‘Verità e bellezza’

Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella

 Series Minor

XCVII.1—2

Direttore
Francesco Sferra

Comitato di redazione
Riccardo Contini, Martin Orwin, Junichi Oue,
Roberto Tottoli, Giovanni Vitiello

Comitato scientifico
Anne Bayard-Sakai (INALCO), Stanisław Bazyliński (Facoltà teologica
S. Bonaventura, Roma), Henrietta Harrison (University of Oxford),
Harunaga Isaacson (Universität Hamburg), Barbara Pizziconi (SOAS,
University of London), Lucas van Rompay (Duke University),
Raffaele Torella (Sapienza, Università di Roma),
Judith T. Zeitlin (The University of Chicago)

Dipartimento Asia, Africa e Mediterraneo

Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

UniorPress
Napoli
2022
 UNIVERSITÁ DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI “L’ORIENTALE”
UniverSity of CamBridge

Series Minor
XCVII.1

‘Verità e bellezza’
Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella

Edited by
Francesco Sferra and Vincenzo Vergiani

UniorPress
Napoli 2022
Volume pubblicato con contributi
– del dipartimento asia, africa e mediterraneo (Università degli
Studi di napoli “L’orientale”),
– della faculty of asian and middle eastern Studies (University of
Cambridge),
– e del Progetto erC n. 803624: «translocal identities. the Śiva-
dharma and the making of regional religious traditions in
Premodern South asia».

UniorPress - Via Nuova Marina 59, 80133 Napoli

ISBN 978-88-6719-209-0

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Tutti gli articoli pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti al vaglio di due revisori anonimi.
raffaele torella
 table of Contents

volume i

Preface........................................................................................ 13

foreword.................................................................................... 19

main Publications of raffaele torella....................................... 25

andrea acri
From Isolation to Union: Pātañjala vis-à-vis Śaiva Understandings
of the Meaning and Goal of Yoga............................................... 35

Lyne Bansat-Boudon
The Surprise of Spanda: An Aesthetic Approach to a
Phenomenology of Transcendence (Rāmakañṭha ad Spandakārikā
2.6 [1.22/22])......................................................................... 73

Bettina Sharada Bäumer

Kṣemarāja’s Poetic Non-Dualism:
Examples from his Netratantroddyota.......................................... 103

giuliano Boccali
Lectio difficilior e creazione poetica: esempi dal Kumārasambhava.. 115
 Verità e bellezza

Johannes Bronkhorst
The Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha: One Text or Two?
One Author or Two?................................................................ 129

maria Piera Candotti and tiziana Pontillo

The dīkṣita’s Language. Vedic Homologies and rūpakas
in Jaiminīya-Brāhmaña 2.60–64............................................... 153

daniele Cuneo and elisa ganser

The Emotional and Aesthetic Experience of the Actor.
Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien in Sanskrit Dramaturg y........... 193

marzenna Czerniak-drożdżowicz
Viṣṇu in his Three Abodes. Some Observations about Three-storey
and Triple-shrined Viṣñu Temples in South India........................ 273

florinda de Simini
Rules of Conduct for the Śaivas. The Intersection of Dharmaśāstra
and Śaiva Devotion in the Śivadharmottara................................ 291

vincent eltschinger
Politics and/in the End of Times. On the Buddhist Reception
of the Arthaśāstra.................................................................... 337

marco ferrante
The Pratyabhijñā on Consciousness and Self-consciousness:
A Comparative Perspective........................................................ 375

giuseppe ferraro
‘Own-nature’ (svabhāva) in the Abhidharma Tradition and in
Nāgārjuna’s Interpretation....................................................... 391

marco franceschini
The Printing History of Sargas 9 to 17 of the Kumārasambhava.... 411

eli franco
Prajñākaragupta on Pramāñavārttika 2.1 in the Light of Yamāri’s
Interpretation.......................................................................... 433

8
 Table of Contents

elisa freschi
Reconstructing an Episode in the History of Sanskrit Philosophy:
Arthāpatti in Kumārila’s Commentators..................................... 457

Paolo giunta
Il rapporto di Śāntarakṣita con Bhartr¢hari. Edizione critica della
Śabdabrahmaparīkṣā e dello Sphoṭavādakhaṇḍana...................... 487

dominic goodall
A Glimpse of Classical Saiddhāntika Theology in a Cambodian
Epigraph: A Fresh Edition and Translation of the Sanskrit Śaiva
Hymn K. 570 of Banteay Srei..................................................... 543

alessandro graheli
Predestination of Freedom in Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Theology
of Devotion............................................................................. 577

