The Philosophical Underpinnings of Knowledge Generation

Bhaskar Kamble (The Imperishable Seed) shows how most of the mathematics we take for granted has its strongest roots in India. Apart from the value of zero in mathematical operations, Brahmagupta, Bhāskara 1, Bhāskara 2, Mahāvīra, and the Kerala mathematicians laid the foundations in the fields of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, combinatorics, linguistics, and calculus starting in the 5th century of the Common Era.

Many of the ‘inventions’ and ‘discoveries’ of European mathematics finally, as the author shows, amount to who first and best plagiarized Indian knowledge systems. The Indian mathematical developments had many applications in the construction of buildings and temples, imbuing astronomy with great precision, and conducting navigation to distant lands by sea route.

Kamble discusses the basic metaphysical underpinnings of Hindu mathematics. Indian philosophy talks of parā vidyā and aparā vidyā, the knowledge of the higher Self and the knowledge of the external material world, respectively. It is one of the fundamental tenets of Indian knowledge systems that these two are not antagonistic to each other and are manifestations of a single unity in the form of Brahman. In such a stance, there is an intense spiritualization of every single aspect of aparā vidyā (all the ‘secular activities’) dealing with the material world. The antagonism between the ‘word of God’ and the ‘word of science,’ present in the Abrahamic traditions, never existed in Indian knowledge systems.

Most of the secular activities are finally in search of the unity that binds the parāand the aparā. In contrast, science, as popularized in Western culture, seeks unity only in the aparā, or material realm. There is a large body of skeptics, Kamble writes, who claim that Indians did not have a proper methodology while doing mathematics. Such claims are either based on ignorance, prejudice, or both.

Indian metaphysics has deep principles of the acquisition of knowledge (epistemology), which Western philosophy is still to acquire or formulate apart from its definition of knowledge as ‘justified true belief.’

It was only after contact with Hindu mathematics that Western mathematicians progressed further and started dealing with irrational numbers, negative numbers, zeros, infinities, and many other concepts. The Roman numbers hardly had the capacity to carry numerical operations, and for a long time, Europe was using the abacus to count, and that too only for positive integers. Though the formulas and original equations were terse and short, there was a tradition of detailed commentaries that explained the equations and formulas. These proofs in commentaries were an important component of Indian mathematics, but the critics conveniently ignored them.

The Self or Brahman as the Basis of Epistemology and Ontology

The Indian corpus of extensive literature cannot stand on flimsy epistemological grounds. Sadly, this aspect is rarely taught to us in our education systems, where modern science takes precedence. Any hypothesis in Indian traditions needs verifiability for acceptance (unlike the falsifiability criterion of science).

As Śrī Chittaranjan demonstrates in his book, On the Existence of the Self, the presence of human beings introduces something more than the behavior of material objects operating solely under physical laws. He shows how one needs to presuppose the presence of some entity, namely the Self, or soul, as a resident within the body of the human being.

The invariable correlation between goal-oriented actions and the presence of living beings (the origin of the goal-oriented actions) points to the existence of an element, namely the ātman, within living beings. Thus, purely physical causes and physical processes cannot explain goal-oriented actions. It follows, then, that the physical world does not form a causal closure. Naik meticulously lays the foundational basis of Indian logic based on Nyāya, with which he refutes Western philosophers arguing against the concept of soul and substance. He discusses in detail how Western philosophers such as Hume and Kant influentially discarded the notion of the soul, which led to many inconsistencies in Western philosophy.

The Question Of Method

The opposition to the Vedic tradition comes largely from those who espouse science. When it comes to the acquisition of knowledge, “reason” alone, a broad category, is an adequate tool. Science, for example, uses a specific reasoning method that is different from the reasoning methods used in philosophy. The central idea of science—physical causes alone can explain all things in nature—came from the Epicureans of Greece. Later, Francis Bacon (‘The Great Instauration’ and ‘Novum Organum’), Newton, and other scientists laid the foundation for the birth of science as we know it today.

In science, we begin with a proposition (a statement) that seeks to fit the facts of observed phenomena into a hypothesis. In doing so, the scientist uses reason to see that these facts fit logically into the meaning of the propositional statement. But science says further that this (propositional) statement must be physically verifiable.This is the key factor here. This principle of physical verifiability precludes the idea of there being any cause other than physical matter for the phenomena of the world. In contrast, there is no such constraint on philosophy by such ideas, and its propositions have a different criterion of verifiability than conformance to physical verifiability. When discussing Vedānta, we deal with a ‘parā vidyā’ in sharp contrast to every other science or discipline in the world grouped under the name of ‘aparā vidyā’. Science endeavors to shed light on, among other things, how this universe originated and how life in the universe originated. Vedānta seeks to reveal the knowledge of a Truth by which billions and billions of cycles of creation and destruction are at once dissolved by an individual’s Self.

When we seek to know the ‘truths’ revealed by science, we use elaborately constructed tools, but when it comes to the Supreme Knowledge of Vedānta, why do we become so blasé that we feel free to disregard the methods that it advocates? Śrī Chittaranjan Naik questions whether such a predisposition on our part can be called ‘rational’?

Authored by Dr. Pingali Gopal. Published by Brhat.