Another passage from Fasching’ On the Identification of Being and Consciousness in Advaita Vedānta.
All possible changing qualities and modes belong to what is there in the actuality-realm, not to thereness as such. That is, it seems that all that can change and undergo modification are the manifold contents that occur within the abiding actuality-realm.
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Yet as we have seen, consciousness is no such content. And it is simply unintelligible how a particular content or constellation of contents that occurs within the actuality-dimension should be able modify this very dimension to luminosity—or rather, and even more to the point: How the absolutely mode-free thereness-as-such can change its mode at all.
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And ultimately the question is whether we really have a positive idea of non-conscious thereness. We actually always only conceive of it negatively, as consciousness-free, unexperi- enced being (“mere” existence), but we have no idea at all as to what this should mean in pos- itive terms. “The primary givenness of reality,” as Klawonn says, “is the most obvious para- digm for what it means that something is” (1991: 258): We have a totally clear idea of being as experiential presentness, e.g. of what it means that a pain exists in the sense of being experientially present. The problem begins when we ask ourselves what consciousness-free existence or thereness might mean. Implicitly, I would contend, we always imagine being in terms of experiential contents. We conceive of the mere, consciousness-free existence of something as being something like the thereness of an experiential content, but only—as we then have to add—minus the being-experienced: It merely is without its being additionally experienced. The problem is: There never was any additionality. When we subtract the being-experientially-present from an experiential content, nothing remains—for there never was being plus consciousness: Being never meant anything other than consciousness here.
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It seems to me that this is implicitly the main reason for Advaita’s identification of sat and cit: That it is hard to see what being should mean at all, apart from “being-witnessed” (cf. Hiriyanna 1993: 360, 363; Malkani 1961: 43). Therefore I think there is indeed some reason to hold that the fact of the experiential self-manifestness of being which takes place in our consciousness is quite inexplicable unless we posit a principle of manifestation at the heart of being itself as such. And this is of course precisely Advaita’s view. Our question was: Whence comes, all of a sudden, the “light” that illuminates being? And the Advaitic answer is to regard this “light” itself as primary, as being identical to the realm of actuality as such.
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The inner essence of the actuality-dimension is the light itself (being is nothing but seeing, as it were), and the whole cosmos consists of process- es that unfold within this primordial luminous realm of presence (and it is not some such processes that inexplicably suddenly “turn on the light”). Consciousness is not one of the exist- ents popping up in reality at some point, it is existence itself. The “omniscience” ascribed to brahman does not mean that the things of the world exist, and in addition to this, brahman knows all about them—rather for something to exist means for it to be manifest in the presence-realm which is the existence-dimension itself.11 “On the supreme consciousness the world is drawn like a picture on a canvas” (Vidyāraṇya 1967: VI.289), it appears in brahman “like a dream” (Vidyāraṇya 1967: VI.211; cf. also XIII.86, XIII.90).12 And it is this existence/presence-dimension which is our innermost “self”, our ātman: The ultimate subject of experiencing, that which ultimately “sees” in us; it is the seeing.
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So the Advaitic answer to the “hard problem of consciousness” (how consciousness arose out of non-conscious processes, cf. Chalmers 1996) would be: Consciousness did not emerge from the non-conscious at all, it was there all along. As conscious subjects we partake, as it were, in the ever-present luminosity which is identical to being itself. It is not consciousness as such that comes into being with us, rather our mind emerges within the self-luminosity of being. Being is consciousness, and “our” consciousness is not distinct from it, but simply this universal presence-dimension itself, (seemingly) modified by the mental processes that make
This gets it said pretty well, but Fasching has the delicate task of getting himself understood while avoiding the projection of a witness “behind the field of vision.” The empirical subject is functionally/causally related — in just the ways the inspired indirect dualism — to what is manifested or not. I close my eyes and the world goes dark.
It “is” the seeing, he says, knowing perhaps that this is not quite right. The “witness” is also (only) “out there” in the “field of presence.”
How does “mind emerge in the self-luminosity of being” ? I suggest, following Peirce and Heidegger, that signs are empirical events in the lifeworld, in “the field of presence,” that “signify.” Instead of internal immaterial meaning, we have an always-already “significant” world which also includes stipulated or historically generate signs proper. The interior monologue is “out there” in the "field of presence. " Or rather it is “present” in its streaming way with the rest of the world. Derrida’s early essay on Husserl is relevant here. Any clinging to an absolute interior loses what Fasching is trying to point at. The self and non-self are both present “for” the “cancelled witness.” There is no witness, but there is that strange word “I” which is intensely related to what is perspectivally perceptually present.
He also makes the strong point that motivates correlationism. Naive appropriations of the scientific image or the Kantian X as an “external reality” are “senseless.” Berkeley’s quasi-immaterialism just saved matter as the mind of God. So Berkeley was merely a theo-materialist. But his critique of materialism was solid, and secular thinkers like Mill gave us a genuine phenomenalism, by bringing in possible/conditional perceptions. This was also in Kant, but mixed with a quasi-skeptical mysterio-materialism. Western thinkers have not generally been eager to identity experience and reality. It remains fascinating to me that we largely have some of scientitistic empiricists to thank for this, who followed the “empirical directive” impiously against the tendency to replace God’s Mind with Atoms and Void as a “truthmaker” against the terrors of an ontological perspectivism in which no one gets to be absolutely and eternally correct.
With phenomenalism comes the issue of the presentient past. What do we make of the accretion of the earth ? And where are the snows of yesteryear ? How exactly do we make sense of the past ? But there’s already a thread for that.