Kengo Harimoto
A Few Notes on a Newly Discovered Manuscript of the Śivadharma
Corpus 1................................................................................ 595

Harunaga isaacson
Vasiṣṭha’s Ashram: A Translation of Sarga 1 of Kālidāsa’s
Raghuvaṃśa into English Verse................................................. 627

volume ii

mrinal Kaul
A Preliminary Note on the Manuscripts of the Tantrālokaviveka.... 679

yohei Kawajiri
A Report on the Newly Found Manuscript
of the Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivr¢ti.................................................. 751

Chiara neri
A Phenomenology of Dreams in Theravāda Buddhism:
An Annotated Translation of the Tenth Chapter of the
Sārasaṅgaha by Siddhattha Thera............................................. 773

9
 Verità e bellezza

Cristina Pecchia
With the Eye of a Scholar and the Insight of a Physician:
Gangadhar Ray Kaviraj and the Carakasaṃhitā.......................... 797

gianni Pellegrini
On prahasann iva. Bhagavadgītā 2.10 in the Light of Traditional
Commentaries.......................................................................... 841

Stefano Piano
Qualche riflessione sui diversi tipi di ṣaḍaṅgayoga....................... 901

Cinzia Pieruccini
Transition and Transformation: On the Roles of Parks
and Gardens in Early India...................................................... 913

isabelle ratié
Some Hitherto Unknown Fragments of Utpaladeva’s Vivr¢ti (IV):
On Non-being and Imperceptible Demons.................................... 929

antonio rigopoulos
Prahasann iva. On Kr¢ṣña’s Hint of Laughter
in Bhagavadgītā 2.10.............................................................. 965

margherita Serena Saccone and Péter-dániel Szántó

A Fragment of Pramāña from Gilgit........................................... 1011

małgorzata Sacha
Imagine the world… Abhinavagupta vis-à-vis the Psychoanalytic
Mystic.................................................................................... 1025

alexis Sanderson
The Meaning of the Term Trairūpyam in the Buddhist
Pramāña Literature................................................................. 1049

Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
D’impronte e ombre tra India e Grecia. Questioni e visioni di storia
del pensiero politico e filosofico tra il V e il II secolo a.C.................. 1063

10
 Table of Contents

francesco Sferra
The Second Chapter of the Abhidharmasamuccayakārikā
by Saṅghatrāta........................................................................ 1145

federico Squarcini
Ecce yoga. Il miraggio del nome, il fantasma della salute
e la concomitanza delle ‘cose’ qualsiasi........................................ 1167

ernst Steinkellner
Śāntarakṣita on the Induction Problem. A Translation
of Vādanyāyaṭīkā 14,12−16,29................................................... 1223

Lidia Sudyka
Imagined Landscapes or Through the Year: The Descriptions of All
Seasons and All Seasons’ Gardens in Indian Literature................ 1237

vincenzo vergiani
Vivakṣā and the Formation of Meaning According to Bhartr¢hari.... 1253

alex Watson
Pratyabhijñā: Recognition’s Nature, Cause and Object.
Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of a Portion
of the Nyāyamañjarī................................................................. 1325

11
 Verità e bellezza

dīnanāth yach and raffaele torella in Śrīnagar in the mid-1980s

raffaele torella in the countryside near Bracciano with students

12
 The Pratyabhijñā on Consciousness and Self-
consciousness: A Comparative Perspective *

Marco Ferrante
(austrian academy of Sciences, Vienna)

Pratyabhijñā’s philosophy is a form of monistic idealism.1 accord-

ing to the school, reality consists in the activity of a single, all-per-
vading element, which is ultimately identified with the individual
consciousness of the subject of experience. this basic viewpoint
generates several philosophical positions, some of which are high-

* I had the privilege to be first exposed to the texts and the philosophy of the

Pratyabhijñā through the teaching of raffaele torella, the leading expert in the
field in contemporary academia. the decision to dedicate myself to the study of
India’s past had much to do with Utpaladeva’s thought and, even more, with
raffaele’s insightful, sophisticated and inspirational rendering of it. I still vividly
remember the moment in which as young undergraduates at the University of
rome we left the safe haven of textbook Sanskrit to plunge into the deep waters
of the unedited fragments of Utpaladeva’s Vivṛti raffaele had himself discovered.
although I have spent the first part of my academic career working on different
topics, I have recently returned to the Śaiva philosophical texts. the more I get
involved in the subject, the more I realize how profound was raffaele’s under-
standing of the tradition and how, sometimes unconsciously, I am still guided by
some of his intuitions. I hope that this small contribution repays a little of what I
have learnt from raffaele, and for which I shall be forever grateful.
1 Pratyabhijñā’s ontological position is better described as ‘non-dualism.’

