The traditional cognitive view, rooted in computationalism, sees the mind as an internal information processor. However, 4E cognition challenges this perspective, emphasizing the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended nature of cognitive processes. Inspired by ecological psychology, pragmatism, and phenomenology, 4E views cognition as a dynamic interaction between the brain, body, and environment.

Traditional Cognitive View

The classical representational view of cognition derives from computers; it treats cognition as computational, meaning that it is a stepwise, serial process—transducing stimuli into symbolic expressions for processing and then further transforming them into particular outputs.

This is directly inspired by computerized operations and algorithmic computation through the manipulation of symbols or representation. The mental is, then, constituted by these internal representations.

This view remains highly influential in brain science, not because of the belief that the brain is like a computer; most brain scientists accept that there is more to the brain than that. But treating the brain as a computational system simplifies its investigation by reducing the complexity of neuronal types and by enabling computational models to test brain function. This has allowed the investigation of the brain as an idealized system within a mechanistic framework that retains the mind-body distinction.

While it has proven fruitful, this simplification and what underlies it have faced significant opposition and challenges.

Ecological Psychology

Around the same time as the rise of computationalism and cognitive science, J. J. Gibson developed ecological psychology, which, in many respects, is in direct opposition to the ideas of computational cognition.

Ecological psychology requires that organisms be externally driven and interconnected with their environment. It dismisses the internal, isolated view of information processing in computationalism. For example, instead of manipulating internal environmental representations to generate action plans, it emphasizes “direct perception.” This means that perception is unmediated: it does not require symbolic processing because the environment provides “affordances,” which are possibilities for action shaped by the inherent properties of the object, but also the organism and its relation to the environment.

This view was not widely accepted at its inception, largely due to Chomsky’s impoverished-stimulus argument. Chomsky argued that environmental stimuli are insufficiently rich in information for the brain’s learning and development.

However, stimuli are not confined to a single system, such as the visual system with the eye, its stimulus, and its subsequent processing areas. They are integrated into a larger system that derives its knowledge from multiple sources.

4E and Its Inspirations

Gibson was not the first nor the last to argue against the inherent Cartesian dualistic nature of mind-body, which takes the mind to be separable from body and world in a solipsistic way. Before Gibson, there were pragmatists, Gestalt psychologists, and phenomenologists. They all argued against dualism, rejected the split between perception and action, and adopted an externalist view rather than an internalist view, which processes information entirely internally.

Drawing on these precursors, the latest criticism of the classical view comes most strongly from enactive cognition and the so-called 4E framework. The 4E framework emphasizes cognition as a process of the interaction between the individual and the environment. It comprises enactive cognition, embodied cognition, embedded cognition, and extended cognition, all beginning with an E. These ideas coalesced into a movement to revolutionize how we conceptualize cognition.

Embodied Cognition

Embodied cognition is the idea that cognition is shaped by our bodies. In other words, what we think boils down to how we can move our bodies. Proponents of this idea about cognition envision human beings as directly constrained by their physical capabilities and, subsequently, cognitively dependent on such capabilities. This is similar to the notion of affordances in ecological psychology. Cognition, thus, emerges from the relationship between an agent’s body and the affordances provided by the environment, rather than from the brain alone.

This idea interlocks the previous clear demarcation between the mind and the body, internal and external. Cognition is situated in our body as well as our mind. We use our bodies directly to support cognition, as shown by the fact that being denied the ability to gesture can hinder thinking and communication.

We can also see indirect evidence of embodiment in our use of metaphors, like “feeling down” and “grasping a concept.” Nonetheless, affordances are the most suitable example: a tool affords grasping because it is shaped for our grip.

This contradicts the classical representational view, which treats the body and environment as merely internal states or representations stored in the brain. It also goes against the view that the brain is an internal processing machine, cut off from the world, like a brain in a vat. Representations mediate between the sensory inputs and action outputs. In embodied cognition, perception is directly coupled with action; it doesn’t passively receive information but guides and shapes action.

Enactive Cognition

Enactive cognition is fundamentally opposed to the classical cognitive view of a passive observer and representer who acts on the environment through internal processes. Instead, the world is brought forth through our actions upon it. It is a reciprocal, dynamic interaction between the body, brain, and environment, none of which can be considered in isolation. This active engagement of the organism with its environment is what gives rise to cognition.

A common illustration of the enactive view is a baseball fielder catching a fly ball. The fielder’s typical strategy is not to perform a difficult trajectory calculation based on sensory representations. Instead, they use a technique that leverages the inherent properties of their body and the environment: they walk forward or backward to keep the ball aligned in a specific region of their visual field, thereby matching its trajectory. This shows that the body is not merely a tool for calculation but is inseparable from the cognitive process itself. Cognition changes and updates as the body and environment do, employing their inherent properties in an enactive manner.

While embodied cognition focuses on how the body’s characteristics and its interaction with the environment shape thought, enactive cognition emphasizes the dynamic, active role of the organism-environment system. Enactive cognition is fundamentally opposed to the classical cognitive view of a passive observer and representer who acts on the environment solely on the basis of internal processes, even though embodied cognition may still allow action-oriented internal representations.

Embedded Cognition

Embedded cognition, in a similar vein, holds that cognition emerges from the interlinking of the brain, body, and environment. The organism uses these constraints and characteristics to lessen its cognitive load. Representing everything and internally performing calculations would maximize cognitive load; acting on the environment, shifting environments, and using the relation between it and the self would reduce it.

An example of embedded cognition is employing landmarks to navigate roughly rather than remembering routes exactly. This offloading of mental work to the environment is key to minimizing the overall effort required for a cognitive task.

Much of modern society is offloading cognitive processes to the environment, such as watches, calculators, and organizational systems. We use environmental cues to reduce our need for decision-making; we follow paths, others’ actions, and norms.

We can say that we use the environment to both enhance our cognitive capabilities and lessen the load. We organize our environments and use visual aids to support cognitive processes such as calculation and comprehension, and we place objects in specific locations to reduce the need for memorization. Our cognition is embedded in our environment, inherently and by choice.

Extended Cognition

Extended cognition expands the boundaries of where thinking occurs, moving beyond just the brain and even the body. Proponents argue that the tools we use for cognitive tasks, such as taking notes to support extended memory or using props for calculation, are not merely aids but extensions of cognition.

For instance, proponents of this view of cognition suggest that imagining an object’s rotation is functionally equivalent to physically rotating it. This perspective mirrors the way we treat tools as physical extensions of the body, such as prostheses, hearing aids, or crutches. The concept of extendedness applies this same principle to cognition, incorporating social groups, computers, notes, or even our own bodies (like counting on fingers) into the cognitive process.

