The Theory of Knowledge | Rāmānuja
The Theory of Knowledge | Rāmānuja
That reality is knowable is the key thought of the Viśiṣṭādvaita theory of knowledge; and knowledge as darśana in the widest sense includes what is perceived through the senses, what is inferred by anumāna and what is intuited spiritually as Brahma-jñāna.
If there is an unbridged gulf between being and knowing, then the theory of knowledge is the theory of no knowledge and scepticism becomes inevitable:
This tendency is clearly discernible in the Kantian opposition between the noumenal and phenomenal Reality, the Bradleyan contrast between Reality and appearance and Śankara’s distinction between the transcendental (or pāramārthika-satya) and the empirical (or vyavahārika-satya).
Rāmānuja avoids this impasse by accepting the trustworthiness of knowledge in all its three levels ascending from sense perception, science and philosophy, to the integral and immediate experience of Brahman.
The logical apprehension of Brahman (or Brahma-jijñāsā) as the supremely real leads to the intuitive realization of Brahman (or Brahmānubhava).
Knowledge is the affirmation of reality and even negation presupposes affirmation. If Brahman is real, the world rooted in Brahman is also real and we can go from the partial to the perfect.
Truth is an immanent criterion of knowledge. Truth is true and it attains the more of itself, till it is fully realized as Truth or the eternal value of Reality.
To realize this end, Rāmānuja utilizes all the ways of knowing Brahman and employs the principle of dharma-bhūta-jñāna, the logical rule of a-pṛthak-siddha- viśeṣaṇa, the grammatical rule of samānādhikaraṇa and the realistic view of sat-kārya-vāda.
The theory of dharma-bhūta-jñāna or attributive consciousness of the self furnishes the raison d'etre of Viśiṣṭādvaita epistemology as it thrown light on the nature of the external world, the ātman and Brahman.
Consciousness presupposes the self of which it is an essential attribute and it cannot be conscious of itself. The self and its consciousness are distinguishable but not divisible.
Self-consciousness implies the self that is conscious and consciousness of the self and the distinction between substantive intelligence and attributive intelligence, like light and its luminosity.
Jñāna is attribute-substance like sunlight which is a quality and at the same time the substratum of colours.
In the empirical state, jñāna is obscured by avidya and contracted by karma; it reveals external objects and it is the source of all the mental states dealt with by psychology, normal, abnormal and metapsychical, from the stage of instinct to that of supra-normal consciousness.
The three states of jñāna, namely, the waking consciousness, dreams and sound sleep, are psychologically the variations of the same jñāna and are therefore continuous and not self-contradictory.
When jñāna is freed from avidya-karma, it expands into infinity and becomes the integral consciousness of God (Brahmānubhava).
The theory of judgment may now be developed in the light of jñāna:
The ātman is ever self-luminous and it is its jñāna conditioned by karma that reveals the external world either as objects or as a whole.
Judgment is thus due to the judging activity of the self-conscious ātman and not to the passive reception of impressions from the visible and tangible world.
All knowledge issa-vikalpaka or determinate and not nir-vikalpaka or indeterminate perception without difference.
Rāmānuja's view that the external object is for consciousness and not in consciousness and that jñāna illumines or reveals objects, avoids the impasse caused by extreme realism and idealism and has the merit of simplicity.
Realism is justified, when it refers to the object as given and not as constructed by thought, and idealism is true in so far as it accepts the a priori nature of consciousness and denies the utter externality of the object.
Knowledge arises from the subject-object relation of the self (cit) and the not-self (a-cit), and the ultimate subject of every judgment is the whole of reality. It is Paramātman who shines in all thinkers and things and is yet beyond them.
The theory of a-pṛthak-siddha-viśeṣaṇa the adjectival theory of the Absolute, brings out the meaning of judgment in its logical and ontological aspects:
In the proposition, "man is rational;” the predicate is the inseparable or essential quality of the subject which is more than mere connection of content. The quality subsists in the substance and shares in its substantiality though it is different from it.
The self as the knower is an eternal thinking subject and it has intelligence as its inseparable quality (prakāra).
Logic is rooted in ontology and the ultimate subject of every proposition is the whole of reality:
The logical subject is the knowing self (cit) with consciousness (caitanya) as its quality and the ontological subject is Brahman as the self of the self or the ultimate substance (prakārin).
Just as knowledge (jñāna) is substance-attribute, so the self (cit) is itself a substance and also a quality of Brahman as an adjective of the absolute.
As the logical ego, the self is a mode (or prakāra) of Brahman, but as an ethical ego it is a monad having its own intrinsic nature. It is at once an organ of the absolute and an organism.
The same truth is brought out by the grammatical rule of sāmānā- dhikaraṇya or co-ordination and the Mimāṅsā rule of connotation:
According to the former, words in a sentence having different meanings can denote only one thing as in the example, "This is Devadatta." It refers to co-ordination and personal identity and not to abstract identity.
According to Mimāṅsā, words connoting genus and quality (jāti and guṇa) also connote individual and substance (vyakti and guṇin) respectively, as in the example "This is a cow," and in the Upaniṣadic text "Thou art that."
A substance may become the body or quality of another substance and a word connoting the body (śarīra) may connote the self, its possessor (śarīrin) also.
In the last example, the term "thou" which connotes jīva (as śarīra) connotes also Brahman (the śarīrin). Thus, in the highest Vedāntic sense all terms connoting a thing or a person or a god connote also Brahman as the source, support and ultimate self of all.