However, due to the comparative nature of this article I have decided to stick to
the more recognizable label of ‘monism.’
 Marco Ferrante

ly controversial. It is sufficient to mention the idea that knowledge

and consciousness are language-related phenomena, and the
notion that external reality is ontologically dependent on the
mind. this short essay focuses on a further problematic aspect,
namely the thesis that in being aware of an object the subject of
the awareness is also conscious of her/himself. In other words, the
claim under scrutiny is that consciousness always entails self-con-
sciousness.2
the problem with the expression ‘self-consciousness’ is that it
is ambiguous. It can refer to the fact that cognitions or mental
states are innately conscious of themselves, a connotation I am
going to call ‘self-consciousness (1).’ But it can also mean that cog-
nitions or mental states come together with the awareness of an
endurable self which is the subject of experience. I am going to
call this second connotation ‘self-consciousness (2).’3 Self-con-
sciousness (1) has long been debated, by both classical Indian
authors and contemporary scholarship: how do we know that we
are in a given mental state ? By a property of the mental state itself
(svasaṃvedana) or through another mental state (parasaṃvedana)
operating on the first? Indian traditions have taken both sides.
the Pratyabhijñā — like their main rivals, the Buddhists of the
Pramāñavāda tradition — have adopted the first stance, thus
claiming that a cognition is innately self-reflexive. Whatever it is,
what is essential to our discussion is that self-consciousness (1) is
not a counterintuitive position and can be argued for even with-
out assuming the existence of personhood.4

2 In accordance with the contemporary view on the issue, I am keeping sepa-

rated the notions of self-consciousness and consciousness. Self-consciousness or

self-awareness is the capacity to entertain introspection, which is one of the sev-
eral features of mind. consciousness is much more difficult to define, but very
generally speaking the notion refers to that mental state in which one is aware of
one’s own surroundings.
3 For the sake of simplicity, I am using the terms ‘cognitions’ and ‘mental

states’ heuristically and interchangeably. they both indicate the condition that
occurs in the mind at the end of the process of acquisition of thoughts, percep-
tions, desires, etc. For both the Sanskrit equivalent would be jñāna, which indi-
cates an episodic state of awareness. If a certain awareness is causally produced
by appropriate means of knowledge, then it becomes a pramā, namely, a veridi-
cal cognition. See Potter 1984.
4 Self-consciousness (1) was actually introduced into the philosophical debate

by the Buddhist Pramāñavādins, who nevertheless would never accept self-con-

376
 The Pratyabhijñā on Consciousness and Self-consciousness

Much different is the situation with self-consciousness (2),

which is counterintuitive and much more contentious, for it pre-
cisely claims that a mental state implies an awareness of its owner.
Is this position tenable ? In this article I am going to argue that
Utpaladeva’s endorsement of self-consciousness (2), though con-
troversial, is defensible. In doing so, I shall discuss the arguments
presented by a contemporary philosopher, Uriah Kriegel, and
apply his model to the case of the Pratyabhijñā.

1. The double nature of vimarśa

Pratyabhijñā’s most crucial tenet is possibly the idea that con-
sciousness and knowledge are conceptual activities that are always
determinate 5 and language-driven.6 as I have shown in detail else-
where,7 their main claim — on which the grammarian and
philosopher Bhartṛhari had a major influence — is that cogni-
tions are conscious in so far as they are the object of a higher-order
activity of the mind. accordingly, the Śaivas distinguish first-order,
world-directed mental states, which they simply call ‘cognitions’
(prakāśa, ‘light’), from a higher-order activity of mind in which
second-order mental states operate on first-order ones. this activ-
ity, which they call ‘reflective awareness’ (vimarśa/pratyavamarśa/
parāmarśa), is conceptual and language-based. as it will be clear
below, this picture does not entail that second-order mental states
objectify first-order ones. the thesis is best epitomized by ĪPK
1.5.11:

sciousness (2). In fact, the Pratyabhijñā authors claim that self-consciousness (1)
always entails self-consciousness (2), but this is another aspect of the story.
5 See ĪPK 1.5.19: sākṣātkārakṣañe ’py asti vimarśaḥ katham anyathā | dhāvanādy

upapadyeta pratisaṃdhānavarjitam ||.

6 to better understand the point, it is useful to recall russell’s distinction

between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (russell

1910). the former is an awareness acquired through a direct, sense-based inter-
action between a person and the object the person is knowing. the latter is
instead mediated and judgmental. In opposition to the Buddhists of the
Pramāñavāda tradition, the Pratyabhijñā maintains that all knowledge is descrip-
tive.
7 For an analysis of the question and Bhartṛhari’s influence on the Kashmiri

school, see Ferrante 2021: 63—69.