4E as a Philosophy of Nature

The primary aspect of the 4E framework is its holistic view of cognition and its challenge to certain foundational assumptions of the current cognitive approach. Yet, the deeper you delve into 4E, the harder it becomes to specifically ascertain exactly what it is trying to do. As is evident by the fact that some scholars add concepts like empathic, affective, and even a second, broader sense of ecological cognition to the original four ‘E’s. It is not sufficiently well defined to serve as a concrete research program that generates specific, testable hypotheses. Instead, as philosopher Shaun Gallagher has put forward, it is more akin to a philosophy of nature.

The 4Es, as a philosophy of nature, may serve as a guide. It may shape how we see nature, in terms of intentionality, the brain-body interaction, and even the mind-brain dialectic, etc. While it may be overly general and holistic to design specific experiments or formulate specific hypotheses, it can still influence the interpretation of models and experimental results.

As a philosophy, it is an attack on the long-lasting ghost of the Cartesian internalist, dualistic mind. This view has been difficult to dislodge, yet science and philosophy as a whole may have begun a slow move away from it. More radically, it challenges the mechanistic view of nature by arguing that we cannot separate our understanding of nature from our place within it, thereby defying the traditional methods of decomposition.

Born ca. 1225 AD, Thomas Aquinas is revered in some circles as highly as the ancient Greek and later Enlightenment-era thinkers. While the medieval philosopher’s works are still studied in many universities, ethicists and academics try to further interpret Thomistic thought, applying it to the issues of our day. Let’s dig into the philosopher’s own life and times before exploring the ideas from pagan philosophers with which he most agreed.

The Times in Which Aquinas Lived

The life and prolific career of this Italian university lecturer occurred late in what is commonly referred to as the “Dark Ages” (spanning 500-1500 AD). Unfortunately, from the very name itself, the Dark Ages appear to many modern people as a period of superstition and stifling of the sciences. On the contrary, argues Cambridge historian Seb Falk, these medieval ages witnessed great scientific advances. In the literary world, people cultivated new ideas and safeguarded the philosophies of centuries past.

The worlds of Christianity and Islam, while theologically opposed in some respects, provided the main thinking hubs of their day. The Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham, a faithful Muslim who held that studying nature brought him closer to its Creator, gave the world the camera obscura—the forerunner of the modern camera—in the 11th century. Modern scholars also pinpoint Ibn al-Haytham as one of the first to use the scientific method. And as Falk points out, the Catholic Church established universities; monks copied manuscripts and developed mechanical clocks. “The most advanced scientific knowledge for most of the European Middle Ages,” he says, “came from the Islamic world.”

“Muslim and Jewish scholars were building on the work of earlier thinkers from Greece or India,” Falk points out. What is more, Arab culture helped protect and preserve the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. Between 750 and 950, a translation movement was sustained in Baghdad that kept the works of Aristotle and other classics alive while these same writings lost precedence in the West. This is important to note since much of Aquinas’ own philosophy draws from Aristotle. Just as Thomas would later do, the Arab thinkers began to weave Greek ideas into their philosophy. The “Angelic Doctor” would himself flirt with ideas from the Arab philosophers in his own writings. The Middle Ages were not so backward in the ways of science and learning after all.

Aquinas and Academics

St. Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) educated the young Thomas. He would eventually teach at the University of Paris, which had its beginnings in the mid-12th century, so it was pretty new when Thomas came on the scene.

Aquinas wrote poetic hymns that are still sung in Catholic liturgies today, such as “O Salutaris Hostia” and the “Tantum Ergo.” He appears among the Church Triumphant in Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso and speaks to the Pilgrim (Dante thoroughly studied Aquinas). Hailed as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas belonged to the religious order known as the Dominicans and lived his life according to Christian morals. His philosophy infuses his theology, just as his theology informs his philosophy. Like Ibn al-Haytham and others of Abrahamic beliefs in this era, he was a genius who saw no contention between knowing God and knowing about the natural world.

In his texts, most famous of which is the Summa Theologica, he posited his theses and the counter-theses (objections) of opponents, real or imagined, proofs and counter-proofs. He referenced numerous pagan thinkers, most notably the ancient Greeks, as well as his contemporaries, the Islamic scholars. Just as not all retweets equal endorsements, Aquinas’ quoting another philosopher did not constitute agreement, nor did it guarantee opposition.

Sometimes he interjected the ideas of Muslim thinkers so as to offer a counterpoint to his own; other times, he furthered his own propositions by reinforcing them with agreements from these philosophers. The latter example did not trouble his Christian conscience, since taking wisdom from any created source is reconciled with the biblical understanding that all wisdom is from God (see Proverbs 2:6). Aquinas went so far as to hold that to “scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God.”

1. Aristotle and the Power of Reason

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the veritable cornerstone of philosophy in the pre-Christian world and had a huge influence on Aquinas. He believed that humans have souls and that their ability to rationalize sets them apart from other living things.

Aristotle sought to understand more deeply the common everyday experiences of life. The quality that distinguished his philosophical methodology from those of many of his predecessors was the classification of his findings. He observed things, their characteristics, and functions, and classified them accordingly. In a hierarchy of being, he placed humans at the summit since we are rational animals, “questioning and thinking animals, able to engage in philosophical thought,” as writer Mortimer Adler puts it. Aristotle believed that everything has a nature, that is, a set of unique qualities that distinguishes it from all other kinds of things.

Aquinas admired much of Aristotle’s work, assimilating the ancient philosopher’s thinking into his own. Aristotle’s concept of nature is one that Aquinas also uses. So too are Aristotle’s four causes, which the later scholastic philosopher adopted. These added to his understanding of efficient causality, which undergirded the second of his five proofs for the existence of God.

Even so, the Dumb Ox’s acceptance of Aristotle was initially controversial. Early on, Church authorities cautioned the faithful against Aristotelianism. But eventually, Thomas delivered public lectures on Aristotle, which drew opposition. In 1273, his colleague St. Bonaventure also endeavored on a number of conferences in which he instead opposed Aristotelian views, “including the teachings of Thomas.” Nevertheless, Aquinas’s approval was endorsed by the Church in the long run.

Yet, Aquinas did not blindly accept all of Aristotle’s propositions. According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, “During his captivity [when his family imprisoned him] Thomas… is said to have written a treatise on the fallacies of Aristotle.” Despite his appreciation of Aristotle, it did not stop Aquinas from trying to think clearly.

2. Plato and the Human Soul

The senior contemporary of Aristotle (not to mention his teacher), Plato deeply impacted ancient Greek philosophy and thus the trajectory of education in Western civilization. Plato (ca. 428-ca. 347 BC) influenced not only Aristotle but other sources that would shape Aquinas’ beliefs, such as those of St. Augustine of Hippo. That said, Aquinas’ views fell more in line with Aristotle’s, whose vision of reality deviates in several major ways from Plato’s.

