Many thanks for your letter. I am glad to hear that somebody else likes the book, and I am not sorry that it should be 'Les Amis du Bouddhisme'. The French, in general, are not so prone to complacent mental laziness, which (according to Palinurus) 'is the English disease'.

I find reading Bradley a fascinating experience. On every other page I recognize with delighted astonishment a paragraph on some matter that has been occupying my own thoughts and that, often enough, finds a place in the Notes. In FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURE [c], for example, I say that 'if anything exists, everything else does' and that 'The images involved in thinking must already in some sense be given before they can be thought'; and I find that Bradley says 'everything conceivable has existence in some sense' (p. 195). Then, in MANO [b] I say 'A universal becomes an abstraction only in so far as an attempt is made to think it in isolation from all particular or concrete content'; and Bradley makes a distinction between 'concrete universals' and 'abstract universals'. Again, Bradley remarks 'It takes two to make the same, and the least we can have is some change of event in a self-same thing, or the return to that thing from some suggested difference' (p. 141); and if you will run through the second paragraph of ATTÁ, you will see that it is purely and simply an expansion of Bradley's statement.[1] Sometimes it is almost embarrassing. I read in one place that 'in much imagination we shall find the presence of a discursive element' (p. 76); and turning to MANO, opening sentence, I find I have written 'Much mental activity (imagination) is to some extent reflexive (in a loose sense)' and I later use the expression 'discursive thought' in this very sense.

This looks as if I have simply copied Bradley; and if I were somebody else, with the task of reviewing the Notes, I should undoubtedly say that 'the author, quite clearly, owes much to Bradley, from whom he has lifted several passages almost verbatim but without having had the decency to acknowledge his source'. And yet it is not so; apart from my youthful reading (now forgotten) of another work of his, I have no knowledge of his writings, and the authors to whom I am most indebted (Sartre, Eddington, Ross Ashby[2] -- whom you do not know of) have almost certainly never read him (Sartre and Bradley, independently, give much the same account of the part played by images in thinking, though their way of expressing it is quite different).

It is satisfactory, of course, to have independent confirmation of certain statements in the Notes (the heavy volumes of Bradley can be thrown at an objector with telling effect); but, at the same time, I am given a sobering reminder that nobody has ever thought anything that somebody else has not already thought before him -- and this is true even of the Buddhas, who re-discover what has already been discovered (nay, re-discovered) by their predecessors. On the other hand, this perennial sameness of philosophical reflexions can be very stimulating -- see this remarkable passage from Dostoievsky's The Possessed:

'Old philosophical commonplaces, always the same, from the beginning of time' murmured Stavrogin with an air of careless pity. 'Always the same! Always the same from the beginning of time and nothing else!' replied Kirilov, his eyes sparkling, as if his victory were comprised in this idea.[3]

But also, Bradley is as exciting to read as Russell is dull. Bradley has his hero -- Judgement (perhaps you are familiar with him?) -- and his heroine -- Reality --, and we are made to wonder whether he will succeed in bringing them together (with Inference as go-between) by the end of the book. He gets Judgement into some very tight corners, and we are left in suspense until a later chapter to find out how the hero escapes (if he does). (Looking ahead a few pages, I see that the traditional syllogism is going to come to a sticky end -- 'A mistake that has lasted two thousand years'. I might almost have written those words myself, though in another connexion.) Part of the fun is trying to anticipate Bradley's solution and to keep a page or two ahead of him; and I felt very satisfied on one occasion when, after reading a paragraph, a scathing comment (Bradley makes them too) occurred to me; I was about to write it in the margin when I noticed that Bradley had already put it as a footnote. You have to get up early if you're going to get the better of him.

The book originally appeared in 1883, but the present edition contains Bradley's own commentary on it written forty years later. It is interesting to see how he sometimes admits to being perplexed, not only by other philosophers, but also by his earlier self. (It might be an encouragement to us when we can't make head or tail of other people's philosophy, or even our own, to remember that it happens even to the best philosophers. Mathematicians are more fortunate: given time, two mathematicians of equal intelligence can always understand each other, since the rules of mathematics are agreed upon beforehand. Not so the rules of philosophy -- indeed philosophy really consists in trying to discover what the rules are, if any.) Naturally, there is nothing in Bradley of a lokuttara nature, and even the crucial lokiya questions about self and the world he does not deal with; but if one is looking for a coherent philosophical background for one's thinking, he can provide things that are quite beyond the powers of modern academical philosophy -- not everything, of course, but he is nearly always relevant (even when he is mistaken), whereas our present-day realists are monotonously and almost militantly irrelevant. Not surprisingly, they don't like Bradley, and he has suffered an undeserved eclipse. Here is one of them, Miss Stebbing, a female logician (if you please):

Neither Bradley, nor Bosanquet, nor any of this school of Idealist Logicians, has ever succeeded in making clear what exactly is meant by the principle of identity-in-difference upon which the metaphysical logic of the Idealists is based. Their logic ends in 'shipwreck'.... (MIL, p. x)

Knowing your sympathy with Lin Yutang's views on European philosophy, it is perhaps rather unkind of me to send you all this. But the fact is that, just at present, this is more or less the only thing I am thinking about. In any case, I shall not ask you to read Bradley, and I shall be quite satisfied if you will contemplate him from a comfortable distance.




