This series covers events from 09/29/1974 - 10/27/1974

This is a series of five Sunday classes on the topic of Epistemology that Anthony Damiani gave at Wisdom’s Goldenrod between September 29 and October 27, 1974. Together they build one sustained argument: everything we know is known within consciousness; the seemingly independent world “out there” is a world-image we project and then mistake for reality; and the way to the real runs through understanding consciousness itself. Each class centers on papers Damiani prepared, mostly abridgments of books or articles on Western and Indian philosophy, which he reads aloud and discusses in light of Paul Brunton (PB), C. G. Jung, Plato, Kant, and Advaita Vedanta. The surviving record pairs those papers with student notes by Alan Berkowitz and Jeff Cox.

The first class (September 29), on the subject of Mentalism, is built on Damiani’s abridgment of chapter 2 of J. J. van der Leeuw’s The Conquest of Illusion. Beginning from the “primitive dualism” of inner consciousness and outer world, van der Leeuw shows that all we know directly are states of our own consciousness. The tree we see is an image produced in consciousness by an unknown reality, and illusion lies not in the image but in taking it for the thing-in-itself. No philosophic problem, the paper concludes, can be approached from within the world-image. Discussion also covers Plato’s cave, Jung on projection and dreams, and K. C. Bhattacharyya’s account of presentation as embodied belief, with Damiani stressing that withdrawing projections brings us closer to the world as it is.

The second class (October 6), on the Given, takes up the stubborn feeling that objects are simply presented to us. Damiani’s paper abridges two articles by S. K. Chattopadhyaya: “The Object and Sensibility” and “The Real, the Given, and the Objective.” An object, it argues, is defined by its relation to an act of knowing, and its generic character is its givenness. Against Bertrand Russell’s “possible” object, it shows that an object’s existence before and after it is known is a thought construction, and that givenness leads us only to postulate a transcendental background (Kant’s thing-in-itself, the Avyakta of Samkhya, the avidya or maya of Vedanta) that can never itself be given. Damiani’s three-circles diagram (Divine Intellect, Soul, Psyche) frames a comparison of the approaches of Plato, PB, and Jung.

The third class (October 13), on Perception and Existence, stages the realist-Vedantist debate through abridgments of G. R. Malkani’s “Examination of the Main Realistic Argument” and Chandrodaya Bhattacharya’s “The Theories of Drishti-Srishti and Srishti-Drishti.” Malkani’s Vedantist answers the realist that knowledge can prove only an object’s simultaneous existence, never its independence, and that perception itself imports into the object the appearance of otherness, independence, and prior existence: existence is never created, but appearance is. Bhattacharya weighs the view that the world exists and is therefore perceived (Srishti-Drishti) against the view that it exists because it is perceived (Drishti-Srishti). Discussion extends to Ajati, the no-creation position associated with Ramana Maharshi, and to knowledge as the soul’s organ of self-discovery, with avidya as a progressive realization of who and what we are.

The fourth class (October 20), on Knowledge and Reality, is preserved only in Jeff Cox’s notes. It reviews the previous week’s class before turning to abridgments of Malkani’s “Knowledge by Symbolization” and A. C. Mukerji’s “Reality and Ideality in the Western and the Indian Idealistic Thought.” Malkani argues that all knowledge is carried by symbols whose terms are universals, so we never grasp the particular sensation we claim to see. Mukerji holds that Thought, Knowledge, or Consciousness is the foundation of all distinctions, not one faculty among others, and the paper identifies it with the Nous.

The concluding class (October 27), also on Knowledge and Reality, gathers the series into a six-part outline moving from the I and the not-I, through the given and the realist-idealist debate, to the claim that knowledge ultimately coincides with Being. Damiani also reads several shorter papers, including passages abridged from P. J. Chaudhury’s “Science and Epistemology,” pieces on knowledge and imagination and on the four factors involved in knowledge, and a reworking of K. C. Bhattacharyya’s “The Subject as Freedom.” The paper preserved with this class, an abridgment titled "Knowledge as Appearance of the Real," argues that realists fail to see that the same reality reveals itself as the content of knowledge, while those who dismiss knowledge as mere appearance confuse knowing with being. Knowledge gives us the “what” of reality, never the “that,” yet the “that” is no inaccessible thing-in-itself. The series ends where it began, with consciousness: experience floats in the Self like an ice cube in water, and, as Damiani puts it, the “I” is first.

Classes and documents available in this series