For Plato, the body is an external hindrance to the soul, and the outcome of a good life entails dying and attaining disembodied bliss. For a devout Christian who believes in bodily resurrection in the hereafter, such a platonic disentangling of body and soul simply did not fly. So Aquinas’ perception of the human soul contrasts with that of Plato.

Plato’s overemphasis on the soul and his belief that it provides the faculty of reason could be said to influence, or at least align with, the beliefs Thomas held. He too thought that in the soul was seated the intellect. Aquinas saw the soul as superior in some sense to the body, while at the same time, one with the body. To this day, Christian theologians believe that men and women are made imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God. Many would also say that this resemblance to God resides chiefly in the soul, from which spring one’s rational faculties.

Plato and Aquinas both saw the soul as something spiritual—immaterial. They both saw the soul as immortal—existing without end since its genesis. But again, they differed in that Plato viewed the person primarily as a soul; that was the important part to him anyway. Aquinas, however, spoke of the Christian belief that the human person is a body-soul composite, or unity.

3. Grace in Al-Ghazzālī

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzālī (1058-1111) was a Muslim theologian who adopted a simplistic way of life. He lectured on various topics at Nizamiyah College in Baghdad (modern Iraq). He was a Sufi, a Muslim mystic, who sought experiential knowledge of God. His book The Doctrines of the Philosophers, translated into Latin posthumously, was accessible to and quoted by both Albert and his pupil Thomas. R.E.A. Shanab says that Aquinas “studied the works of the Islamic philosophers, especially Ghazali’s, at the University of Naples.” Shanab believes the mystic’s thoughts heavily influenced the Dominican.

Certainly, in the framing of the relationship between the Creator and humanity, al-Ghazzālī and Aquinas might see eye-to-eye. In The Alchemy of Happiness, al-Ghazzālī addresses the goal of the believer in relation to the Creator. The aim of the spiritual life, he says, is love of God. Spiritual dangers, then, are those that “hinder the love of God in a man’s heart.” Achieving such a lofty goal requires God’s help. “Man’s preservation and eventual attainment to perfection are also entirely dependent upon the grace of God.”

Such an ideal echoes the Christian concept of grace, which is God’s life in the human soul, animating it and allowing the person to do good works. It is necessary to cooperate with grace to gain salvation. In Aquinas’ words, once Adam and Eve sinned, human beings “needed grace’s help to avoid falls” and “to deserve heaven.” While this likely is not a direct influence from al-Ghazzālī, the idea of grace is an example of common ground between Christian and Muslim thought.

4. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and the Existence and Perfection of God

Even before Aquinas’ time, Aristotle’s teachings already enjoyed a renaissance in the East among the Islamic philosophers. One such thinker was Ibn Rushd, better known by the Latinized rendering of his name, Averroes (1126-1198).

Ibn Rushd sought to examine religion with a critical eye, but he also thought the Muslim faith should be adhered to when any one philosopher’s claim did not harmonize with the basic principles of his religion. Ibn Rushd believed that the universe had to be contrived by the mind of another, and he observed that all in existence was “finely-tuned,” precise, and well-ordered. To him, this served as proof of the divine. Similarly, surveying the structure of the universe, Aquinas said such organization could not happen by chance. Like Averroes, he posited that this order argued in favor of a Creator.

The correlation between the theology of Aquinas and Averroes goes further. In De Ente et Essentia, his treatise on being and essence, the Dominican philosopher distinguishes between the essence (the whatness or that which makes a thing what it is) and the existence (or being) of things. He cites past philosophers, including Averroes and Avicenna. He points out where they are wrong, but he also credits them where he believes they spoke truth.

Aquinas also says that such is not the case when it comes to God. He writes: “God’s essence is identified with his own very existence… he hasn’t essence distinct from his existence.” He expounds on God’s perfection and says that God is pure being, calling upon a few familiar characters to bolster his thesis: Aristotle and Ibn Rushd.

Aquinas believed there is no gradation of quality in God, that he is perfect and also changeless. For both Aquinas and Averroes, if God is truly God, he is total perfection.

5. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Reflecting on Divine Revelation

Avicenna is the Westernized version of the name belonging to the Muslim philosopher Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina. Avicenna (980-1037) pondered metaphysical questions and wrote commentaries on verses of the Qur’an. In his Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas cites Avicenna 17 times, underscoring the importance of this Quranic scholar.

Avicenna retained Aristotelian influences. As a monotheist, he also found himself among a philosophical lineage made up of the so-called “classical theists.” The classical theists are thinkers who adhere to the notion of divine simplicity: the idea that God is one, unique, and unified being. Divine simplicity states that there can only be one God, that he is not one among many representatives of a species of entities but is his own being, and that he is noncomposite—not made up of multiple parts. For a classical theist, God cannot be parsed out; there are no elements to God that are separate and distinct from others. As Aquinas believed, God’s essence and existence are one. The ancient Christian writer Tertullian said, “The supreme being must be unique, without equal… If God is not one, he is not God.” This same belief has been upheld by Catholicism as well as by Protestant thinkers like Martin Luther and John Calvin.

Divine simplicity is communicated in the Bible. God’s oneness in nature is also made clear in the Qur’an. Both Aquinas and Avicenna believed in divine simplicity since both were deeply in tune with the tenets of their respective creeds. Both belonged to Abrahamic religions that emphasize the Creator’s divine revelation. Steeped in that kind of emphasis, both Avicenna and Aquinas labored to interpret what they considered sacred writings: Avicenna reflected on verses of the Qur’an; Aquinas, on verses of Scripture. They both sought to understand God more deeply.

Further Reading:

If you enjoyed learning about St. Thomas Aquinas, his life, or the philosophical debates he found himself in, you may enjoy reading any of the following works.

• Adler, M.J. (1991). Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy. Collier Books.
• Chesterton, G.K. (1986). The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton II: St. Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man, St. Thomas Aquinas. Ignatius Press.
• Feser, Edward. (2017). Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Ignatius Press.
• Kreeft, P. (2014). Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas. Ignatius Press.
• McDermott, T. (editor). (2008). Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings. Oxford University Press.
• Piper, J. (1991). Guide to Thomas Aquinas. Ignatius Press.
• Rogers, P.M. (editor). (2008). Aspects of Western Civilization: Problems and Sources in History. Pearson Education, Inc.
• Walsh, M. (editor). (1991). Butler’s Lives of the Saints. HarperOne/HarperCollins Publishers.