377
 Marco Ferrante

the essential nature of light is reflective awareness, otherwise

light, though coloured by objects, would be similar to insentient
realities, like a crystal, etc.8

If we translate the jargon of the school into more perspicuous

words, the stanza would sound as:

the essential nature of cognitions/mental states is reflective

awareness. If that were not the case, a cognition would be inert
like a crystal.

But why is vimarśa the essential feature of prakāśa, or, to put it dif-
ferently, why cannot a cognitive state exist without a high-order
conceptual activity? the answer is given in Utpaladeva’s short
auto-commentary (Īśvarapratyabhijñāvṛtti) on the same stanza:

reflective awareness constitutes the primary essence of light. In

the absence of this reflective awareness, light, though objects
make it assume different forms, would be merely limpid but not
sentient, since there is no savouring.9

repeating again the exercise of translating the text into clearer

words we obtain:

reflexive awareness is the primary essence of consciousness. If

there were no reflective awareness, consciousness/cognition
would be merely transparent, even if it would retain the ability to
assume the form of the contents it is aware of. Why? Because it
would lack savouring.

Utpaladeva’s answer seems to be that a cognition deprived of

reflective awareness would lack ‘savouring.’ the obvious question
is to understand what ‘savouring’ stands for. In torella’s transla-
tion ‘savouring’ renders the Sanskrit camatkāra/camatkṛti, a distinc-
tive term of the school and indeed a troublesome one. Its basic

8 svabhāvam avabhāsasya vimarśaṃ vidur anyathā | prakāśo ’rthoparakto ’pi

sphaṭikādijaḍopamaḥ ||. ĪPK 1.5.11. all translations of the ĪPK and the Vṛtti thereon
are from torella 2002.
9 Vṛtti on ĪPK 1.5.11: prakāśasya mūkhya ātmā pratyavamarśaḥ, taṃ vinā arthabhe-

ditākārasya apy asya svacchatāmātraṃ na tv ajāḍyaṃ camatkṛter abhāvāt.

378
 The Pratyabhijñā on Consciousness and Self-consciousness

meaning is ‘wonder,’ but the Pratyabhijñā authors often gloss it

with ‘lysis, satisfaction’ (nirvṛti), ‘bliss’ (ānanda) or, indeed,
‘savouring’ (āsvāda). the main hermeneutical problem with ca-
matkāra is that it immediately evokes the aesthetics domain. to
make the picture more complex, abhinavagupta was a leading
scholar both in the Pratyabhijñā tradition and in aesthetics. the
consequence is that it has become rather commonplace to try to
make sense of Pratyabhijñā’s camatkāra in connection with the ca-
matkāra of the rasa theorists, that is, with that state of wonder, bliss
or rapture one feels during an aesthetic experience. In a sense,
this might be true, but only indirectly. I believe in fact that Pratya-
bhijñā’s camatkāra has primarily a philosophical connotation,
which is strictly related to the way the school conceived conscious-
ness. In order to better understand what I mean, some words on
contemporary conceptions of consciousness are called for.
In one of the most influential books on the subject published in
the last decades (chalmers 1996), David chalmers draws a distinc-
tion between contents of mind. States of mind can be analysed in
psychological and/or phenomenal terms. a mental state is dis-
cussed in psychological terms when it is regarded as the causal or
explanatory basis for a certain behaviour. It is instead discussed in
phenomenal terms if it is examined as a consciously experienced
phenomenon. thus, psychologically speaking, mind is character-
ized by what it does, phenomenally speaking by how it feels.
consciousness makes no exception, since it has a psychological
side consisting of awakeness, introspection, reportability, self-
awareness, etc. Yet, all these aspects come along with a phenome-
nal dimension that corresponds to the ‘subjective quality of expe-
rience.’ In the end, quoting thomas nagel’s famous definition, a
mental state is conscious if there is ‘something it is like to be’ in that
mental state (nagel 1974). In chalmers’s view the explanation of
consciousness’s psychological side may pose some technical prob-
lems but it is philosophically limpid. this means that there are no
insurmountable obstacles to a theory capable of accounting for the
psychological aspects of consciousness in purely materialist terms.
By contrast, it is much more difficult — the ‘hard problem’ of con-
sciousness — to explain why consciousness has always a subjective
feeling or certain phenomenal qualities that philosophers of mind
usually call qualia. as chalmers (1996: 4) puts it:

