My letters

(This is a collection of my letters to media over the years)

The letter below to "Philosophy Now" was published in Issue 108 (June/July 2015) of the magazine.

Dear Editor: A number of the articles in Issue 106, and also Grant Bartley’s Editorial, tend to reinforce the premise that human beings are “reasoning animals.” It is also indisputable that our philosophical reasoning is based on logic. Moreover, as Bartley points out, logic “is concerned with what is thinkable through language.” But we do not all speak the same language. Language being a system of symbols, each language could possess different sets of symbols, or the meaning attributed to a symbol may differ from one language to another. Do these limitations of language and mathematics also restrict the efficacy of logic, thus constraining our understanding of the world? This thought echoes Kant’s caution that our inability to accommodate the illogical could limit our comprehending the world beyond our minds. This could also be the reason why mystics deliberately include apparent contradictions while talking about the nature of reality, to signal to us the possibility that reality transcends ‘true or false’ dichotomies, and there could be a third position which could take up both opposites and something else too. This third position is to be found in the interstices of the ‘true and false’ antinomy. A classic example is the Zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping.

Given this, there are two ways of looking at what is proposed by these mystics and thinkers: if and when the normal true or false rules do not apply, ultimate reality should be viewed as something non-rational, and we just accept it for what it is. On the other hand, if we believe that there is nothing in the universe that is not explicable using reason, then mystics can be accused of trying to make mugs of us by using their ‘beyond reason’ postulate as an epistemological escape clause.

Venkat Ramanan, Brisbane