The humble quest of Mīmāṃsā thinkers consisted in seeking the right interpretation of the early Vedas, rather than the true description of reality or salvation. This means they did not waste much time on quarreling with peers who adhered to other schools of Indian philosophy, or darśanas. Mīmāṃsā became famous for its philosophy of language, in which a word’s meaning is inherent, while the connection between words and objects is eternal. This is a direct parallel to contemporary semantic realism in the Western philosophy of language. Moreover, to determine the proper way to perform Vedic rituals, prompted Mīmāṃsā thinkers to establish a codifiable set of actions prescribed as duties that may resonate with some of the pinnacles of Western ethics.

The Invention of Mīmāṃsā: When, Where, Who?

Mīmāṃsā literally means “investigation” or “reflection.” It emerged in the centuries after the Vedic hymns had been codified and ritualized (c. 1500–500 BC). While another classical Indian darśana, namely, Vedānta, turned to the Upaniṣads, which had been considered as the last Vedas, or the culmination of the Vedas, Mīmāṃsā focused on the Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas. This means that Mīmāṃsā lacks the metaphysical grandeur of its philosophical rival. Saṃhitās are the core mantra portion of the Vedas, consisting of hymns, chants, and prayers directly addressed to various deities for ritual use. Brāhmaṇas are subsequent prose texts that provide detailed ritual instructions, theological explanations, and mythological justifications for the ceremonies found in the Saṃhitās. Clearly, Mīmāṃsā thinkers sought to root their authority in the interpretation of ritual performance and the rules governing sacred language.

All six darśanas were considered to have originated in the founding texts of one of the famous sages. In this case, Jaimini (c. 3rd–2nd century BC) is believed to be the author of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra. Later commentators vastly expanded the system’s philosophical scope. Śabara (c. 5th century AD) produced the earliest surviving commentary (Śabarabhāṣya), which became the basis for all subsequent discussion.

In the 7th century, two important figures, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara Miśra, developed their distinct sub-schools of Mīmāṃsā. Kumārila’s version of Mīmāṃsā emphasized a robust realism about language and pioneered theories of sentence meaning (śābdabodha) and epistemology, including detailed accounts of inference and testimony. Prabhākara, by contrast, advanced the school famous for its doctrine of “intrinsic validity” (svataḥ prāmāṇya) of knowledge and its subtle semantic theory, which holds that grasping word-meaning is inseparable from grasping sentence-meaning. Together, these thinkers transformed Mīmāṃsā from a specialized hermeneutics of ritual into one of the most sophisticated classical Indian philosophies of language, meaning, and knowledge.

The Central Concepts of Mīmāṃsā

The central goal of Mīmāṃsā is to investigate and define dharma (duty, righteousness). In this context, dharma is not a mystical or universal law of cosmic order, but a recipe for a particular action. One does not grasp dharma through metaphysical speculation but by being an earthly creature who simply reads and interprets Vedic injunctions. For example, the command “one should perform the new moon sacrifice” establishes a duty independent of human authorship and stemming from the infallible Vedic tradition grounded in the timeless, unauthored (apauruṣeya) Vedas.

Such commands or prescriptions do not describe reality but bind the agent to a course of action, something simply ought to be done. The performance of such action, when done correctly, produces an unseen potency known as apūrva, which inevitably brings about the promised result, whether worldly benefit or otherworldly reward. Importantly, the efficacy of ritual does not depend on divine intervention. Gods, according to classical Mīmāṃsā, are merely names within the ritual apparatus. What matters is the faithful execution of Vedic injunctions themselves.

You may be worried that much is at stake here for Mīmāṃsā thinkers: relying too much on the infallibility of the Vedas places much epistemic pressure on one’s philosophical system. However, to defend its reliance on Vedic testimony, they articulated a striking epistemological position: the intrinsic validity of knowledge (svataḥ prāmāṇya). According to this view, all bits of knowledge are presumed valid the moment they arise in our minds and need not be externally certified right away. Knowledge remains valid unless and until it is subsequently defeated by evidence of error, such as a visual illusion or a fallacy in reasoning. This position shifts the burden of proof from the knower to the skeptic and treats Vedic statements as self-authenticating unless positively contradicted.

Linguistic Meaning in Mīmāṃsā

If Mīmāṃsā is remembered as a philosophy of ritual in the histories of Eastern and/or global philosophy, it is worth noting here that it equally developed a respectable philosophy of language. Since the Vedas themselves are authoritative not as descriptions but as kinds of speech-acts that generate duties, understanding language became inseparable from understanding dharma.

At the foundation of Mīmāṃsā lies the conviction that the relationship between words (śabda) and their meanings (artha) is eternal, fixed, and not subject to human convention. Unlike some modern theories that treat language as a form of social contract, Mīmāṃsā held that words inherently reveal their referents. To put it differently, a word is not a mere sound that arbitrarily comes to signify but carries meaning by its very nature. This underwrites the school’s broader thesis that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya). If words are intrinsically meaningful and the Veda is eternal sound, then Vedic injunctions are timeless truths, not human inventions.

This view led to intense debates with rival schools, particularly with the Nyāya school, which treated word meaning as mediated by convention. Mīmāṃsā thinkers argued that the connection between word and meaning is eternal and direct. In this way, they carved out a semantic realism: language is not contingent, but part of the fabric of reality itself.

Mīmāṃsā also made sophisticated contributions to sentence theory (śābdabodha). How does the meaning of a sentence emerge from its words? Kumārila Bhaṭṭa claimed that each word conveys its individual meaning first, and only afterward are these meanings syntactically connected to yield sentence meaning.

His contemporary Prabhākara Miśra disagreed, advancing anvitābhidhānavāda, the doctrine that words never present isolated meanings at all but always function within a sentence-context. For him, hearing a word in a sentence is already to grasp it as syntactically connected to others. Remarkably, this debate anticipates disputes in analytic philosophy of language between atomistic and holistic theories of meaning, such as Frege’s.

Mīmāṃsā and Wittgenstein: A Surprising Compatibility

At first glance, the austere ritualism of Mīmāṃsā and the ordinary-language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein seem worlds apart. One emerged in ancient India, defending the eternal authority of the Vedas, while the other, in twentieth-century Europe, was probing how meaning arises from our everyday practices. Yet when placed side by side, intriguing resonances emerge.

Both Mīmāṃsā and Wittgenstein resist the temptation to reduce language to a mirror of reality. For Mīmāṃsā, the Veda’s sentences do not primarily describe the world but prescribe duties. This means, recall, that language functions as a guide to action that shapes communal life rather than a neutral report. Similarly, Wittgenstein emphasized that meaning is use: words are embedded in “language-games” that direct human activity.

