, the Soul); the relation between mind and matter; the nature of the individual self and the world; the nature of perception; and the purpose of philosophy (or the darsanas). Their study is one of the means to confer liberation to an individual. This teleological purpose is absent in western traditions where philosophy is mostly a dry intellectual exercise reflecting on interesting problems and questioning religious dogma but always conforming to scientific paradigms. It is a fallacy (a colonial story internalised by most Indians today- a classic case of colonial consciousness) to believe that science did not have importance in Indian traditions. Indian traditions are clear again that science applies to the world of matter (Prakriti) and not in explaining or understanding the nature of the Brahman or Consciousness.

Indian and western philosophical traditions run on two parallel tracks consequently. Western traditions stay hegemonic in its belief that only the west has the undeniable right to speak about humanity; Indian traditional scholars remain cocooned in their own safe world unaware of western discourses which clash with their ideas strongly and yet dominate the world of ideas. A dialogue seems to be almost impossible. The few (a sheer minority) who are aware of both the worlds, like Chittaranjan Naik, remain frustrated in their attempts to bring them on a single platform. It is unfortunate that many traditional Indian scholars, who know English, rarely try to understand western discourses and initiate a serious counterview. Indian culture has a lively and extremely robust debating tradition. Amazingly, these debates were always internal rarely extending to alien cultures or ideas. This book should become an important beginning point for such debates.

The author’s previous book places perception as a primary source of knowledge and refutes the representationalism theory of western traditions effectively. Bookauthority.org ranks it as one of the best books on Indian philosophy. The present book does something more unusual which may allow it to join the list soon; it not only attempts to prove the existence of the Self but also refutes arguments by western philosophers to reject it. The author stresses that the ideas which he presents are hardly radical. He only gives a clear form in an easier language to whatever has always existed in Indian traditional philosophies. A famous physicist said that if you cannot explain your physics to a bartender, it is probably not very good physics. Naik succeeds with regard to Indian philosophy.

Indian culture has always been about experience and knowledge. It is an amazing facet of Indian soil that almost all the spiritual giants, both past and contemporary, speak the same language after attaining moksha. Adi Shankara, Vidyaranya, Ramana Maharishi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Meher Baba, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, and Swami Chinmayananda are just some whose sayings and writings show a consistent similarity in the experience of the Self after dissolving the limiting embodiments. There has only been a confirmation of what our rishis said in the Vedas and Upanishads. This itself should tell us how Indian philosophy becomes a tool for intense personal transformation.