The Materialism of the Samkhya Philosophy

V. Brodov

The founder of the Samkhya1
philosophical system and the author of the Samkhya-sutra was, as is generally
believed, Kapila (c. 6th-5th centuries B. C.). The Samkhya-sutra was lost, so
that we have to use later sources – Isvarakrishna Samkhya Karika (3rd-4th
centuries C. E.), Vacaspati Misra’s Samkhya Tattva Kaumudi (9th century), and
others.

Kapila’s primary principle is
that the world is material. Matter (prakrti)
is the basis of everything that is, it is omnipresent, eternal, and one. The
motion of prakrti is just as eternal
as prakrti itself. Primordially, prakrti has no outside cause, for matter
(prakrti) has neither beginning nor
end. Kapila wrote that the world was not created, and therefore there was no creator;
the world itself was the cause of the world; the world developed gradually.

Kapila recognised the objective
nature of the cause-and-effect links in nature, self-development of nature from
the lower forms to the higher. The first sloka
of the Samkhya-Karika says that there is continuity in the development of the
world from the lower to the higher… Nothing can arise out of something that
does not exist… There is a close tie between cause and effect. If that were
not so, everywhere at any moment anything at all could arise. Each cause
conditions a specific effect, and there can be no cause without an effect. The
effect is always inseparable from the cause. Therefore any existence is
conditioned.

Kapila used the materialist
doctrine of the cause-and-effect links to substantiate his atheism and to
criticise the religion of Brahmanism. He wrote that, if the first cause is God
(Brahma) and the world is the effect, there is a discrepancy between cause and
effect. There can be, however, no discrepancy between cause and effect. The
cause of this world is matter (prakrti).
The universe is the result of modifications of matter.

As we see, Kapila uses the
category of causality from the very start in the exposition of his
philosophical views. That is not accidental. The point is that the positions of
Samkhya on causality were the decisive premise which determined its
philosophical orientation. In criticising Machism, Lenin pointed out: “The
question of causality is particularly important in determining the philosophical
line of any of the recent ‘isms’ “.2 As we see it, this idea of Lenin’s is entirely
valid, methodologically, relative to some of the oldest “isms”.

According to the Samkhya
doctrine, everything (any phenomenon) has its material cause. All relations
between cause and effect are conceived in the sense that the latter is always
present in the former.3 The following are the Samkhya arguments in
favour of this.

There are two kinds of causes,
material (in which the effect is latent) and efficient or productive (which
helps the effect to manifest itself). If we accept, however, that the material
cause does not contain the effect, the concept of “productive cause”
loses its meaning, for it has no object of action.

Assuming that an effect arises out
of a cause in which it is not contained is tantamount to asserting that
existence arises out of nonexistence, or something emerges out of nothing.

An effect must be of the same
nature as the cause; they have the same basis. A cloth may only be made out of
yarn (not out of milk); curds may be made out of milk (rather than out of
yarn), etc.

The theory that the effect exists
before it manifests itself is called Satkarya-
vada.4

Thus Samkhya asserts that there
are no effects without causes. Everything in nature has a cause of its own,
including body and soul, sensations and intellect, which are “limited and
dependent objects”.

Only “the cause of all
causes and effects”, that is, prakrti (matter), has no cause. ” …
The products are caused, while prakrti is
uncaused; the products are dependent, while prakrti
is independent; the products are many in number, limited in space and time,
while prakrti is one, all-pervading
and eternal.”5

According to the Samkhya
doctrine, prakrti consists of three
forces or gunas – sativa, rajas, and tamas. Sativa is regarded as something light and illuminating; rajas, motivating and mobile; tamas, heavy and restraining. Analysis
of the Samkhya Karika shows that in effect sativa IS potential consciousness;
rajas, the source of motion, action, and development; tamas is that which restrains action and slows down development.
These three gunas, constituting the
basis of any object or phenomenon, are inseparably connected and mutually
condition one another. They are connected as closely as flame, oil, and lamp
wick.

The gunas are a kind of primary principles – mass (tamas), energy (rajas), and. the conscious principle (sativa).6 Everything in nature is charged, as it were,
with these three principles. The interaction between them consists in that
energy cannot exist without mass, while conscious phenomena do not exist
without energy. How does an object or phenomenon emerge or is shaped, then? The
process begins with individual particles of the three forces, indifferently scattered
through primary matter, being gathered together into who~es under the impact of
natural affinity; this results in non-uniform pressure in various parts of
matter, so that bodies distinct from one another are gradually formed instead
of uniform indifferent matter.

The emergence or formation of
some object or phenomenon does not signify creation of matter, In the same way
as the disappearance of an individual object or phenomenon does not mean
destruction of matter. In the process of evolution, nature does not increase or
diminish quantitatively. Matter cannot be either created or destroyed. The sum
total of all matter – of all its actual or potential states – always remains
constant. The elements of matter are in eternal motion which cannot stop for a
second even; any material process, any growth or withering away is nothing but
redistribution of matter, its transition from the past into the present and
from the present into the future, or from potentiality to actuality. Redistribution
of mass and energy engenders the entire diversity of the material world, the
world of plants and animals.

