Theos-Talk Archives (May 2000 Message tt00105)

> In a message dated 4/3/00 12:50:53 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> schuller@prodigy.net writes:

> As I see it now, Krishnamurti in his many expositions applied a very pure,
> though somehow 'naive,' phenomenological method in describing the human
> condition, the constitution of the emperical ego and the transformative
> effect of pre-supposition-less awareness. Though he was not trained in
> methodological phenomenology and probably never read anything in that area,
> there are some researchers agreeing that what he did was executing the
> phenomenological reduction and the transcedental reduction just by the power
> of his sincerity, authenticity and observational acumen.

Continued:

Aryel wrote [with my remarks]:

> K was intensely and relentlessly interested in helping to bring
> about a transformation in human consciousness, and such a mutation is
> impossible, so long as methods are a part of one's daily life (in
> psychological and "spiritual" areas).  Anyone who has read K, even
> superficially, knows that methods have absolutely no place in anything he
> ever said.  There are excellent "reasons" for this -- if one wants to ANALYZE
> it, and therefore distort it somewhat.  A method, any method, implies the use
> of algorithms, of mechanical approaches to whatever it is one is attempting
> to discover or understand.  Methods are eminently useful for situations that
> call for making pragmatic decisions:  "Should I make a right turn, or go
> on?"; "should I push the 'detonate' button, or not?"; "should I consume
> hydrogenated oil, or not?" (note the presence of CHOICE, which cannot be in
> CHOICELESS AWARENESS).  A method ALWAYS implies the acceptance of a LANGUAGE
> GAME, of FORMS OF LIFE (to use expressions employed by Wittgenstein), that
> is, before one even thinks of using a method, one already has a point of
> view, a presupposition about the investigation to be made.  (This,
> incidentally, is a major flaw in P, and a major reason why it's not possible
> to say exactly what P is, since every new author gives us a "new & improved"
> form of it.  P, in all versions I'm acquainted with, tells us there MUST be A
> METHOD to make investigations into THAT WHICH IS.  It also tells us there
> MUST be total PRESUPPOSITIONLESSNESS.  But these two are mutually exclusive.
> A method ALWAYS implies presuppositions.)

[There is indeed an ongoing discussion about, and many different streams within
P. Not everybody applies Husserl's different insights, some develop their own,
and not everybody shares his ideal of freedom of presuppositions. In both
regards hermeneutic phenomenology as developed by Heidegger can be seen, as I
understand it, as deviating from Husserl by acknowledging the impossibility of
presuppositionlessness in P, and by substituting the art of questioning for the
phenomenological reduction. As far as your reasoning that method and
presuppositionlessness are mutually exclusive and therefore P, as a philosophy
trying to incorporate both, would be flawed, I can only defend P by
stating that its method is less an application of a mechanistic rule and more
the living of certain insights or artful application of these insights, and that
its relation to presuppositionlessness is less a belief in its actualized
reality in P, and more an ideal, which might not even be realized.

H. Spiegelberg in his "History of the Phenomenological Movement" said the
following: "Sometimes 'Voraussetzunglosigkeit' [presuppositionlessness] has been
misinterpreted in the sense of a pretense of total rejection of any beliefs
whatsoever, and of a program to start the philosophic enterprise from absolute
zero, even without language and logic. While a full clarification of this issue
would presuppose and deserve considerable discussion for its own sake, it will
suffice here to point out that in Husserl's case"freedom from presuppositions"
stands for the attempt to eliminate merely presuppositions that have not been
thoroughly examined, or, at least in principle, been presented for such
examination. It is thus not freedom from all presuppositions, but merely freedom
from unclarified, unverified, and unverifiable presuppositions that is
involved."

In this way I don't see insights and ideals as problematic
flaws in P. It's a vibrant and fruitful philosophical movement, which I foresee
to become a major influence, together with Buddhism and theosophy, on a budding
Krishnamurtian intellectuality, if such a thing will survive the always present
danger of dogmatic Krishnamurtism.]

> K is the only person in history
> that I am aware of, who explored without presuppositions.

[This statement probably can never be proven and as such is in my view more an
article of faith than a statement of fact. I myself can not go further than
saying that K had "sincerity, authenticity and observational acumen." It might
actually be reasoned that K had its own set of mixed presuppositions, one
flowing forth from his
ultimate motivation for speaking in public, i.e. his "only concern ... to set
men absolutely, unconditionally free," and the other from his statement "Truth
is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever" as he
stated both in 1929. Because K stated
that nobody had implemented his intended total transformation, he never got the
proof that he could "set men absolutely, unconditionally free" by his proposed
non-method. Of course there is a little interesting problem here, because I
believe he did acknowledge Vimala Thakar as having executed the transformation.
The problem is that implicitly, in the way she described the process she went
through, she proofed also that her process was much more classically
theosophical than Krishnamurtian, and in that way both proofing K right in the
feasability of his proposed transformation, and actually refuting him in that no
procedure, path or guru would be involved. With Vimala Thakar's transformation K
might have gotten more than he bargained for.

In "Krishnamurti: An Esoteric View of his Teachings" (www.alpheus.org/onk.htm) I
wrote:

"Regarding the feasibility of Krishnamurti's suggestion of a profound
fundamental transformation of the human consciousness, it has to be pointed out
that Krishnamurti did not arrive at that level of consciousness by way of his
own proposed instantaneous 'non-method.'(16)  He arrived there solely by
treading first the path of initiation under a Master (17)--going almost to its
final conclusion--then stepped aside, and denounced the whole method.(18)
Furthermore, Vimala Thakar, the only one who executed his kind of transformation
in a credible way (19)--and as such could prove its feasability--did not arrive
there by his proposed 'non-method' either.  Instead, she transformed because
Krishnamurti acted as Guru to her.  She first gradually acquired an experimental
understanding of his erroneous brand of Advaita Vedantism and then Krishnamurti,
while laying hands on her for healing an auditory ailment, initiated her into
his rebellious state of consciousness"

> So, if anything,
> P-ists need to be looked at from K's perspective, not the other way around.

[I'd say P and K have to be a) compared to find similarities and differences (as
Gunturu does) , b) P looked from K's perspective (which you might do), c) K
looked from P's perspective (which I am working on), and d) specific areas of
life and different
philosophical subjects have to be investigated with the help of both P and K.
The studies so far done in that direction are:

M.M. Agrawal "Consciousness and the Intergrated Being: Sartre and Krishnamurti"
(Shimla, India: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1991. Monograph) [Sartre's
"The transcendence of the Ego" is an amazing study and the bridge between
Krishnamurti's thoughts and phenomenology.]

L.K. Holden "The Structure of Krishnamurti's Phenomenological Observations and
its Psychological Implications" (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1971. Dissertation)

V. Gunturu "Jiddu Krishnamurti's Gedanken auser der Phaenomenologischen
Perspective Edmund Husserl's" (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. Ph.D. thesis).
Hopefully this last study will find an english translator.]

to be continued

====================
Alpheus' homepage:
www.alpheus.org
Background on Cyril Scott:
www.alpheus.org/tame.htm
====================


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