Guna (philosophy)

“ As long as there is difference in the Gunas (i. e, Guna transformations, Ahankâra &c.) , so long there is plurality in Âtmâ. As long as there is plurality so long is it dependent on others. (The difference in Jivâtmas or individuals, is not due to any difference in Âtmâ, but to differences in the Guna transformations which give rise to the body. Dependence is also an accompaniment of those transformations) ,
So long as Jiva is dependent on others it has fear from Íshvara. Those that worship the Guna transformations are given up to sorrow and they become deluded. ”

“ Life cannot maintain itself unless it grows and expands. The soul that liveth to itself, that liveth solely by habit and automatism, is already dead. Morality is the unity of the personality expanding by action and by sympathy. It is at this point that Guyau’s thought approaches closely to the philosophie des idées-forces of his step-father, by his doctrine of thought and action. ”

“ Life can only exist by extending. It can never be purely egoistic and endure; a certain giving of itself, in generosity and in love, is necessary for its continuance. Such is the view which the French philosopher-poet expresses in opposition to Nietzsche, starting, however, from the concept of Life did Nietzsche. Guyau worked out a doctrine of ethics and of religion based upon this concept which will demand our special attention in its proper place, when we consider the moral and religious problem. ”

“ In the thought of Guyau there is a further insistence upon freedom in spite of the fact that his spiritualism is super-added to much which reveals the naturalist and positive outlook. He upholds freedom and, indeed, contingency, urging, as against Ravaisson’s teleology, that there is no definite tendency towards truth, beauty and goodness. At all times, too, Guyau is conscious of union with nature and with his fellows in a way which operates against a facile assertion of freedom. ”

“ Guyau himself has a certain affinity with Nietzsche, arising from his insistence upon Life and its power; but the author of the delightful little collection Vers d’un Philosophe (1881) is free from the egoism expressed in Der Wille zur Macht. Guyau posits as his idée-directrice the conception of Life, both individual and social, and in this concept he professes to find a basis more fundamental than that of force, movement or existence. Life involves expansion and intension, fecundity and creation. It means also consciousness, intelligence and feeling, generosity and sociability. ”

“ He tends to look upon the ethical problem in the spirit which Guyau, Bergson and Blondel show in their general philosophic outlook. In life, action and immediacy alone can we find a solution. Nothing practical can be deduced from the abstract principle of obligation or duty in general. The moral consciousness of man is, in Rauh’s opinion, akin to the intuitional perceptions of Bergson’s philosophy. Morality, moreover, is creating itself perpetually by the reflection of sensitive minds on action and on life itself. ”

“ At every point of its course it is supposed to possess the power of removing sins and conferring heavenly bliss. The Purannas (holy books) declare that the sight, the name, or the touch of Gunga takes away all sin, no matter how aggravated. Even to think of this holy river, when far away from it, is sufficient to remove the taint of sin; while to bathe in it conveys blessings which no tongue can tell.
With a stream of such wonderful powers rolling its current at their very doors, it will be believed that Gunga's banks are scenes of daily rites and of idolatrous worship. ”

“ He asks us to observe its spirituality, for the more gross and materialistic pleasures fall short of the criterion by the very fact that they cannot be shared. Guyau’s thought is here at its best. The higher pleasures, which are not those of bodily enjoyment and satisfaction, but those of the spirit, which thinks, feels, wills and loves, are precisely those which come nearest to fulfilling the ideal of sociability, for they tend less to divide men than to unite them and to urge them to a closer co-operation for their spiritual advancement. ”

“ Sri Krishna replied: —
"Bondage and liberation are terms applied to Me not with reference to my real self, but with reference to My Gunas (the Guna limitations, Satva, Rajas and Tamas that are subordinate to me. Śridhara) . The Gunas have their origin in Mâyâ. Therefore I have neither liberation nor bondage.
"Sorrow and delusion, joy and grief, even the attainment of body — these are all due to Mâyâ. The dream is only an illusory form of the mind, even so the course of births is not real. Vidya and Avidyâ both proceed from My Mâyâ, O Uddhava. ”

“ Nature does everything. The gunas bring about the universe. The man who says: "I act," is mistaken and confused; the gunas act, not he. He is only the spectator and looks on. Most of the Gita teaching is built upon this conception of the Samkhya, and unless that is clear in our minds we can never discriminate the meaning under the phrases of a particular philosophy.
Let us now turn to the Vedantic idea. According to the Vedantic view the Self is one, omnipresent, all-permeating, the one reality. Nothing exists except the Self—that is the starting-point in Vedanta. ”

“ While Fouillée and, more especially, Guyau were thus outlining an ethic marked by a strong humanitarianism, a more definitely religious ethic was being proclaimed by that current of philosophy of belief and of action which has profoundly associated itself in its later developments with “Modernism” in the Roman Church. The tendency to stress action and the practical reason is noticeable in the work of Brochard, Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, also in Rauh. ”

“ He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality. Though he may not give us all we would wish, in our haste to be all-wise, let us yet be grateful to him for this, that he has the purpose and also the power to shake us out of complacency, to compel us to recast our philosophical account. In this he is supremely serviceable to his generation, and is deserving of the gratitude of all who care for Philosophy. For, while Philosophy cannot die, it may be allowed to fall into a comatose condition ”

“ The search for truth is slow and needs faith and patience, but the careful seekers of it are making the future of mankind. But truth will be discovered only in relation to action and life and in proportion to the labour put into its realisation. The search for truth must never be divorced from the active life, Guyau insists, and, indeed, he approaches the view that the action will produce the knowledge, “He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine.” ”

