“How is it, Gotama? Is there not an _I_?”
The Buddha still maintains silence, and the other goes his way.
If one does not understand the Buddha, it is impossible to interpret
this colloquy other than does Oldenburg, for example, in his _Buddha_.
But the meaning is quite otherwise than as there given. We here stand
before that which from the standpoint of epistemology constitutes the
keystone of the whole Buddha-thought. To understand it fully, we must
take a plunge into the heart of modern physics.
One of the most important forward steps taken by physics--if
not technically, perhaps, yet easily the most important
epistemologically--is its insight in the domain of interference
phenomena, especially in the examples of the same afforded by light.
A ray of light reflected back upon itself interferes with itself,
_i.e._ it forms in itself “stationary waves” which present light as
“non-light.”
To this paradoxical mode of expression, however, one is only compelled
so long as one identifies light with the energy itself. For the site
of interference, the nodal point of the vibrations, is just as much
“energy” as is the trough of the vibration. And so if one assumes
light itself to be the energy, one here has a light without light. In
truth, however, light is nothing but an expression of the energy in
virtue of which it exists, and it is a stroke of genius on the part
of modern physics--one, to be sure, which it has perpetrated unknown
to itself--that in interference it has lighted on the one single
possibility of making energies perceptible to sense in that one form
in which alone they are capable of being made sense-perceptible--_as
a pure negative_, a pure _privation_ in the sense-activity of me the
observer. As all languages become alike in silence, so all energies
become alike in interferences. As silence only means that there are
languages, so interference only means that there are energies.
With the fact “interference,” accordingly, science bears witness
against herself, inasmuch as thereby she brings before our eyes the
existence of actual energies in the form of the negative itself. That
is why I have just called the phenomena of interference the most
important step epistemologically that modern physics has yet taken. For
if science would but recognize this fact for that which it really is,
she would find herself obliged to remodel her whole scheme of thought
from the foundation upward.
The--for the beholder--purely negative character of the interference
has its basis in the entry of the energy into itself. With this we
stand in presence of the Buddha-thought.
Here the fact “self-consciousness” becomes a pure interference
phenomenon of _I_-energy. As such it is a pure entering of the
_I_-energy into itself. As such, again, it is, on the one hand, a
pure negative for the whole external world; on the other hand, to the
individual himself, it is a something _immediately_ given, where it
is simply a matter for correct interpretation, and that, here, in an
immediately given, perforce can only be intuitive.
In this insight into the nature of self-consciousness, the _I_, more
sharply than anywhere else, defines itself as a something that only
comprehends itself, while at the same time comprehending the world as
being incomprehensible. In this insight the silence of the Buddha in
the face of Vacchagotta’s questions explains itself. For, as long as
the _terminus technicus_ “interference” is not formulated, the question
is unanswerable. An interference at once is and is not. It is the
immediately given for the individual himself--the not given at all for
others, for beholders.
The acceptance and elaboration of this thought is facilitated by the
data of physiology and psychology.
The entire course of man’s development is to be apprehended as a
surging back by degrees upon himself, a “re-flecting” in the most
literal sense of the word. Man is the “reflecting” living being, the
word being understood as well in its physical as in its psychical
sense. The whole process of development from infant to adult is a
gradual becoming acquainted with himself. Disgust, shame, are as
yet unknown to the infant. These are evolved only as phenomena of
“reflection,” as a wave of experience running back upon the individual
himself, and finding its conclusion in the matured self-consciousness.
This self, however, is the stationary wave; at every moment the same
and yet another; the--for me--_immediately certain_, as which it
presents itself in consciousness; the--for others--not present at all.
In the foregoing it has been shown that both these varieties of
attempts at world-conceptions, as well that based upon the concept
of _substans_ as that which takes the whole play of world-events
for pure relation-values, thereby deprive their own selves of the
possibility of existence, since from both points of view a world of
concepts never could come to be. The Buddha solves the problem by
pointing out that there is no such thing as a world of concepts; in the
_I_-world, however, the world itself and the world _as such_--the real
world and the world of ideation--merge into one in the interference
“self-consciousness.” And this is the answer to the question, “How
must the world be fashioned to render possible the fact that it is
present _as such_?”
* * * * *
The insight into the essential nature of self-consciousness is _the_
intuition.
The value of an intuition is to be judged by what it accomplishes as a
working hypothesis.
What does the Buddha-thought accomplish here?