379
 Marco Ferrante

When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and

information processing, but this processing does not usually go on
in the dark. there is also an internal aspect; there is something it
feels like to be a cognitive agent. this internal aspect is conscious
experience.

now, I believe that Utpaladeva is using camatkāra to refer to this

subjective dimension of consciousness. He is using it to describe
the qualia, the ‘phenomenal,’ the ‘what it is like to be’ dimension
of a cognitive state. although this subjective aspect remains
difficult to pinpoint, it is nonetheless there, present in the mental
states of all conscious beings. Utpaladeva describes it metaphori-
cally because it is practically impossible to articulate the notion
verbally. this is why he is talking of ‘savouring’ or ‘satisfaction.’ as
for the basic meaning of camatkāra (‘wonder’) one may argue,
again following chalmers, that the fact that consciousness has a
phenomenal aspect is indeed surprising (chalmers 1996: 5). In
principle, it is in fact absolutely legitimate to imagine an entity
possessing all the psychological features of consciousness
(reportability, self-consciousness, awareness, attention) without
their phenomenal counterparts. Such an entity, which contempo-
rary philosophers of mind call zombie, corresponds, by and large,
to the crystal Utpaladeva is mentioning in his work. the point is
that a zombie may be metaphysically possible but it is never met in
ordinary life where, on the contrary, qualia appear always to be
associated with conscious experience. For the Pratyabhijñā
authors the private dimension of consciousness is the basis of all
other aspects of subjectivity: reflective awareness, cognitions and,
in the end, the very notion of self. the idea is stated clearly in a
passage of the Vimarśinī commenting on ĪPK 1.5.13. Here abhi-
navagupta is explaining the difference between a conscious being
and a non-conscious one. In doing so, he seems to enlist the ele-
ments that characterize subjectivity in a hierarchical order:

a pot does not possess savouring, it itself does not have reflective
awareness, it is not evident to itself, nor does it shine without inter-
ruption. this is why it said to be unconscious. on the other hand,
[a person named] caitra savours the ‘I’ in himself because he has
the intensity, the impetus, the radiance, and the power [of con-
sciousness], because he possesses reflective awareness, and
because he is evident to himself. Having a nature that is so differ-

380
 The Pratyabhijñā on Consciousness and Self-consciousness

ent from that of the discriminative cognition ‘this,’ he [caitra]

manifests itself as connected with innumerable elementary phe-
nomena (abhāsa) like blue, yellow, pleasure, pain, their absence,
etc. For this reason, we say that caitra is conscious.10

the idea is that ‘savouring’ (camatkāra), that is, the first-person,

subjective, private dimension of consciousness is the basis for
reflective awareness (vimarśa), which is the capacity of having
high-order mental states. In turn, these high-order mental states
operate on cognitions (prakāśa), that is, on first-order mental
states engendered by the sensory stimuli. all this leads to the
notion of a self (ātman) that has an uninterrupted nature, name-
ly, it is extended through time. Schematically, the process is thus
the following: camatkāra  vimarśa  prakāśa  ātman.
apart from all this, vimarśa has also another connotation,
which is evident in ĪPK 1.5.12:
Precisely for this reason the self has been defined as ‘sentience,’
meaning by this the activity of consciousness in the sense of being
the subject of this activity. It is thanks to sentiency, in fact, that the
self differs from insentient reality.11

Besides being the basic feature of conscious mental states, as

claimed in ĪPK 1.5.11, vimarśa is also what characterizes the self and
distinguishes it from inert reality. thus, if we combine the affirma-
tions of these two contiguous stanza, 1.5.11 and 1.5.12, we come up
with a picture in which the higher-order activity of mind (vimarśa)
is at the same time the hallmark of cognitions/mental states
(prakāśa) and of the self (ātman). this leads to the conclusion that
all mental states must involve an awareness of the knowing subject
or self. In other words, consciousness must entail self-conscious-
ness.12 the move is clearly understandable if one considers the

10 ghaṭena svātmani na camatkriyate, svātmā na parāmṛśyate, na svātmani tena

prakāśyate, na aparicchinnatayā bhāsyate, tato na cetyata iti ucyate. caitreña tu svātmani

aham iti saṃrambhodyogollāsavibhūtiyogāt camatkriyate, svātmā parāmṛśyate, svātmany
eva prakāśyate idam iti yaḥ pariccheda etāvadrūpatayā tadvilakṣaṇībhāvena nīlapīta-
sukhaduḥkhatacchūnyatādy asaṃkhyāvabhāsayogenābhāsyate, tataḥ caitreṇa cetyata ity
ucyate. See Iyer-Pandey 1986: 250—251.
11 ĪPK 1.5.12 ātmāta eva caitanyaṃ citkriyācitikartṛtā-|-tātparyeñoditas tena jaḍāt sa

hi vilakṣañaḥ ||.
12 From now on I am using ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’ technical-

ly. accordingly, ‘consciousness’ does not indicate the faculty of being subjective-

