A strictly a materialistic or ‘scientific’ view of the process of perception has caused deep troubles to the western philosophical world to date. Indian thinkers and philosophers had a far more understanding of the process of perception which they covered in their treatises almost a thousand years back. It is the most unfortunate debacle of our education systems after independence, a continuation of the colonial legacy, that they ignored teaching the growing generations the richness, depth, antiquity, and sophistication of Indian philosophy.
Western philosophers have been either ignorant of Indian thought or perhaps thought that the East had nothing to contribute to philosophical thought. The separation of theology and philosophy did not happen in Europe itself until the Reformation. When we accuse Indian philosophy of being ‘religion,’ it is an application of a post-Reformation prejudice (religion- a matter of faith; philosophy- for self-reflection or critique and nothing about God, the soul, and the universe). Hegel, the German philosopher originated this prejudice and largely fashioned the Western image of India. The standard themes were: India only developed an abstract Absolute; it lacks a historical sense; it does not know of concrete individuality; and so on. Once Hegel sent Indian philosophy to departments of Religion and Indology, Philosophy never reclaimed it.
The Indian philosophical system classifies into orthodox or non-orthodox depending on whether they accept the Vedas or not respectively. The orthodox systems include the six systems called Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Mimansa, and Vedanta. The non-orthodox systems are Charvakism (materialism), Buddhism, and Jainism. Philosophy was never a dry intellectual exercise in Indian traditions but has a ‘soteriological’ power-the power of intense individual transformation from ignorance and bondage to freedom and wisdom. There is never a sacrifice to reason and experience, but what distinguishes Indian philosophy is that there is no extreme reverence to science.
When it comes to perceiving objects in the external world, the standard Western paradigm is that light falls on an object first. This reflected light enters the eyes, falls on to the retina from where neural impulses travel via the nerves to a region of the brain. Here, the image gets a reconstruction, and the person ‘sees’ the object. The same sequence is true for all the other senses too. This is the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception,’ a stimulus of some sort evoking a response inside our brains through an intermediate causal chain. Of course, there is a little difficulty in explaining how an internal image inside the brain projects to the outside world.
Hence, in effect, what we perceive in the external world are not as they really exist, but how the interpretation occurs in our brains depending on our endowed senses. It is an indirect form of reality. In Kantian philosophy, the original unknown is the ‘noumenon’ and the known constructed reality is the ‘phenomenon’. This forms the basis of both philosophy and neuroscience. However, this is incoherent in explaining the ontological status or reality of the world. If there is an unknown ‘noumenon’ and a representative ‘phenomenon’, then every object in the causal chain from the external world to the perceiver, including the intervening medium (even the brain) is unknowable.
Very briefly, in contrast, Indian philosophy for thousands of years has been clear on its stand of a ‘Natural Realism’ or ‘Direct Realism’. All the systems with some minor variations propound an active theory of perception where the perceiver is central in the scheme of things. The perceiver goes out and reaches the object in the world. This is the ‘contact-theory of perception’ of Indian philosophy. Contact with the object by the perceiver gives direct information of the world as it exists. Hence, the external world as seen or heard is an actual world in its reality and not a construction. Perception is never a valid source of knowledge in western traditions but it is the most important source of knowledge in Indian traditions.
In the Indian tradition, the cognizer (Purusha) and the cognized (prakriti) belong to two distinct categories with essential characteristics of sentience or consciousness (chaitanya) and inertness (jadatva) respectively. Perception, an inside to outside process, is thus a composite process in which the self, the mind, and the sense organs together participate to establish a contact with the object. Western philosophy stays subservient to science and ties itself in knots in trying to explain the reality status of the objects in the world. Proving Indian thought from western perspective and the other way around too remains difficult due to the incommensurability problem, but Indian philosophy seems to give far better explanations of reality and the world than western philosophy. Indian philosophy is also means to liberation (moksha) most importantly. If only our education systems could teach this too.
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