From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sun Sep 25 2005 - 22:38:52 BST
DMB,
DMB quotes Richard Hayes:
"According to Dignaga, every cognition falls into exactly one of two
possible categories. The deciding characteristic that separates these two
categories is the presence or absence of some kind of judgment (kalpana), by
which Dignaga means the mental activity of associating a sensation with past
or future sensations or with language. The word kalpana is a verbal noun
that literally means the act of producing or creating or regulating. In
everyday language, the word could be used to refer to the act of building
something mechanical or composing a piece of music or a poem. To capture the
sense of the word, let me refer to it not merely as judgment but as creative
judgment.
A cognition in which there is a complete absence of creative judgment is
called a pure sensation (pratyaksa). An example of pure sensation for
Dignaga is the act of seeing a patch of colour without associating it in any
way with previously seen colours, or with simultaneous sensations of sound,
odour, taste, texture or temperature; this pure sensation is also free of
any associations with words. In a pure sensation, a sensible property is
being experienced just as it is in itself and for itself. In contrast to
this pure sensation, Dignaga recognizes another kind of cognition in which
creative judgment is present; in this kind of cognition, sensed objects are
no longer experienced simply as they are; rather, they serve as signs that
indicate other experiences. They may indicate experiences from the past by
triggering memory, or they may indicate possible future experiences by
triggering anticipation." (from the paper "Did Buddhism Anticipate
Pragmatism".)
dmb explains:
At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I'd like to point out that these
two categories of experience roughly correspond to Pirsig's static/Dynamic
split, with "pure sensation" being the primary empirical reality or Dynamic
Quality and "creative judgment" being the static patterns left in the wake.
Scott:
If you sit on a hot stove and immediately jump off, hasn't a biological
judgment been carried out? Pure sensation doesn't get you off the stove,
rather, some sort of biological judgment (call it instinct?) that excessive
heat is going to damage your biological integrity is what got you off. In
other words, the hot stove example is a case of the sensation of excessive
heat acting as a sign to the biological system. Furthermore, pain exists
only because it provides this signalling function. The same goes for all
other so-called "pure sensations". It is only human fancy that can come up
with the concept of a pure sensation. In actual experience they are all
signs.
- Scott
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