381
 Marco Ferrante

apologetic tone of the Pratyabhijñā’s works, whose primary pur-

pose is to counter the Buddhist skepticism about the notion of
self. In the end, Utpaladeva is not trying to establish a theory of
consciousness but he aims to prove beyond doubt that person-
hood has real existence. Yet the move is also philosophically prob-
lematic: the thesis that consciousness implies self-consciousness is
controversial, for it has a strong idealistic flavour 13 and, even
worse, because it implies a conflation of the concepts of conscious-
ness and self-consciousness which most contemporary philoso-
phers are keen to keep apart. they would in fact argue that ‘to be
conscious of’ an event or a thing does not imply ‘to be self-con-
scious of it.’ the fact that I am aware of the book I have in front of
me does not entail that I am automatically aware of me having the
awareness. For being aware of such an awareness requires a fur-
ther effort of the mind, directed at itself. But normally, the argu-
ment goes on, cognitions do not work that way. I usually perceive
the book in front of me without being aware of having the percep-
tion. the conclusion is that consciousness and self-consciousness
are independent phenomena.14
Still, the Pratyabhijñā is arguing exactly for the opposite thesis.
Utpaladeva claims that a state of awareness, a cognition, always
implies self-awareness, that is, the notion of ‘I.’ He says that when
I am conscious of the book in front of me I am also conscious of
myself having the cognition, at least to some degree. Is this posi-
tion absolutely untenable ? as we will see below, it is not. In the fol-
lowing section I will describe the ingenious attempt of the philoso-
pher Uriah Kriegel to defend the claim that self-consciousness —

ly conscious of one’s own experience but it simply stands for ‘cognition’ or

‘awareness of’. and ‘self-consciousness’ means ‘awareness of (one) self’ as the
subject of knowledge.
13 the rejection of idealism in analytic philosophy is still largely based on the

work of Moore (1903) and russell (1912).

14 an example from Searle: ‘Finally, consciousness should not be confused

with self-consciousness. there are indeed certain types of animals, such as

humans, that are capable of extremely complicated forms of self-referential con-
sciousness which would normally be described as self-consciousness. For exam-
ple, I think conscious feelings of shame require that the agent be conscious of
himself or herself. But seeing an object or hearing a sound, for example, does
not require self-consciousness. and it is not generally the case that all conscious
states are also self-conscious.’ See Searle 2002: 8.

382
 The Pratyabhijñā on Consciousness and Self-consciousness

indeed a very circumscribed type of it — is implicit in conscious-

ness.

2. Kriegel’s arguments for the presence of self-consciousness in conscious-

ness
consciousness is an ambiguous concept possessing both intrinsic
and relational modes. the sentence ‘caitra is conscious’ is an
example of the intrinsic mode. In it we have an intrinsic property
attributed to a person.15 Kriegel defines this condition intransitive
consciousness. the sentence ‘caitra is conscious of a pot’ is on the
contrary an example of the relational mode. In it we have a rela-
tional property whereby a subject takes something as an object.
Such a condition is defined transitive consciousness. In addition to
that, adopting a scheme introduced by David rosenthal
(rosenthal 1986) that has become common in contemporary phi-
losophy of mind, Kriegel distinguishes between consciousness
belonging to individuals, or creature consciousness, and conscious-
ness belonging to mental states, or state consciousness. By combin-
ing these different aspects, we arrive at the following fourfold clas-
sification of consciousness:

1) intransitive creature consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra is conscious.’

2) transitive creature consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra is conscious of his new
pot.’
3) transitive state consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra’s thought is conscious of
his new pot.’
4) intransitive state consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra’s thought that his pot
is new is conscious.’

Kriegel’s first move is to prove that creature consciousness ulti-

mately depends on state consciousness. the reason he gives is that
in order to be conscious an individual must at least have one con-
scious mental state. accordingly, to possess mental states is a
requirement for being conscious as persons. the second step is to
prove that in the case of state consciousness all transitive mental
states depend on intransitive ones. Is all this tenable? Kriegel

15 In Kriegel’s work the examples are obviously different: he mentions ‘Mr

Smith’ and ‘his car.’ I have just replaced them with different, Indian names.

