(a) Do you think Cārvāka's philosophy is positivistic in nature ? Give reasons and justifications for your answer. 10 marks (b)…

(a) Cārvāka and positivism. Cārvāka, or Lokāyata, is positivistic only in a limited, methodological sense. Its fragments, including those attributed to the Bṛhaspati Sūtra, accept pratyakṣa as the sole pramāṇa and reject anumāna and śabda as independent sources of knowledge; they also deny ātmā, heaven, karma and dharma as metaphysical realities. This resembles Comtean positivism in restricting valid knowledge to what is observable or empirically accessible and rejecting transcendent metaphysics. However, the resemblance is not exact. Comtean positivism is a doctrine of the development of science and society, whereas Cārvāka is a materialist naturalism with an ethical aim of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Cārvāka does not merely adopt a method; it asserts a metaphysical naturalism, holding that only matter and its combinations exist. Thus it is anti-metaphysical in its rejection of the unseen, but not identical to modern positivism; it is better described as empiricist, materialist and hedonistic rather than strictly positivistic. Its main argument is that vyāpti (invariable concomitance) can never be established by perception of all cases, so inference is not independently valid. Our knowledge of it comes largely from opponents' summaries, such as the Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha, and later Cārvākas such as Purandara accepted inference about perceptible matters.

(b) Naiyāyika proofs of the self. Naiyāyikas prove the self through the six marks (liṅga) of Nyāya Sūtra 1.1.10: icchā, dveṣa, prayatna, sukha, duḥkha and jñāna. First, desire (icchā): one desires an object remembered as pleasant, which needs one self that experienced and now remembers. Second, aversion (dveṣa): likewise presupposes a subject recalling past pain. Third, effort (prayatna): purposive striving requires a conscious agent. Fourth, pleasure (sukha) and fifth, pain (duḥkha): these are qualities that need a substratum other than body or senses. Sixth, cognition (jñāna): knowledge is a quality needing a substance, and recognition across senses and times needs a permanent knower. The self is the permanent substratum of these changing mental events. Thus the self is inferred from desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain and cognition, not from revelation. These arguments are meant to establish the self as a real, conscious substance.

(c) Vaiśeṣika absence. According to the Vaiśeṣikas, the two sentences do not denote the same type of abhāva. Later Vaiśeṣika (Udayana, Śivāditya) treats absence as a seventh padārtha and distinguishes its forms. ‘Air does not have heat’ expresses atyantābhāva, a relational absence (saṃsargābhāva) of a quality in a substrate: hot touch, a quality, is never present in air, whose touch is neither hot nor cold. The counter-positive (pratiyogī) is heat and the absent relation is inherence (samavāya). Saṃsargābhāva also includes prior absence (prāgabhāva) and posterior absence (dhvaṃsābhāva). ‘Air is not fire’ expresses a mutual absence, anyonyābhāva, which is contrasted with saṃsargābhāva as absence of identity rather than of relation: air and fire are different substances. The first is a negative predication about a quality; the second is a distinction between two entities. This distinction matters because Vaiśeṣika realism makes abhāva ontologically real, not merely a mental negation. However, a critic may argue that both are simply negative judgments. Still, for Vaiśeṣika, the difference between absence of a dharma and mutual absence of substances is essential.

(d) Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara. Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara differ on how word-meaning yields sentential meaning. Kumārila's abhihitānvayavāda holds that words first denote their separate meanings (for Kumārila, universals), and these meanings then convey the connected sentence meaning through expectancy (ākāṅkṣā), compatibility (yogyatā) and proximity (sannidhi). The verb denotes action, and in injunctions its meaning is bhāvanā, a causative or injunctive force that prompts the agent to perform the action. Because the connection is not directly denoted by any word, Bhāṭṭas explain sentence meaning as conveyed by the word-meanings through secondary signification (lakṣaṇā). Prābhākara’s anvitābhidhānavāda holds that words denote already syntactically connected entities, so sentence meaning is immediate, not a post-verbal construction. Words are learned from elders' usage (vṛddha-vyavahāra) in whole sentences, always as connected with something to be done; the central sentence meaning of injunctions is kārya or niyoga (the duty enjoined). Bhāṭṭa’s view preserves the simplicity of word-meaning but adds a mental operation; Prābhākara’s view is more linguistically economical because comprehension is direct, though it makes word-meaning more complex by embedding syntactic relations. Thus the issue is whether syntactic connection is added after word meanings are grasped, or is already part of what words denote.

(e) Viśiṣṭādvaita. Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita compares God and the world to an individual self and its body. Brahman is the antaryāmin, the inner controller; jīvas and matter are his body. Rāmānuja defines a body as any substance that a conscious self can wholly support, control and use for its own purposes, and which exists only for that self (Śrībhāṣya 2.1.9). This śarīra-śarīri-bhāva is inseparable (apr̥thak-siddhi), not identity: cit and acit are attributes (viśeṣaṇa) of Brahman. God is distinct from the world, yet the world cannot exist apart from him. Brahman's glory is twofold: nitya-vibhūti, the eternal transcendent realm (Vaikuṇṭha) of pure sattva, and līlā-vibhūti, the material world of cosmic play; distinct from both is God's own divine auspicious form (divya-maṅgala-vigraha). Brahman is untouched by the defects of his 'body', because suffering follows karma, which does not bind him. The analogy resembles Spinoza's modes in making the world dependent on an absolute, but differs because Rāmānuja’s God is personal and conscious, not an impersonal substance. Critics may say that if the world is God’s body, the distinction becomes too thin and the view approaches pantheism. Rāmānuja would reply that it is panentheism: God is in the world, but the world is not all of God. Thus it preserves immanence and transcendence, but needs defence against pantheism.