Emotions as Materiality in Indian Philosophy

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Emotions as Materiality in Indian Philosophy Anonymous Fri Jan 17 05:07:25 2020 No.14553367 [Reply] [Original]

Is there a discernible parallel with modern materialism in the Sāṃkhya conception of Emotion/Cognition?
>Unlike the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Vedānta accounts of the emotions, the Sāṃkhya-Yoga account does not draw a fundamental distinction between feelings and cognitions. The reason for this is that the Sāṃkhya account rests on the division between puruṣa and prakṛti. The former is pure consciousness and does not contain any cognitions or feelings whereas prakṛti is primordial matter and has the three qualities (guṇas) sattva, rajas and tamas, which are aligned with different feelings: sattva with pleasure (sukha), rajas with pain (duḥkha) and tamas with confusion or illusion (moha). The terms sattva, rajas and tamas are difficult to translate but are sometimes rendered as “reflection”, “activity” and “inertia”. The important point about this dualist structure for the emotions is that, according to the Sāṃkhya account, both cognition and feeling belong to the realm of prakṛti which means that they are material. This stands in contrast to many dualist accounts in the history of Western philosophy, for example that of Descartes, according to which cognitions are immaterial whereas emotions or passions are material, thus making it easier to oppose the two. Larson and Bhattacharya (1987) summarize the difference between Western and Sāṃkhya dualism in the following way:

>[A]ccording to Sāṃkhya philosophy, the experiences of intellect, egoity, and mind, and the “raw feels” such as frustration or satisfaction—or, in other words, what conventional dualists would consider to be “inherently private”—are simply subtle reflections of primordial materiality, a primordial materiality undergoing continuous transformation by means of its constituent unfolding as spontaneous activity, reflective discerning, and determinate formulation. Thus, the modern reductive materialists' claim that “sensations are identical with certain brain processes” would have a peculiar counterpart in the Sāṃkhya claim that “awarenesses” [Sanskrit terms omitted] are identical with certain guṇa modalities. (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, p. 76)

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