Dissertation: Transcendental Logic and Spiritual Development in Dignāga's and Kant's Critical Epistemology - Summary (original) (raw)

In Buddhism and in Kant, there exists a common quest for an incompatible yet harmonious mutual dependence between the constraining of all possible phenomena within the bounds of natural causality and the spiritual liberation from such causal chains: saṃsāra vs. nirvāṇa in Buddhism and nature vs. freedom in Kant. Kant believes that transcendental epistemology is necessary to resolve said paradox, and this position has proven so incomprehensible for later thinkers that philosophers nowadays still feel compelled to defend Kant. Meanwhile, in Buddhism, debates continue to rage on whether epistemology constitutes a proper means to explain the dependence, and such debates have resulted in the split of Mahāyāna Buddhism into Madhyamaka and Yogācāra, and subsequently Madhyamaka into Svātantrika and Prasaṅgika. The mainstream understanding of epistemology in the philosophical traditions of Kant and Buddhism is problematic because the cognitive system is understood to be operating ontologically in time. I shall attempt to demonstrate that the ontological assumption in the mainstream understanding is the root cause for both the difficulty in appreciating Kant's transcendental idealism and the indeterminable position of epistemology in Buddhism, especially Dignāga's anti-realistic epistemology. I will also defend epistemology by denying the ontological attribution to the epistemic system and by establishing what I term “critical epistemology.” This entails focusing on the need for an additional, distinct kind of causality (the causality of freedom) on top of the natural causality in both traditions, be it textually or philosophically. The causality of freedom only necessitates the cause of cognition and its relation to all cognitions, whereas the causality of nature is only effective in the results of cognition but never on the cause of cognition. Although the two kinds of causality operate independently, they constitute a formal unity in the realization of every possible cognition. The orthogonality between the two kinds of causality sharply distinguishes the free (reflexively cognizing) status from the constrained (reflexively cognized) status of a person; furthermore, its empty inner product, i.e., the empty impact these two kinds of causality exert upon each other, makes sense of each vector subspace (dimension), namely ideality and reality, in all possible realized cognitions, thus culminating in a single world of “experience.”