The idea that matter (mass and
energy) does not grow or diminish quantitatively but is merely redistributed in
the process of emergence and destruction of individual objects and phenomena of
nature, can be regarded as one of the strokes of genius of ancient Indian
thinkers who anticipated later discoveries. In a most general form, this can be
viewed as a distinct expression of the idea of the Law of conservation of the mass of substance as it is known to
modern natural science. It should be stressed at the same time that
anticipation as one of the forms of perception of scientific truth was
characteristic of many outstanding thinkers of antiquity. As Engels put it,
thinkers of the past brilliantly anticipated countless numbers of truths whose
correctness is now proved scientifically.

Matter and the laws of its
evolutionary development are knowable. The ways or channels through which man
receives knowledge of the objects and phenomena surrounding him are the five
sense organs.

The entire infinite variety of
matter is classified into five basic forms or essences: earth, water, fire,
air, and ether. Samkhya regards the process of world manifestation as ordered
development of matter from the finer forms to the most dense ones which are
referred to as “material elements” (mahabhuta). These “essences” are similar to the Greek
“elements”, with the exception that what in Graeco-Roman philosophy
is referred to as the “fifth essence” (quintessentia) is called the first essence, or spatiality (akaca) in Samkhya.

We do not set ourselves the task
of considering the interconnections and mutual relations between the gunas and essences, although this
question is of great interest both on the epistemological and ontological
plane. But we should dwell, however briefly, on the relationship between the gunas and prakrti. The point is that Samkhya is the first and probably the
only philosophical school in India
to make a serious attempt to formulate the philosophical concept of matter.

We know that there were
materialists in Europe (such as Ludwig Feuerbach, for instance, who rejected
the abstract speculations of Hegel) who negated the existence of matter as the
being of “the general”, calling it “an empty abstraction”,
and recognised matter only as the being of individual things. From this
viewpoint, only individual things are genuinely material, like this house,
this tree, these leaves, etc. That which is given in direct sense perception,
that is, the individual sensual objects, is indeed material.7 This
view, however, was deficient in divorcing the singular from the general,
violating as it did their dialectic unity.

Philosophers of the Samkhya
school were also guilty of divorcing the singular from the general, but it is
very important to point out that they recognised the reality of both. In their
view, matter (prakrti) exists in two
independent forms, one general and one singular, and that was where the
metaphysical gap lay.

Matter of the first form
(“the general”) is substance, the first cause of the world of
objects; in it, the gunas are in a
state of equilibrium, and it is therefore without qualities, which prevents man
from perceiving it through the senses. It is therefore incognisable, but the
incognisability results from its fineness rather than from nonexistence.

Matter of the second form
(“the singular”) is an infinite number of moving objects, phenomena,
and events developing in space and time. The singular is accessible to the
sense organs, it is knowable.8

The stumbling block for the
Samkhya authors was the question of the origin of consciousness. Ram Mohan Roy
believes that purusa was created by
Kapila as an explanation for the origin of consciousness.

According to Kapila, purusa is the omniscient and extremely
fine element which, as distinct from prakrti,
possesses consciousness. Prakrti is
the object or matter; purusa is the
subject or consciousness. There are grounds to believe that Kapila was fearful
lest this proposition of his should be given an idealistic interpretation. As
distinct from atman, said Kapila, purusa does
not create anything, it is passive; it is merely a passive witness; only prakrti is active, and so on. Prakrti is the subject of action; in the
process of spontaneous development it comes in contact with purusa and ultimately cognises itself; purusa is devoid of the ability for
self-cognition.

The inconsistencies and errors of
the Samkhya School relative to the origin and
essence of consciousness were readily exploited already in antiquity by
representatives of religious orthodoxy.

In the Middle Ages, Gaudapada,
Vacaspati Misra and other commentators (or followers) of Kapila’s doctrine made
further concessions to idealism, recognising the existence of souls independent
of matter.

On the whole, an inconsistent
position on this score gave rise to reproaches on the part of idealists for
concessions to materialism as well as on the part of materialistically-minded
Indian philosophers, Thus S. Radhakrishnan criticises Kapila for deviation from
idealism: “If we admit the Samkhya view of prakrti and its complete
independence of purusa, then it will be impossible to account for the evolution
of prakrti. We do not know how latent
potentialities become fruitful without any consciousness to direct them.,,9

Ram Mohan Roy holds an opposite
view of the Samkhya philosophy, indicating that its weakness lies in negating
the historicity of development. Had the Samkhya philosophy asserted that at a
definite stage in the development of the world, consciousness (chaitanya) arises out of things, while
quantitative changes, reaching a certain phase of development, become
qualitative changes producing new qualities, then the whole inconsistency (asangati) would have disappeared.
Correctly criticising the anti-historical (metaphysical) quality of the
Samkhya philosophy, Roy
regrettably commits an error himself, comparing Kapila’s materialism to that of
the French philosophers of the 18th century. The point is that the French
materialism of the 18th century was a historical product of a qualitatively
different epoch, and of a different class; it was different in its content.

Such is a brief characteristic of
the materialism pf the Samkhya
School. 

  

Notes: