bled from his pores, and to march obliviously into the ocean. Chaitanya left
no writings, although some of his followers and successors in the bhakti camp
came back to articulate philosophy. Vallabha turned bhakti in the direction of
monism, breaking from the long-standing allegiance of the Vaishnava move-
ments with some variety of dualism, holding that the Absolute comprises the
world as a relation of whole and part. There were now so many factions on
the Vaishnava side that they spread out imperially across ontological space.
One faction among them, as the philosophical arguments of the schools had
grown hyper-technical, even became part of the current of anti-intellectualism.
Neo-Nyaya Formalism: Technical Logic and
the Clouding of Philosophical Attention Space
Along with the rise of Vaishnavism and its inner splits and its polemics with
Advaita had come the spread of argument about epistemological validity into
every intellectual camp. The emergence of Advaita had stirred up a response
in Nyaya; in the next round, the Advaitins launched a deep refutation of Nyaya
which pushed them even further into anti-substantialist terrain. This Advaita
anti-conceptual monism left an opening into which moved the Ramanujans
and Madhvas by reformulating anti-monist metaphysics; they also turned,
sooner or later, to logical grounds for their polemics. Nyaya did not wither
under attack; instead it produced another wave of even more refined logic,
which too was eventually taken up as a weapon by the sectarian schools.
The most famous of the later Advaitins, Shri Harsha and Chitsukha, had
thrown down the gauntlet to conceptual and empirical logic in general. The
founder of Neo-Nyaya, Gangesha, around 1350 countered this Advaita anti-
logicism by reforming logic so as to be immune to the dialectitians’ attacks on
positively expressed concepts. Shri Harsha had uncovered vicious regresses
everywhere. How is an individual known to be an instance of a universal
without invoking yet another cognition of this relation, and then a cognition
of that cognition, and so on? Similarly, how are universals distinct from one
another without qualities of distinctness which lead to yet another infinite
regress? And without distinctness, everything falls into the undifferentiated
monism of Advaita. Gangesha responded by raising the level of reflection on
the role of primitive terms in philosophical argument (Phillips, 1995: 100–101,
122–132). Cognitions, he held, are divided into determinate verbal awareness
and indeterminate awareness of primitives, which we recognize only upon
analysis. Questions of truth or falsity apply only to determinate awareness; the
items of indeterminate awareness simply are. Gangesha then defined the primi-
tives of his argument such that regress does not arise.
By painstakingly classifying various types of absence or negation, Neo-
External and Internal Politics: India • 267