Moreover, both Mīmāṃsā and Wittgenstein grapple with the problem of rule-following. Wittgenstein asked: how can we be said to follow a rule rather than merely act in accord with it? Mīmāṃsā provided a strikingly parallel answer: rules bind the agent precisely through their linguistic form. The authority of injunctions does not derive from psychological states or divine will but from the intrinsic normativity of language itself.

Finally, both reject the idea that meaning depends on private acts of intention. For Mīmāṃsā, words are eternally linked to their meanings, independent of speakers’ whims. For Wittgenstein, private languages are impossible because meaning requires shared criteria of use. In both, language is irreducibly public, normative, and action-guiding. That a premodern Indian ritualist and a Viennese philosopher should converge on such insights testifies to the universality of the philosophical puzzles posed by language.

Vedānta literally translates as “the end of the Vedas,” and it has never been conceived as a single doctrine. Vedānta concerns the realization of God in our world, thereby cutting across the core ideas of Hinduism, such as Atman, Brahman, and attaining salvation by breaking the shackles of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to consider Vedānta as a contribution to a purely theistic cause because this particular darśana offered a radical and transformative view of consciousness. And what would Western philosophy be without the debates about consciousness? I guess a lot shorter, and with far less existential dread.

Are Vedānta and the Upaniṣads Basically the Same Thing?

The Vedic tradition (c. 1500‒600 BC) marked the flourishing of ancient urban centers in the Indus Valley. These urban centers were home to Indo-Aryans, a specific ethnolinguistic group who spoke languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The social system that reigned back then was deeply embedded in the Vedas. The four Vedas, each composed in Sanskrit, contained instructions for sacred rituals, chants, hymns, and speculative reflections on the nature of reality, transmitted orally for centuries before being written down. Moreover, the only people who had access to the Vedas, and, therefore, the sacred knowledge about the world, were Brahmins. This was the caste of priests, whose duty was to devote themselves to studying and interpreting the Vedas. At the same time, they were considered the highest class in the Indo-Aryan social order.

However, among the most intellectually engaged, some Brahmins grew discontent with their own caste. Priests seemed to be immersed in earthly, all-too-human customs, such as striving for power and money. This made them less observant of the rules of Hinduism and less devoted to the ultimate spiritual goal of salvation. For this reason, some of them went to forests in search of the inner light and God.

Over time, this led to the creation of the Upaniṣads (800‒200 BC), a new corpus of texts passed down from teacher to student. The Upaniṣads are also called Vedānta, or “the end of the Vedas.” So this is where the confusion may arise. It looks like the Upanishads, which are listed as the fifth and sixth Vedas, bear the same name as the philosophical school. Be it as it may, Vedānta was systematized much later, between the 8th and 16th centuries AD, by sages like Śaṅkara (c. 8th century AD), Rāmānuja (c. 11th century AD), and Madhva (c. 13th century AD), and in opposition to other rivals of the Hindu religion, such as Buddhism and Jainism.

The Central Concepts of Vedānta

The mentioned sages, Śaṅkara (c. 8th century AD), Rāmānuja (c. 11th century AD), and Madhva (c. 13th century AD), all developed their sub-schools of Vedānta: Advaita Vedānta, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, and Dvaita Vedānta, respectively. The sub-schools tackled the three main concepts: Brahman, Ātman, and their Relationship.

At the heart of Advaita lies the concept of Brahman, understood as the infinite, attribute-less (nirguṇa) ground of being. Brahman is not merely the highest deity among others but the ultimate reality itself, which is timeless and unchanging. In this framework, the multiplicity observed in the world, namely its forms, colors, beings, and changes, is regarded as māyā, or illusion in the sense of misperception.

What, then, of the individual self, the Ātman? In Advaita, the Ātman, when stripped of its empirical layers of personality, memory, and bodily identity, is none other than Brahman itself. Thus, the salvation or the liberation from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth is not a journey toward union with Brahman, because there was never any real separation to begin with. Instead, it is the removal of ignorance (avidyā), a direct recognition that the self already is Brahman, and that all apparent distinctions are provisional. Due to this, Śaṅkara is famous in the history of philosophy for his position of non-dualism, or better yet, monism.

For Rāmānuja, the central problem with Advaita was that it rendered individuality, diversity, and devotion unintelligible. If everything is only Brahman, then what is the status of love for God, ethical action, or ritual practice? His response was to argue that Brahman is indeed one, but not devoid of qualities. Brahman is personal, identified with Viṣṇu or Nārāyaṇa, one of the principal deities in Hinduism, and endowed with auspicious attributes such as compassion, knowledge, and power.

On this view, Ātman, or the individual soul, is real and eternal. It is not an illusory appearance of Brahman, but a distinct entity. At the same time, it cannot exist independently, because the soul is inseparably related to Brahman as part of its very nature. The salvation in Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita is not the dissolution of individuality into the absolute, but something akin to the blissful communion of the soul with a personal God. The liberated soul retains its distinctness, and its highest fulfillment is loving devotion (bhakti) to Brahman. Obviously, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta also serves to defend non-dualism, albeit in a more nuanced way that balances monism and pluralism.

The third major branch of Vedānta, Dvaita, represents a deliberate rejection of Advaita’s monism. For Madhva, the sage behind Dvaita, any philosophical position maintaining that Brahman and Ātman are ultimately identical undermines both common sense and the foundations of religious life as described in the Upaniṣads. Madhva thought that one can’t really love or serve God meaningfully if one is ultimately identical with Him. Instead, he argued in favor of an uncompromising dualism: Brahman (or Viṣṇu) and the individual soul (jīva) are eternally distinct realities.

In his view, thus, Brahman is a personal God, independent, omnipotent, and the source of all things that exist. Unlike in non-dualist Advaita, Brahman is not a formless absolute but the supreme Lord, an object of devotion and worship. Ātman, by contrast, is finite, dependent, and always subordinate to God. It has its own distinct essence, which can never collapse into Brahman. Salvation, therefore, does not amount to the identification with God but attaining eternal proximity to Him, dwelling forever in His presence, serving Him in bliss and devotion.

Vedānta in Relation to Other Darśanas

Vedānta’s place within the six āstika darśanas is best understood through a dialectical lens: each school both drew from and reacted against the others, creating a dynamic intellectual ecosystem. With Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta shared a close familial bond. Both were professed by the masters of scriptural interpretation, but while the proponents of Mīmāṃsā concentrated on ritual injunctions and the authority of the Vedas in matters of action, Vedānta thinkers redirected the same hermeneutical tools toward the Upaniṣads.

The dialectic continued with Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika. Nyāya’s sharp tools of logic and epistemology, and Vaiśeṣika’s systematic ontology of categories, provided Vedānta with valuable resources while also offering a foil. Vedānta appropriated Nyāya’s logical exactness for its own polemical purposes, showing how critique and borrowing could go hand in hand.

The dialogue with Sāṃkhya and Yoga was also rich. Sāṃkhya’s dualism of puruṣa (consciousness) and prakṛti (matter) set the stage for the reinterpretations of the Upaniṣads. Thus, Advaita dissolved dualism into pure nondualism, while Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita recast it within a theistic framework. From Yoga, Vedānta absorbed meditative and practical disciplines, but reoriented them toward the realization of Brahman rather than mere isolation of consciousness. In this way, Vedānta did not stand apart from its predecessors; it positioned itself as their logical and soteriological culmination by appropriating their methods, refining their arguments, and claiming to surpass them with a vision of reality that aspired to liberation from all suffering.

Vedānta and Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

For analytic philosophers, Vedānta offers more than exotic history. In Western metaphysics, there is also a lively debate between monists, who hold that reality is fundamentally a single, unified entity, and pluralists, who hold that the world is composed of many independent, irreducible constituents. What makes this parallel more than a curiosity is the way Vedāntic thinkers anticipated the structure of these contemporary debates.

Consider the case of priority monism. Philosopher Jonathan Schaffer argues that while the world is a single entity, its parts have a kind of dependent reality, which means that they exist, but only in virtue of their place in the whole. Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita makes a remarkably similar move, yet it also presses a challenge. For Rāmānuja, the whole (Brahman) is not merely prior to its parts; they essentially constitute it. Brahman without souls and matter would not be Brahman at all, just as a living organism without organs would cease to be the organism it is.

In this way, Viśiṣṭādvaita suggests a stronger form of holism than Schaffer’s model allows: the whole is not merely metaphysically prior but internally dependent on its parts for its very identity. This is a subtle but important divergence, and one that could enrich ongoing analytic debates about the direction and symmetry of grounding relations.

In the West, “yoga” is synonymous with fitness studios, wellness retreats, and mindfulness apps. However, in this article, we will cover Yoga as one of the six classical schools, or darśanas, of Indian philosophy. Closely allied with Sāṃkhya, it shares much of its metaphysical framework while adding a program of practice. Within this darśana, the human mind was seen as restless and constantly spinning with thoughts, until it was calmed through disciplined meditative and physical practice, allowing puruṣa to shine forth in its pure form. Liberation from suffering and the vicious cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is attainable through reflection and self-restraint.

The Invention of Yoga: When, Where, Who?

The word yoga stems from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning “to yoke,” “to unite,” or “to harness.” In its philosophical sense, it signifies the disciplined unification of body, mind, and consciousness. This idea of disciplined union is ancient, predating the formal Yoga school by centuries. Early forms of yogic meditation appear in the Upaniṣads, where ascetic contemplation was presented as a path toward realizing the unity between the individual self (ātman) and ultimate reality (brahman).

Yoga as darśana began to emerge in a period of intense spiritual experimentation in India, roughly between 500 BC and 300 AD. This was a time when ascetic renunciation (saṃnyāsa) movements challenged ritual Vedic orthodoxy, embodied in the highest caste, the Brahmans (priests). While Brahmanical traditions emphasized sacrifice (yajña) and social duty (dharma), new ascetic and philosophical groups sought direct experiential liberation (mokṣa) from the bondages of their earthly existence. During this time, Buddhism, Jainism, and various heterodox sects that hadn’t accepted the authority of the Vedas introduced meditative practices and theories of karma that influenced Yoga’s evolution from a sub-school of Sāṃkhya to an independent darśana.

Yoga became codified and official darśana with Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras (c. 3rd-4th century AD), a terse collection of nearly two hundred aphorisms that systematized earlier meditative and ethical practices. Divided into four books (pādas), namely Samādhi, Sādhana, Vibhūti, and Kaivalya, the text presents a comprehensive framework for human spiritual transformation grounded in the metaphysical structure of orthodox Sāṃkhya. The second book, Sādhana, outlines the celebrated eightfold path (aṣṭāṅga yoga), guiding the practitioner from moral discipline (yama, niyama) and physical postures (āsana) to concentration (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna), and absorption (samādhi). Patañjali thus reconciled the tension between the ritual and the contemplative, between engagement with the world and withdrawal from it.

The Central Concepts of Yoga

At the heart of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras lies a concise yet profound definition: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, which translates as “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” With this aphorism, Patañjali defines both the ailment and the remedy of human existence. The ailment is citta-vṛtti, the restless oscillation of mental activity. Thoughts, emotions, memories, and sensory impressions constantly spiral in our minds, clouding our awareness. The remedy, nirodha, is not suppression in a crude sense, but the calming of these cognitive processes so that consciousness can recognize its own pure, unconditioned nature. Yoga, then, is a systematic practice aimed at epistemic clarity and ontological disentanglement when it comes to our mind and/or cognition.

Yoga adopts the metaphysical dualism of its sister system, Sāṃkhya, distinguishing between puruṣa (pure consciousness) and prakṛti (primordial matter), but it also provides a method for experientially verifying this dualism. Puruṣa within this conception neither acts nor changes. It merely observes. Prakṛti, on the other hand, is dynamic and composed of the three guṇas, or essential characteristics: aattva (lightness, balance), rajas (motion, restlessness), and tamas (inertia, darkness).

From prakṛti arise all forms of manifestation, the intellect (buddhi), ego (ahaṃkāra), mind (manas), and sensory and motor organs (indriyas). The bondage of the self arises when puruṣa misidentifies with the operations of prakṛti. In other words, we confine ourselves to the suffering earthly existence when consciousness mistakes its reflections in thought for its own nature.

Liberation (kaivalya) is achieved when this misidentification ceases, and puruṣa recognizes itself as distinct from all objects of experience. By grasping the ontological autonomy, all vṛttis, or mental oscillations, cease, yet consciousness does not lapse into blankness. Quite the opposite, it shines as self-evident awareness. The transformation is both epistemic and existential: ignorance (avidyā) is dispelled, and one experiences a spiritual transformation into a free being.

Within this clear soteriological and metaphysical picture, Patañjali’s introduction of Īśvara, a “special puruṣa,” or personal deity, untouched by karmic bondage, seems offbeat. Unlike the omnipotent creator-God of theistic Vedānta, a rivalrous darśana, Īśvara in Yoga is not the cause of the universe but a paradigmatic form of consciousness, eternally liberated and perfectly pure. Devotion to this ideal (Īśvara-praṇidhāna) serves as a powerful aid to concentration, offering a psychological and emotional focal point for practitioners. In this sense, Yoga accommodates personal religiosity without depending on divine grace because, as it seems, Īśvara functions as an existential exemplar rather than an intervening deity.