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 Marco Ferrante

argues that that in order to ‘be conscious of ’ one must be ‘con-

scious’ beforehand. If that were not the case, we would get stuck
in the awkward condition where one can be conscious of some-
thing, say a table, both consciously and unconsciously — a fact
that looks counterfactual. therefore, a preliminary conclusion is
that the first three kinds of consciousness all depend on the fourth
one, namely, all kinds of consciousness entail intransitive state con-
sciousness.
Kriegel’s next step is to show that intransitive state conscious-
ness depends on some form of self-consciousness. If this is proved
to be true, the conclusion is that all kinds of consciousness depend
on self-consciousness. that is the thesis that he wants to demon-
strate. Kriegel starts by stating that the very same fourfold classifi-
cation of consciousness is valid for self-consciousness too. thus we
have:

5) intransitive creature self-consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra is self-con-

scious.’
6) transitive creature self-consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra is self-conscious of
his new pot.’
7) transitive state self-consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra’s thought is self-con-
scious of his new pot.’
8) intransitive state self-consciousness, e.g. ‘caitra’s thought that his
pot is new is self-conscious.’

now Kriegel’s crucial claim is that affirmations 7) and 8) describe

different states of affairs. In 7) the mental state of a given individ-
ual is conscious of possessing a certain awareness; self-conscious-
ness here consists in being conscious of another consciousness:
the latter is the content of the former and this is why we talk about
a mental state having a transitive property. By contrast, in affirma-
tion 8) self-consciousness does not take consciousness as its con-
tent but modifies it in a self-conscious way. affirmation 8) can be
recast more clearly by saying that ‘caitra’s thought self-conscious-
ly thinks to his new pot.’ the difference between transitive and
intransitive types of self-consciousness is justified in terms of differ-
ence of attention. Kriegel adopts the widely accepted distinction
between foveal and peripheral attention. If we return to the case of
consciousness, one is in transitive state consciousness when
she/he is focally or foveally attending to her own mental states. By

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contrast, one is in intransitive state consciousness, when she/he is

attending to something else and is only peripherally aware of the
mental state she/he is in. But what is peripheral awareness? It is
the condition in which we focus our sensory attention on one
thing, yet we are not totally unaware of other phenomena. think
for instance of the case of someone reading a book. our foveal
attention is on the page but at the same time we are also peripher-
ally aware of other sensorial stimuli, such as other objects in our
field of vision, the sounds we hear, etc. the question is whether
the distinction between foveal and peripheral awareness, which
seems so evident in the case of sensory perceptions, is also valid for
conceptual contents. Kriegel argues that it is so, by appealing to
the example of the truck-driver who, though focused on the road,
has meanwhile myriad thoughts she/he is only peripherally aware
of. then, if the distinction between foveal and peripheral atten-
tion is legitimate for both sensory and mental experiences, should
we make an exception for just one thing, that is, the cognition of
the self ? Probably not. Hence it is legitimate to differentiate
between foveal or transitive self-consciousness and peripheral or
intransitive one.
as anticipated, Kriegel’s final aim is to show that all conscious-
ness depends on intransitive state self-consciousness. In this
regard, he puts forward the following arguments. the first is
essentially negative. It is true, he argues, that whenever we look at
the sky we are not necessarily self-conscious of our awareness. Yet
this affirmation is valid only if we restrict our notion of self-con-
sciousness to the transitive type. In fact, if we conceive self-con-
sciousness in intransitive terms, self-consciousness is always at
work, acting as a modifier of all types of consciousness, that is, of
all cognitions. the second argument Kriegel advances hinges on
the fact that a mental state in order to be conscious must be first-
person knowable. Still, first-person experiences are always those
we have self-consciously. Hence conscious states, that is the ones
produced by cognitions, are intransitively self-conscious. Finally,
we must distinguish between particular mental states and type men-
tal states. Particular mental states cannot be thought of without
taking their subject into the picture. In other words, the awareness
of our mental states always involves an awareness of ourselves as
the subjects of those mental states. Still, it is certainly possible to

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make an abstraction by thinking in terms of type mental states. For

example, we can imagine what is the mental state another person
has when she/he is watching the sunrise. nevertheless, Kriegel
argues, this is precisely an abstraction, and normally cognitions do
not work in this way: we can make an effort and imagine what is
the mental state one has when she/he is watching the sunrise, but
we cannot ever know ‘what it is like to be’ watching the sunrise for
the person in question. this is in fact a particular experience that
entails intransitive consciousness. thus, Kriegel’s conclusion is
that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness, more specifi-
cally a certain kind of it, the intransitive state type.

