ishadic world ingredient philosophers, Shankara appears in about the fortieth
generation. This is somewhat later than Augustine but on a par with Ibn Sina,
insofar as we count Islamic falsafa as a continuation of the Greek network.
The cogito is a development fairly deep into the medieval segment of the
sequence, which is not to say it became outdated thereafter; the sophisticated
abstractions attained in medieval religious garb became permanent acquisitions
for later secularist versions.
A thoroughgoing omni-skepticism is a deep trouble, the counterpart to the
regulative ideal, the most central sacred object of intellectual life, the ideal of
absolute truth.^14 That is why skepticism is repeatedly revived, even though
hardly anyone is ever convinced by it. The “great philosophers” are those who
find a variant on the same reflexive deep troubles; hence the kinship in the
solutions which they pose to them, even though these too are not uniform, but
fall into the oppositional pattern characteristic of intellectual space.
long-term fractionation over the categories of reality
Over the long term, the major intellectual driving force is the dynamics of
organizationally sustained debate. Factions which keep their identities during
many generations of argument become locked into a long dance step with one
another; increasingly impervious to outside influences and turned inward upon
their mutually constituted argumentative identities, they drive the collective
conscience of the intellectual attention space repeatedly to new heights of
abstract self-reflection. To illustrate how this unfolds the epistemology-meta-
physics sequence, let us sketch the sequence in India.
The Indian Sequence. We can distinguish five periods:
- From about 700 to 400 b.c.e., the breaking apart of the Vedic schools
into multi-sided competition among Upanishadic and heterodox sages. The
intellectual content consists in rival claims as to the cosmological ingredients
underlying the visible world. At the end of this period, Buddhism becomes the
dominant school. The Buddha’s winning stroke is to explain that the seeming
permanence of objects and of the self are transitory aggregates, and to identify
spiritual liberation with detachment from the illusory. The strand of skepticism
which had emerged in the overcrowded attention space is incorporated into
the Buddhist synthesis as an intellectual motivation to detach oneself from the
world through meditation. The dominance of Buddhism during the formative
period of Indian abstract philosophy made Sañjaya’s skepticism into its ruling
frame; with the external decline of Buddhism, Advaita took over its basic stance
for the Hindu side.
From the point of view of Western thought, the premise that the world is
an illusion tends to reduce Indian philosophy to merely sectarian or historical
interest. To approach Indian philosophy in this way is to miss its technical so-
818 •^ Meta-reflections