The Eightfold Path: A Stairway to Heaven

Central to Patañjali’s Yoga is the aṣṭāṅga, or eight-limbed path, articulated in the Sādhana Pāda of the Yoga Sūtras. While often misunderstood in the West as primarily a set of moral guidelines or physical exercises, the eight limbs constitute carefully structured psychological guidelines designed to refine the mind (citta) and facilitate the experiential recognition of pure consciousness (puruṣa). Rather than a linear progression, the path is dialectical. Each limb both presupposes and reinforces the others, creating a mutually supportive system that gradually disentangles awareness from the oscillations of the mind (vṛttis).

The first two limbs, yama and niyama, cultivate ethical and inner discipline. Yama, or moral restraints, governs the practitioner’s outward conduct and relationships with others, emphasizing nonviolence (ahiṃsā), truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), celibacy or moderation (brahmacarya), and non-possessiveness (aparigraha). Niyama, the inward observances, focuses on personal cultivation through purity (śauca), contentment (santoṣa), austerity (tapas), study (svādhyāya), and devotion or surrender to the divine (īśvara-praṇidhāna).

Devotion to Īśvara (īśvara-praṇidhāna), incorporated within the niyama stage of the Eightfold Path, functions as a psychological and spiritual support: by focusing the mind on this pure exemplar, the practitioner cultivates steadiness, surrender, and trust. Together, these first four practices prepare the mind and body for deeper meditative engagement.

The next three limbs, namely āsana, prāṇāyāma, and pratyahara, stabilize the body and senses. Āsana refers not to acrobatics but to posture: achieving comfort and stability so that bodily restlessness does not disturb meditation. Prāṇāyāma regulates vital energy through breath control, harmonizing physiological and subtle systems. Pratyāhāra, or withdrawal of the senses, redirects attention inward, severing habitual attachments to sensory stimuli and creating the conditions for focused awareness.

Finally, the last three limbs, called dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi, lead to direct experiential insight. Dhāraṇā is the cultivation of concentrated focus on a single object, while dhyāna allows uninterrupted meditation, a continuous flow of attention free from distraction. Samādhi, the culmination, integrates subject and object in complete absorption, dissolving the duality between perceiver and perceived. In this state, the practitioner witnesses the mind’s modifications without attachment, achieving the clarity necessary for liberation (kaivalya).

By focusing predominantly on physical exercise or superficial wellness, many Western interpretations overlook Yoga’s philosophical rigor and soteriological purpose. Patañjali’s eightfold path does not merely amount to practices for bodily fitness or ethical living.

Yoga and the Problem of Mental Causation

The central problem for the Yoga tradition, as for modern philosophy of mind, is to explain how consciousness, which is immaterial and inert, can appear to participate in the causal order of nature. Patañjali’s solution, inherited from Sāṃkhya to some extent, is to treat consciousness not as a causal force but as a condition for manifestation. Puruṣa does not act upon prakṛti. Instead, prakṛti unfolds and performs through proximity to puruṣa.

This asymmetrical relation sounds a bit like the “hard problem” of consciousness introduced in 1996 by David Chalmers. That is the issue of how subjective awareness arises in a physical world governed by causal laws. The Yoga account resists reductionism by positing that awareness is a distinct ontological principle, irreducible to, and not originating from, the material substrate.

The Yoga conception of puruṣa as pure luminosity, or consciousness without intentional content, finds a close analogue in modern discussions of qualia, the intrinsic “what-it’s-like” character of experience. Thomas Nagel’s (1974) classic argument about the impossibility of knowing “what it is like to be a bat” captures the same insight: that subjective awareness cannot be exhaustively described in objective, third-person terms. By distinguishing between the mutable mental states (vṛttis) and the unchanging witness that illumines them, Patañjali’s system anticipates a proto-phenomenological view of mind, one preoccupied with the first-person perspective and awareness.

Consciousness, for Yoga, is not defined by its functions or outputs. Still, by its very capacity to reveal, it is something akin to the inner light that makes both experience and knowledge possible.

Vaiśeṣika is one of six philosophical schools or darśanas. The common denominator among all schools was the acceptance of the authority of the Vedas and the idea that true knowledge enables achieving salvation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara). Vaiśeṣika, however, offered a naturalistic framework, classifying entities into categories (padārthas) and positing atoms (paramāṇu) as the building blocks of matter. Although in our Western intellectual landscape we associate Democritus as the father of atomism, who paved the way for discoveries in 20th-century physics, the metaphysics of Vaiśeṣika is oddly modern. Although there is textual evidence that Democritus, as well as other Presocratic thinkers, traveled to the East, it is hard to establish direct connections.

The Invention of Vaiśeṣika: When, Where, Who?

Vaiśeṣika takes its name from the Sanskrit word viśeṣa, meaning “particularity” or “distinction,” and referring to existing, different, innumerable, individual entities. Its central concern is how to classify and explain reality in its most basic constituents.

Traditionally traced to Kaṇāda Kashyapa (6th‒2nd century BC), a sage sometimes described as a “particle-eater” (kaṇa meaning particle or grain), the foundational text, the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra, lays out the categories of being and a theory of atomism. This text prioritizes metaphysics and ontology over epistemology. Legend has it that Kaṇāda began his reflections while observing the smallest particles of food that fell from a ritual offering, marveling that even these minute fragments had structure and significance. Such stories, while apocryphal, capture the spirit of the school: a fascination with the infinitely small and the systematic.

However, later commentaries, such as those by Praśastapāda (5th century AD), Śrīdhara (10th century AD), and Udayana (11th century AD), contributed further refinements, most notably in integrating Vaiśeṣika metaphysics with the Nyāya syllogistic system and arguments for the existence of God. It’s for this reason that Vaiśeṣika’s epistemology, though it provides the firm footing for its metaphysical speculations, has rarely taken center stage.

Interestingly, this darśana positioned itself squarely against the entire philosophical and theological landscape, challenging both the orthodox (āstika) schools that affirmed the Vedas and the heterodox (nāstika) systems that rejected them. Early Buddhist philosophers denied the existence of enduring substances, insisting that what we perceive are fleeting bundles of qualities. Vaiśeṣika responded with realism: if the world were nothing but fleeting impressions, they argued, then stability, causality, and knowledge itself would be impossible.

Sāṃkhya, one of the six darśanas, proposed a rival vision of reality, dividing existence into puruṣa (pure consciousness) and prakṛti (primordial matter). Vaiśeṣika countered that such dualism needlessly multiplied entities (this might remind you of Ockham’s razor).

The Central Concepts of Vaiśeṣika

Naturally, we will first cover the concept of an atom. According to Kaṇāda’s Vaiśeṣika Sūtra, all material substances (dravya) are ultimately composed of indivisible, eternal atoms (aṇu). The atoms of earth, water, fire, and air possess distinct qualities and combine in specific configurations to form dyads (dvyaṇuka) and triads (tryaṇuka), which in turn constitute perceptible, macroscopic objects.