[L. 91]   4 April 1964

It would take more than a few remarks about the sterility of Western philosophy to dry me up. I am fond of the sound of my own voice, but, living in solitude, I rarely get the opportunity of hearing it, so I have to make do with the next best thing: if I can't enjoy hearing myself talk, I can at least enjoy reading myself write (if you get the idea). In any case, if I am going to correspond with anybody I assume that he wants my reflections in the original edition, not in a popularized version. If he doesn't love my dog, then he can't love me. (I have rather the same attitude towards the hypothetical readers of the Notes: they are given my thought whether they are likely to understand it or not. This may lay the book open to the charge of intellectual immodesty -- which I don't deny -- but nobody, I think, can justly call it hypocritical. Whether or not everything I say will be of use to the reader is another question, and I am quite ready to admit that some of it may be a positive hindrance. But, rightly or wrongly, I leave that for the reader to decide.)

When I said that the author of the Notes seems to have 'lifted passages from Bradley without acknowledgement', that must be understood as a pardonable exaggeration on the part of a heated (if imaginary) reviewer. In fact, even though I have now quoted Bradley (with acknowledgement), nobody will accuse me of having transcribed him literally in other parts of the book, though people may quite likely (if they are acquainted with Bradley) suppose that I have taken my ideas from him. But, personal vanity apart, this does not matter.

There is nothing very much new to report. Bradley makes a distinction that seems to have a certain (limited) application to the Dhamma. He speaks of the metaphysicians, on the one hand, who speculate on first principles and the ultimate nature of things; and on the other, of

those who are not prepared for metaphysical enquiry, who feel no call towards thankless hours of fruitless labour, who do not care to risk a waste of their lives on what the world for the most part regards as lunacy, and they themselves but half believe in. (PL, p. 340)

In the Suttas, too, we find something of this distinction between those sekhá who are ditthipattá ('attained-through-view') and those who are saddhávimuttá ('released-through-faith').[a] The former have heard the Buddha's Teaching, reflected on it, and accepted it after considering the ultimate principles on which it is based. The latter have heard the Teaching and reflected on it (as before), but, instead of seeking its first principles, have accepted it because it inspires them with trust and confidence. Both of them have practised the Teaching, and both have attained to sotápatti or beyond, but one puts paññá foremost, and the other saddhá. But there is also a third kind of sekha, the káyasakkhi ('body-witness'), who is quite without any corresponding category in Western philosophy: he is one who puts samádhi foremost -- he develops mental concentration and gets all the jhánas, and needs not so much paññá or saddhá. In A. III,21: i,118-20, the Buddha is asked which of these three is the best, but he declines to discriminate between them, saying that any one of them may outdistance the other two and arrive first at the final goal.

It is actually on this question of samádhi that Eastern thought is at its greatest distance from Western; and the latter can certainly be charged with sterility on this score (and this will include the existentialists). The trouble seems to be this. Western thought has a Christian background (its individual thinkers can almost all be classed as pro- or anti-Christian, and rarely, if ever, as neutral), and, since the practice of meditation is normally connected with religious beliefs (in a wide sense), all states attained through such practices are automatically classed as Christian (or at least as Theist or Deist), and therefore as essentially mystical. Now, no philosopher who respects the Laws of Thought can possibly find a place for the mystical in his scheme of things, since mysticism is an act of faith in the principle of non-contradiction (i.e. that the Law of Contradiction does not hold) -- in other words, God (who is, one might say, self-contradiction personified, and, being the Ultimate Truth, is therefore no contradiction).[b]

So samatha practice (ánápánasati, for example), even were it known in the West (which it is not), would first be misunderstood as mystical, and then, on the strength of this, would be banished from the philosopher's system (except, of course, on Sundays). It was, indeed, the desire for some definite non-mystical form of practice that first turned my thoughts towards the East: Western thinking (of which I really know very little) seemed to me to oscillate between the extremes of mysticism and rationalism, both of which were distasteful to me, and the yoga practices -- in a general sense -- of India offered themselves as a possible solution.

Perhaps you remarked about the first appearance in my letters of the word 'metaphysics'. This word is now rather out of fashion; seemingly for two different reasons. Bradley calls himself a metaphysician, and my dictionary tells me that metaphysics are 'Speculations on the nature of being, truth, and knowledge', which seems to justify Bradley's claim. But Bradley was an idealist philosopher and was primarily concerned with the relation between 'appearance' on the one hand and 'reality' on the other. And, in fact, metaphysics has rather come to be associated with idealist philosophy, and in particular with the investigation of a 'reality' that, being what lies behind appearances, is necessarily hidden from our eyes (except at the present instant). From this philosophy there has been a two-fold reaction. On the one hand, there are the realists (Russell & Co.), who deny the idealist position by the simple expedient of ignoring consciousness, thereby conceiving all truths as statistical (which is the position of science). Extreme exponents go so far as to deny philosophy and metaphysics altogether -- for example, Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.53):

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wishes to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his proposition. This method would be unsatisfying to the other -- he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy -- but it would be the only strictly correct method.

