Noday I stumbled across David Hume again. I remember how intensively we studied his writings in Heidelberg. We went very deeply into the text, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American history of ideas lectures. So I stumbled across the concept of taste in Hume, as the core of his 'aesthetic' theory. I thought of Rasa and began a Conversation with the AI. Larger connections became clear to me, lines that I had never seen. However, I was a little disappointed by the superficiality. But if I compare the conversation with other conversations I've had with people over dinner, it was one of the more interesting ones.

So I wanted to find out more and looked up Gilles Deleuze. He was already taking part in the fictional conversation with AI, but his later essay on David Hume is on a completely different level. Deleuze's analysis is brilliant. He shows the full power of Hume's revolutionary approach, a thinking that is empirical and positivist, the power of the intellect that works with assumptions of causality, and also with the power of association and intuition to show how man builds an edifice of thought. This thought structure is not oriented towards metaphysical concepts such as self, God or world, but shows how thought itself moves and unfolds. It quickly becomes clear why Deleuze returned to David Hume towards the end of his life.

Dvaitadvaita

However, this throws me into a bit of a crisis, or hopefully to a point where I can find a new synthesis. After all, crises and new beginnings are often not so different. As I am on the fringes of what I can think, it is difficult to formulate this. Nevertheless, here's an attempt: the dualism of the Western tradition of thought is a trap from which it is difficult to escape. This is largely due to the fact that this dualism attaches great importance to the self. Once one has assumed oneself to be the center of the world, to place one's own rights above those of everything else and to fence them in again only by virtue of rational principles, a world view emerges that is concentrated on the individual person, which is expressed religiously in the tales of woe of individual prophets. The trials and tribulations of this tale of woe are part of great subjective narratives that are expressed in art.

The way out of this is not to dissolve dualism one-sidedly, i.e. into a materialistic position or a purely metaphysical position, but into a philosophy of immanence. This immanence, i.e. the idea that there is only one world that contains everything in its complexity, demands a new way of thinking. Space and time, change and process, relation and the individual, difference and repetition, resonance and language and so much more must be rethought. That was Deleuze's project. And that is also the project of the Upanishads. And that is the reason why I am reading Deleuze in India.

Now I read Deleuze's thoughts on Hume and remember my philosophy studies, and the desperate trench warfare in dualism. But I see that Hume and the Vedas are striving for something similar. A deep insight into the nature of the cosmos, without an exaggerated self-exaltation of the self. This may sound somewhat absurd, since in the Upanishads, Atman, the self as a principle, Purusha as the primordial soul, and Brahman as the creator are the starting point of thought. But this is exactly where the connection lies. The Upanishads think it together, as a kind of self-differentiation as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This differentiation is only possible in a thinking of immanence, where the different traditions of thought over the millennia and continents converge.

So the crisis that this triggers for me is this: I understand the perspective of the empiricist, and the perspective of the Vedas. Both of them come across dualism, in two forms, in a dualistic way. And in the Vedas one then speaks of Dvaitadvaita - dualism-non-dualismthe duality of duality and non-duality. And while I myself approach this concept of dvaitadvaita a little, my confusion arises from the fact that this happens with the help of AI.

Der Beitrag Gespräche mit der KI erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Ahen I fell into the abyss of skepticism as a teenager after my first love of Plato (especially the Phaidon dialog) and the great Greek poets such as Sophocles etc., the path from Descartes' meditation to Hume, Kant and Husserl was rocky. I lost sight of the soul and followed the ideology of purely empirical science. Only what could be perceived with the five senses was considered 'material' for philosophy, and embedded in this was the doubt as to whether these senses could be trusted. Whether everything is not just an illusion. The arc from Plato to David Hume could hardly be greater.

Pictures

The idea that the world shows itself only in perceptual images led me to aesthetics, but I have never seen this as clearly as the other day when I was browsing through Aurobindo's text on the Upanishads. I am reminded of Willard Van Orman Quine's legendary and absurd example of unseparated rabbit parts: when a rabbit passes behind a tree and so two rabbit parts present themselves in my perception - a front and a back rabbit part - and yet I seem to have a certainty that it is a rabbit. So we could learn something here about the principles of our perception and language. Hume took this to an extreme when he said that we cannot be certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow (his point was to question causality). Here is Aurobindo's statement on this kind of philosophy:

"The sun rises up in the morning, mounts into the cusp of the blue Heavens and descends at evening trailing behind it clouds of glory as it disappears. Who could doubt this irrefragable, overwhelmingly evidenced fact? Every day, through myriads of years, the eyes of millions of men all over the world have borne concurrent and unvarying testimony to the truth of these splendid voyagings. Than such universal ocular testimony, what evidence can be more conclusive? Yet it all turns out to be an image created by Nescience in the field of vision. Science comes & undeterred by prison & the stake tells us that the sun never voyages through our heavens, is indeed millions of miles from our heavens, and it is we who move round the Sun, not the Sun round us. Nay those Heavens themselves, the blue firmament into which poetry and religion have read so much beauty and wonder, is itself only an imagein which Nescience represents our atmosphere to us in the field of vision. The light too which streams upon us from our Sun and seems to us to fill Space turns out to be no more than an image. Science now freely permitted to multiply her amazing paradoxes, forces us at last to believe that it is only motion of matter affecting us at a certain pitch of vibration with that particular impression on the brain. And so she goes on resolving all things into mere images of the great cosmic ether which alone is. Of such unsubstantialities is this marvelous fabric of visible things created! Nay, it would even appear that the more unsubstantial a thing seems, the nearer it is to ultimate reality. This, which Science proves, says the Vedantist, is precisely what is meant by Maya." (Aurobindo CVSA 18, p.379)

It is not only Aurobindo's poetic power that fascinates me here, the way he evokes this image of the rising sun and rolls it back and forth, weaving in the different positions in order to then reposition the problem itself. It is the power of being guided by one's own intuition and insight, by experience in the richest sense.

I learn from this:

• If we want to analyze the world as a mere phenomenon, please let the initial images be rich and powerful and not silly reduced like severed rabbit parts.
• If we then follow the method of the natural sciences and the rational mind, then please go to the end, where we see that it is actually this science that creates the very images it doubts.
• And finally the reversal of the problem, in a kind of dialectical twist. The world is undeniably real, but it is not as science describes it. Science itself shows this.

Every experimental setup is a simulation, a construction. Every theory is a description of the world whose hypothesis is subject to constant testing. In the Vedas we learn about the core of the world as we experience it: It is pure consciousness. My consciousness knows nothing other than consciousness. It is a crazy assumption that everything that contains my consciousness should be its opposite. It is not the case that our consciousness contains an image of a completely different reality. Rather, the world consists of consciousness, in the interaction of consciousness with other consciousness, in the differentiation of the one in its multiplicity, perceptions and images arise. They are connected by vibration. The Kena Upanishads describe that, the basic principle is OM in the Mandukya Upanishad, everything is connected by a rhizome on a level of immanence, as Deleuze describes it in his last essay.

Maya, the question of reality, reveals a paradox; it is the question itself that creates the problem. The mentalhe images that serve as the basis for rational analysis are maya - illusion. Our consciousness, on the other hand, is real, the only reality. This is the core of the problem of dualism dvaita-advaita

Om shanti, shanti, shanti

Der Beitrag ­Maya und die Frage nach der Wirklichkeit erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.