At the same time, I am grateful to my doctoral committee and all faculty members of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences for their thought-provoking guidelines in presenting this dissertation at IIT Guwahati. My thanks also go to the non-teaching staff of the department for their kind cooperation in this work. The present thesis is an attempt to investigate the possibility of a parallel notion of consciousness in Śamkara's Advaita Vedānta and Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology.
This would naturally lead to the conclusion that in Husserlian emphasis on intentionality of consciousness, 'meaning' is a theory of 'sense', whereas in Śamkara and in Vedāntic approaches to consciousness there is limitation to the identity of the logical since this order must coinciding with the contingent and the causal order. Śamkara concludes that the knowledge of the world is illusory and it is indescribable as real or unreal. Influenced by Brentano, Husserl begins his phenomenology as a science of the essential structure of consciousness.
CONTENTS
Chapter-1 The Preamble
"I" as a characteristic of the realm of consciousness is absent in the realm of the unconscious. Again we have a sharp contrast between consciousness and the products of physical principles. The thesis to be elaborated here is an attempt to understand the nature of philosophical research on the question of consciousness in Advaita Vedānta Śamkara and Edmund Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology.
The present chapter is Chapter-1 which provides a general introduction to the problem and the nature of the work as a whole. Chapter-5, "Consciousness in Franz Brentano", is a discussion of the notion of consciousness in the light of Franz Brentano's "Descriptive Psychology". It is an attempt to find a possibility of intra-philosophical dialogue between the Indian thinking of consciousness and the phenomenological thinking of consciousness of the West.
Chapter-2
Consciousness in Gauapāda’s Māndukya Kārikā
It means that the second quarter of the Self is called Taijasa (meaning the radiant or luminous one). The verse means that the third quarter of the Self is called Prajna (meaning consciousness or awareness). And finally it is called Prajna, consciousness itself, which constitutes the third quarter of the Self.
It is the ground of "the cessation of the phenomenal world" (prapanca upasama) and non-dual (Advaita). It is the denial of the objects (internal and external) of experience as well as their fields. It is called "fourth" from the perspective of the analysis of the three states of consciousness.
Chapter - 3
Consciousness in Śamkara’s Epistemology
Let us now examine one of the important sources of knowledge according to Śamkara, namely perception. Śamkara's peculiar epistemological contribution consists in the view that knowledge of the former type leads to knowledge of the latter type. In no work of Śamkara do we find a systematic treatment of the means of knowledge (pramānas).
It is the ego characterized by the sense of 'I'.7 Knowledge arises from the amalgamation of the self, the internal organ (antah-karana), the sense organs and the object. Śamkara's opposition to the theory that consciousness is an attribute or quality of the Self is made clear in his criticism of the Nyāya-Vaiśesika school. Śamkara concludes that the position which treats consciousness as an attribute of the essential self is false.
The Purva Mimamsakas supported the theory that consciousness is an activity (karya) of the self. Let's look at three of the earliest examples of the use of this metaphor. But since the mind is composed of the sattva component of prakrti, it has the ability to reflect the consciousness that is itself.
The knowledge of objects is made possible by the functioning of the cognitive mode (Vrtti) of the mind. But the mental mode can only function as a carrier of the reflection of the essential consciousness that is the self. Furthermore, it must be recognized that the shape of the object somehow travels with the stimuli.
This leads to the question of the place of Māyā or Avidyā in Śamkara epistemology.
Chapter-4
Consciousness in Śamkara’s Metaphysics
In other words, metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality; it is not the science of the existing. In other words, Brahman is the cause and effect of the seen and unseen world. Thirdly, Brahman is that consciousness which always shines forth as the true self through the objects of the world.
The Upanisads declare that Brahman is Reality and that the empirical world is the manifestation of Brahman. For them, appearance is not reality, because it contradicts itself; appearance is always the appearance of reality. The principle responsible for the appearance of the world of plurality in non-dual Brahman is Māyā or avidyā.
It is the supreme bliss which is the eternal nature of the Self, and therefore one need not go elsewhere to seek it. 63 It is clear that such Absolute consciousness cannot be considered 'Ananda' in any empirical sense of the word. In the same way, it is absurd on the part of a materialist to explain the process of consciousness with reference to the motion of the material elements.
According to Śankara, the key to understanding the problems of consciousness lies in understanding its. Rather, the true location of the reflection is the prototype, just as the location of the illusory self is absolute consciousness. In other words, essentially unchanging absolute consciousness is not really modified or phenomenalized through the manifestation of the individual self.
Now the question arises, what is the nature of the union or identification of the subject-consciousness and the object-defined-consciousness. The first version of the nature and origin of dreams was called the "presenter". Furthermore, consciousness is of the nature of bliss as there is the enjoyment of happiness.
Chapter - 5
Consciousness in Franz Brentano
He defends two of Aristotle's doctrines, namely the immortality of the soul and the creation of the world. He explains the Aristotelian God as "thought that thinks only itself" and also as "thinking itself" as the ruler of the universe, as the Creator. Indeed, Brentano never lost faith in the existence of God and the immortality of the individual soul.
One knows one's own thoughts directly, through indirect awareness of the inner perceptions of others. He concludes that the descriptive psychologist is interested in the act of presentation and not the object of the act, i.e. the ontological status of the object of presentation. Expressing intentionality in terms of the intentional non-existence of an object, understanding "non-existence" as "being in," meant "being in" in the way it was used.
However, in his later writings he expressly rejected this idea of any special kind of existence of the intentional object. What we think about is the object or thing and not the "object or thought".20 However, the intentional relation, to Brentano, reveals that one of the relata, an object, something over and against a. The intentional relation is further a kind of relation where only one of the terms, the foundation, is real.
In the conception of intentionality, Brentano's use of the term "physical" is sometimes misunderstood as referring to certain real parts of the mental processes. This is perhaps the result of a misunderstanding of the Brentan distinction between the physical and the psychic. To quote him: “All manifestations of our consciousness are divided into two great classes – the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena.”21 For Brentano, the only truly reliable feature for distinguishing mental from physical phenomena is the intentional relation between the object, the immanence of the object in the action.
Husserl's discovery of the target object led him to the question of its composition, an element not found in Brentano.
Chapter - 6
Consciousness in Edmund Husserl
Every such statement of essence is an a priori statement in the highest sense of the word.” 2. Ultimately, the success of the mathematical sciences resulted in the gradual scientific rejection of the mind. The constitution of the world obtained through experience is thus traceable to the pure ego or transcendental subjectivity.
Husserlian phenomenology is therefore based on the fact that all the objects of the world have 'essences'. Here it meant that our ordinary natural concept of the world as the correlate of all our possible experiences. In the crisis, Husserl focused on the living world which investigated the "how of the world's pretending".
These structures are shared by all people and prepare the intersubjective basis of the world. But consciousness is not only intentional, it is also temporary, as the process of constitution is a temporal process that gives rise to the historicity of transcendental consciousness and the world it constitutes. In the Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Husserl claims that the relationship of consciousness to the world is not a haphazard event caused neither by God nor by the evolution of the world itself.
He understood phenomenology essentially as "egology," the study of the ego and its "self-experience" (Selbsterfahrung). Husserl speaks of the "monadization" of the transcendental ego and of the self as a "windowed monad." Husserl speaks of the constitution of the world by the transcendental consciousness that must.
It is called the transcendental consciousness and is the ultimate condition for the possibility of knowledge of objects.