“ Virtue is really its own reward. No one should be or do good in order to gain an entry into paradise or to escape the torments of hell. That is to build morality on an immoral principle and on a belief, not in goodness as valuable in and for itself, but on a basis of material self-interest alone, “the best policy.” It is true, Guyau admits, that virtue involves happiness, but it is not in this sense. A conflict between “pleasure” and virtue is usually one of higher versus lower ideals. ”

“ We need not fear, says Guyau, that such a gospel will promote unduly the operation of mere animality or instinctive action, for in the growth of the scientific spirit he sees the development of the great enemy of all instinct. It is the dissolving force par excellence, the revolutionary spirit which incessantly wages warfare within society against authority, and in the individual it operates through reason against the instinctive impulses. Every instinct tends to lapse in so far as it is reflected upon by consciousness. ”

“ Our own existence is sufficient; the voice of conscience is within our human nature. He objects, as did Nietzsche, to the formality and rigour of Kant’s “categorical imperative.” His method is free from the legalism of Kant, and in him and Guyau is seen an attempt to relate morality itself to life, expanding and showing itself creative of ideals and tending to their fulfilment.
From the primacy of self-consciousness which can be expressed in the notion, Je pense, donc j’ai une valeur morale, a transition is made to a conception of values. ”

“ Guyau touches upon an important point here, which will be further emphasised—namely, the necessity for making our idea of God, if we have one at all, harmonious with our own ethical conceptions. The old ideas of the divinity are profoundly immoral and are based on physical force. This is natural because those views which have survived in modern times are those of primitive and savage people to whom the most holy was the most powerful and physically majestic. ”

“ He points out that Matter, although to a degree the tool of Spirit, is nevertheless the enemy who threatens us with a lapse into mere automatism which is only the parody of true life. The eternal conflict of Matter and Spirit in Evolution demands that we place ourselves on the side of spiritual rather than merely material values. We must not be like "the man with the muck rake." Our conceptions of goodness must be not merely static but dynamic, for the moral life is essentially an evolution—"a growth in grace." ”

“ The ultimate goal of the finite ego, and not only of it, but also of the non-ego—the final goal, therefore, of the world—is its annihilation as a world." [S]
Mr. Gough, in the book already referred to, remarks "that Buddhism is the philosophy of the Upanishads with Brahma left out; that in Buddhism Brahma, or the inner light, is replaced by zero, or a vacuum; that there is no light of lights beyond the darkness of the world-fiction; that the highest end and final hope of man is a return into this vacuum, or aboriginal nothingness of things. This is Nirvana, the extinction of the soul ”

“ By advocating the primacy of self-consciousness Fouillée claims to establish an ethic which towers above those founded upon pleasure, happiness and feeling. The morality of the idées-forces is not purely sentimental, not purely intellectual, not purely voluntarist; it claims to rest on the totality of the functions of consciousness, as revealed in the feelings, in intellect and will, acting in solidarity and in harmony. ”

“ Strange, is it not, he remarks, that the mind of the philosopher himself, a sanctuary or shrine for truth, should appear as a rebellious citadel refusing to surrender to the truth of this universal necessity. We believe ourselves to be free agents or, at least beings who are capable of some free action. However slight such action, it would invalidate the hypothesis of universal necessity.
If all things are necessitated, then moral judgments, the notions of right and of duty, have no foundation in the nature of things. Virtue and crime lose their character ”

“ Whatever the difficulties, the philosopher who aspires to look upon human life as a whole must give some interpretation of this vital aspect of human consciousness. It is in this connection that a solution of the problem of freedom is so valuable, for under a purely determinist and positivist reading of life, the moral sentiments become mere data for an anthropological survey, the hope and tragedy of human life are replaced, comfortably perhaps for some, by an interpretation in which the true significance of ethics is lost. ”

“ Their certainty is an act of belief, which grows out of action and life. It is a curious mixture of insistence upon life and action, such as we find in Guyau and in Bergson, coupled with a religious Platonism. Brochard’s work is of this type. He wrote as early as 1874 on La Responsabilité morale, and in 1876 on L’Universalité des Notions morales. Three years later appeared his work L’Erreur. Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, who best represent this tendency, do not like Guyau’s ethics, which lacks the religious idealism which they consider should be bound up with morality. ”

“ He has learned unconsciously the strength of lying still. A thousand generations of fat and healthy porcupines have taught him the folly of trouble and rush and worry in a world that somebody else has planned, and for which somebody else is plainly responsible. So he makes no effort and lives in profound peace. But this also leaves you with a question which may take you overseas to explore Hindu philosophy. Indeed, if you have one question when you meet Unk Wunk for the first time, you will have twenty after you have studied him for a season or two. ”

“ Theology has wavered between the two views—that of absolute transcendence and omnipotence and that of immanence based on freedom and limitation. In the first, every single thing depends upon the operation of God, whose Providence rules all. This is pure determinism of a theological character. In the other view man’s free personality is recognised; part of the creation is looked upon as partaking of freedom and contingency, therefore the divinity is conceived as limited and finite. ”

“ In the first view God is responsible for all things, evil included, and man is therefore much superior to him from a moral standpoint. The idea of God must be ethically acceptable, and it is unfortunate that this idea, so central to religion, is the least susceptible to modification in harmony with man’s ethical development. We already have noticed Guyau’s stress upon this point in our discussion of ethics. Our conception of God must, Renouvier claims, be the affirmation of our highest category, Personality, and must express the best ethical ideals of mankind. ”

“ We have come to see that even although a belief may be irrational and even erroneous, it may still survive, and it may console multitudes whose minds would be lost on the stormy sea of life without such an anchor. While dogmatic or positive religions do exist they will do so, Guyau reminds us, for quite definite and adequate reasons, chiefly because there are people who believe them, to whom they mean something and often a great deal. ”