PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A contemporary introduction

ARGUMENTS (2) 291

own substrate by its own existence alone... The nature of con-

sciousness is to make something into an object of experience of

its own substrate through its own being alone.^26

According to Ramanuja, a person can be directly aware of herself as the
subject of her experiences, including an awareness of herself. Seeing a lamp,
one can be aware of oneself as so seeing. One need not infer from Someone
is seeing a lamp to I am someone or I am seeing a lamp. The same
experience yields the information that both of these sentences express, and
it is Someone is seeing a lamp that requires inference if anything does, for
it abstractly expresses a consequence of one’s concrete first-person
experience.
Ramanuja makes his allegiance to a Cartesian doctrine of the person
plain when he writes:

Now the permanence of the producer [of conscious acts], and the

origination, duration, and cessation, as for pleasure and pain, of

what is known as the conscious act, which is an attribute of the

producer, are directly perceived. The permanence of the producer

is established by recognition from such judgments as This is the

very same thing previously known by me.^27

The first sentence of this passage appeals to direct perception. Only in the
second sentence is there appeal to argument, and the argument infers from
reliable memory to the endurance of oneself as a substance.^28
Nor, in Ramanuja’s view, is this nature as a self-conscious being lost in
enlightenment. Ramanuja waxes eloquent on the point:

To maintain that the consciousness of the “I” does not persist in

the state of final release is again altogether inappropriate. It, in

fact, amounts to the doctrine – only expressed in somewhat dif-

ferent words – that final release is the annihilation of the self.

The “I” is not a mere attribute of the self so that even after its

destruction the essential nature of the self might persist – as it

persists on the cessation of ignorance; but it constitutes the very

nature of the self. Such judgments as: “I know,” “Knowledge has

arisen in me,” show, on the other hand, that we are conscious of

knowledge as a mere attribute of the self. – Moreover, a man

who, suffering pain, mental or of other kind – whether such pain

be real or due to error only – puts himself in relation to pain – “I

am suffering pain” – naturally begins to reflect how he may

once for all free himself from all these manifold afflictions and

enjoy a state of untroubled ease; the desire of final release thus