Metaphysics, in consequence, understood as the investigation of a reality -- a 'Really Real Reality' as someone has commented -- behind appearances, is now discredited; and Sartre, to take an instance, though coming within the dictionary definition of a metaphysician, does not call himself one -- indeed, he re-defines metaphysics as dealing with the general question, 'Why should things exist at all?' (B&N, p. 297). (The question 'Why are there other people?', for example, would be metaphysical in Sartre's sense. Metaphysics, so understood, lead eventually to the direct intuition 'It is so', beyond which it is impossible to go. One is perhaps tempted to remark that such metaphysics have something in common with feminine reason: 'I love him because I love him.') In view of the prevailing ambiguity of the word, it is probably better to let it sleep. (The word is ambiguous even in its origins. Aristotle wrote his 'Physics', and then after his 'Physics' he wrote another chapter or book, which, for want of anything better, he called 'Metaphysics'; but the word has commonly been taken to mean 'what lies beyond physics', i.e. a metaphysical world (reality) beyond the physical world of appearance.)

I confess that I don't altogether follow the tangle of names and addresses that you have sent me -- would it help matters if we were to suppose that Mr. K. and Mrs. J. are one and the same person? There might be something in Bradley we could use to justify this assumption, should it be necessary. 'Where sameness is asserted difference is presupposed. Where difference is asserted there is a basis of sameness which underlies it.' (PL, p. 373) ('Whom Bradley hath joined, let no man put asunder', as the Anglican Marriage Service almost tells us.) But perhaps you will object that the mere fact of our supposing that Mr. K. and Mrs. J. are one person -- even if it is convenient to do so -- will not make them one person in actual fact, if they are really two. But we may appeal to Hegel, who maintained that thought and actuality are the same: what I think, that actually is; and what is, that I think. So if we care to think that Mr. K. and Mrs. J. are one person, then they are so in reality. But alas! here comes 'Gaunt Kierkegaard' (as Palinurus calls him) to tell us that Hegel's view is a 'lunatic postulate' (CUP, p. 279) and we are regretfully forced to admit that this is true.[d] However, I have no doubt that you see the situation more clearly than I do, and perhaps you will be able to assure me that no contradiction arises from supposing that Mr. K. and Mrs. J. are, in fact, two distinct people.

I have read Huxley's Brave New World twice already, I think, and I have no great desire to read it again. It is, I agree with you, not up to the level of his other books, though I believe it has been his best seller.

Ride-a-cock gee to Banbury T
To see a fine bathroom and W. C.

Next section

Back to Clearing the Path - Contents

Back to Ñánavíra Thera Dhamma Page

Footnotes:

[90.a] Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Englishmen have one set of Ultimate Truths, while Frenchmen have quite another set -- a conclusion that is sometimes not so ridiculous as it seems. [Back to text]

[91.a] These sekhá are sotápanna and beyond. Before sotápatti (i.e. after reaching the magga but not the phala) -- see CITTA -- sekhá are dhammánusárí or saddhánusárí, between whom the same distinction holds. [Back to text]

[91.b] Some philosophers take advantage of this situation: they develop their system as far as possible, carefully avoiding self-contradictions; but when they encounter one that they cannot explain, instead of confessing defeat they proudly declare that they have proved the existence of God. [Back to text]

[91.c] Beginning perhaps with Nietzsche, who speaks of 'the illusion of hinder-worlds'; whereas Kierkegaard seems to have partly accepted the distinction: he conceded the idealist contention, but regarded it as irrelevant and a temptation --

The triumphant victory of pure thought, that in it being and thought are one, is something both to laugh at and to weep over, since in the realm of pure thought it is not even possible to distinguish them. That thought had validity was assumed by Greek philosophy without question. By reflecting over the matter one would have to arrive at the same result; but why confuse the validity of thought with reality? A valid thought is a possibility, and every further question as to whether it is real or not should be dismissed as irrelevant. (CUP, p. 292)
[Back to text]

[90.1] Bradley quote: The quotation was subsequently incorporated into Notes, ATTÁ [b]. [Back to text]

[90.2] Ross Ashby is a prolific and intelligent writer on cybernetics, and the Ven. Ñánavíra Thera seems to have found his views to be thought-provoking, even if largely unacceptable. Some time prior to 1957 the Ven. Ñánavíra Thera had read Ross Ashby's Design for a Brain (London: Chapman and Hall, 1952), and he may also have read Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1957). [Back to text]

[90.3] Dostoievsky: See L. 22. [Back to text]