3. Pratyabhijnā’s theses reconsidered

Kriegel’s model cannot be applied in its entirety to the Pratya-
bhijñā’s case, but it is very helpful to clarify what the Śaiva thinkers
have in mind. Let us consider the distinction between state and
creature self-consciousness. the decisive move of the Pratyabhijñā
philosophers is to conceive the question of subjectivity in terms of
mental states. they claim that any given mental state possesses an
ineliminable, phenomenal, subjective dimension. they indicate it
with the expression camatkāra, a notion that strongly reminds
Kriegel’s intransitive state consciousness. this primary seed of subjec-
tivity is then progressively absorbed into the concepts of self or
personhood, that is, creature consciousness. the picture is clearly
detectable in ĪPK 1.5.17, where Utpaladeva distinguishes the
nature of the self (intransitive state consciousness, camatkāra)
from the notion of ‘I’ (creature consciousness, ātman), with the
latter presupposing the former. In other words, it is only because
there is an underlying subjective feeling of experience that one
can come up with the notion of ‘I.’
the variety of notions such as ‘I’ etc. does not entail diversity in
the nature of the self, because a self is created precisely as he who
lends himself to being the object of the reflective awareness ‘I,’
like action which is expressed by personal endings.16

16 nāhantādiparāmarśabhedād asyānyatātmanaḥ | ahaṃmṛśyataivāsya sṛṣtes tiṅvā-

cyakarmavat ||. ĪPK 1.5.17.

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equally crucial is the distinction between intransitive and transitive

self-consciousness. Kriegel scheme helps us to better understand the
notion which the Śaiva repeatedly stress, namely that a cognition
cannot be objectified.17 the main idea is that all mental states pos-
sess both an intransitive and a transitive (e.g. intentional) mode,
which occur at the same time. the Pratyabhijñā thinkers are eager
to clarify that the intransitive aspect of a mental state can never be
the content of another, in force of its absolutely subjective nature.
But surely this does not mean that a mental state cannot transitive-
ly have another one as its content.18 therefore, the controversial
thesis whereby knowledge involves an awareness of the subject of
experience is rationally defensible, and it does not necessarily call
for an idealistic standpoint.
It is worth noting, however, that what we have just said does not
prove that a self — the notion of personhood endowed with tem-
poral extension — has a real existence. a Buddhist would in fact
point out, rightly I think, that the passage from state consciousness
to creature consciousness — that is, Kriegel’s claim that a person
is precisely somebody who possesses conscious mental states — is
unwarranted. nevertheless, this is not a compelling objection to a
western viewpoint in which the real existence of personhood has
rarely been questioned. For their part, the Pratyabhijñā thinkers
would reply that the proof for the existence of a self is provided by
the argument from memory. More specifically, by the fact that one
needs posit the notion of self in order to explain the existence of
coordinated, higher-order cognitions.

4. Final remarks
Using arguments from contemporary philosophy to interpret
works and authors that are so distant in space and time can be

17 ‘He who is the object of reflective awareness “I” on the plane of the present

cognizing subject does not have the nature of “this”’ (Vṛtti on ĪPK 1.5.17: vārtamā-
napramātṛbhāve nāhaṃpratyavamṛśyasya prameyatvenedantā).
18 If we claim that all our cognitions imply the knowledge of their subject, that

is of ourselves, the conclusion is that all that we know is actually our own mind
(solipsism). this risk is avoided by restricting the notion of self-consciousness to
the intransitive type. on how the Pratyabhijñā authors dealt with this question,
see also ratié 2007.

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 Marco Ferrante

seen with some suspicion. this is understandable. However, if we

want to do justice to the brilliance of South asian thinkers we must
turn to their arguments and simply try to see whether they are
sound. this becomes almost necessary when dealing with philo-
sophical positions that are disputable and often counterintuitive,
as is the case of some of the statements we have discussed above.
otherwise we should content ourselves with studying these works
from a historical point of view, which is for sure a commendable
enterprise, but which often does not make explicit how much
these thinkers still have to say. the main purpose of this paper is
to show that, though hard to swallow, Pratyabhijñā’s monistic ide-
alism can be rationally defended. or, at least, some of the school’s
tenets can. In particular, Kriegel’s arguments show that it is legiti-
mate to argue that cognitions involve self-consciousness (2), as the
Pratyabhijñā repeatedly claims. In the end, what these thinkers
are contending is that there is an unavoidable presence of the ‘I’
in all our cognitions and actions. In my interpretation, this pres-
ence takes the form of a rarefied version of subjectivity that corre-
sponds to what contemporary philosophers of mind call the
qualia, that is, the phenomenal, private and qualitative dimension
of consciousness. If this interpretation is on the right track,
Pratyabhijñā’s works are not just historically relevant but also
extremely compelling from a purely philosophical perspective.

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