Unlike the atomism of Democritus, however, Kaṇāda’s theory is not mechanistic but teleological and ethical in structure. The combination and separation of atoms occur not merely through physical contact but also under the influence of adṛṣṭa, an unseen causal principle often identified with the moral residue of past actions (karma). Thus, cosmological order and moral law are unified within a single explanatory framework.

The atomism of Vaiśeṣika cannot be understood apart from its broader ontology of padārthas (“categories” or “reals”). Kaṇāda enumerated six fundamental categories, later expanded to seven, through which all existent entities can be described: dravya (substance), guṇa (quality), karman (motion), sāmānya (universal, the common nature by which many things can be grouped under one class), viśeṣa (particularity), samavāya (inherence), and later abhāva (non-existence). Atoms, in fact, exemplify this classification of categories.

They qualify as dravya (substance) because they serve as the substrates in which qualities (guṇa) and motions (karman) inhere. Each atom also possesses its own viśeṣa (particularity), a distinctive feature that distinguishes it from all other atoms, even of the same type. Their combination and separation, which underlie all physical transformations, are instances of karman (motion). The connections among these categories are governed by samavāya, a relation of inseparable inherence that binds qualities to their substances and parts to the wholes they constitute.

Eastern and Western Categories

Though separated by geography and intellectual lineage, Vaiśeṣika’s padārtha classification and Aristotle’s Categories reveal striking conceptual convergences. Both systems aim to provide an exhaustive taxonomy of being, understood in Aristotle’s terms as an ontological grammar underlying all predication and knowledge.

Aristotle’s ten categories, namely substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion, serve as modes in which a subject may be said to exist. Similarly, Kaṇāda’s six (later seven) padārthas, namely dravya (substance), guṇa (quality), karman (motion), sāmānya (universal, the common nature by which many things can be grouped under one class), viśeṣa (particularity), samavāya (inherence), and later abhāva (non-existence), seek to classify all that can be real or knowable. Both traditions begin from substance as ontologically primary, with qualities and motions depending upon it for their existence.

Yet Vaiśeṣika’s inclusion of samavāya (inseparable inherence) as a distinct category marks a notable departure: it provides a metaphysical account of the unity between substances and their attributes, a problem Aristotle leaves implicit in his notion of substantial form. Aristotle’s focus on relation and quantity has no strict analogue in Kaṇāda’s system, where these are subsumed under qualities and motions.

The brief comparison thus shows us two parallel yet independently developed realist metaphysics: Aristotle’s categories articulate the grammatical structure of language as a mirror of being, while Vaiśeṣika’s padārthas delineate the constituents of being itself as the foundation for knowledge.

The Building Blocks of Knowledge: Vaiśeṣika‘s Realist Epistemology

Although Vaiśeṣika is primarily a metaphysical system, its ontology presupposes a distinctive realist epistemology. Knowledge (jñāna) arises through genuine contact (sannikarṣa) between the self (ātman) and external reality. Originally, Vaiśeṣika recognized only two valid means of obtaining knowledge (pramāṇas): perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna). Later, under Nyāya influence, it incorporated additional pramāṇas such as verbal testimony (śabda).

Be it as it may, true knowledge may stem either from the contact of sense organs with substances that are, with the number and spatial arrangement of atoms and their qualities embedded into particular things, or from syllogistic reasoning when it comes to unperceived relations and entities.

For Kaṇāda and later commentators such as Praśastapāda, the categories (substance, quality, motion, generality, particularity, inherence, and absence) are not merely linguistic conveniences but ontological commitments. Knowing something correctly means recognizing the appropriate category to which it belongs and understanding the lawful relations that connect it to others. The epistemological project, therefore, mirrors the metaphysical one: just as reality is atomically composed, so too is knowledge built from discrete, veridical instances of human cognitive capacities that correspond to the world’s actual constituents.

The Relevance of Vaiśeṣika for Analytic Philosophy

So far, we have covered the relatively evident and uncontroversial connections between ancient philosophy, most notably Democritus and Aristotle, and Vaiśeṣika. One of the most philosophically provocative features of later Vaiśeṣika thought is its systematic treatment of the seventh category named abhāva, or nonexistence. Its introduction in later commentaries was no mere metaphysical curiosity: abhāva addressed the problem of how we know that something is not there. This question resonates strongly with contemporary discussions of negation, reference failure, and negative existential claims.

Vaiśeṣika thinkers distinguished four kinds of abhāva: prāgabhāva (prior absence), pradhvaṃsābhāva (posterior absence), anyonyābhāva (mutual absence or difference), and atyantābhāva (absolute absence). These distinctions enabled them to analyze statements such as “The offering bowl is absent on the altar” with remarkable logical precision, accounting for the temporal, relational, and categorical nuances of negation.

Moreover, absence is a legitimate ontological category required for the coherence of discourse and perception alike. To perceive the absence of an offering bowl, for instance, is not to hallucinate a void but to apprehend a structured lack within a determinate field. When a householder enters the courtyard at dawn and sees that the offering bowl is absent on the altar, she does not merely fail to see the bowl. According to Vaiśeṣika, she literally perceives and, if asked, later recounts its absence.

Such insights resemble debates in analytic philosophy about the ontological status of negative facts and the semantics of non-referring terms. D.M. Armstrong similarly defends the reality of negative facts, arguing that statements such as “the cat is not on the mat” correspond to actual facts in the world that constrain and structure reality.

On the other hand, Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions grappled with explaining how statements involving non-referring terms, such as “The present king of France is bold,” can have truth conditions without positing non-existent entities. Vaiśeṣika anticipates these concerns centuries earlier, demonstrating that certain philosophical puzzles transcend time and culture and belong to humanity as a whole.

What are you thinking about when scrolling that Instagram feed? Do you think everything here is real? Or maybe it is an illusion we confuse with reality? French thinker Jean Baudrillard calls this “hyperreality.” It is a state where illusions and simulations are more real than real life. When we create these online images, we start thinking that these picture-perfect online figures are who we are in real life. But the reality is different. And Baudrillard’s hypothesis is applicable here and now as never before. Why? That is the question we need to explore.

What Is Hyperreality? Baudrillard’s Theory Made Simple

A philosophical concept created by Jean Baudrillard, hyperreality is when some things that copy reality seem to be more real than reality itself, for example, photos, videos, and filtered social media posts. When we are looking at them, well, we cannot say for sure whether they are real or created by AI.

Baudrillard explained it using four stages of what he calls the “sign” or symbol. Stage one is a sign that reflects reality. For example, it can be your portrait. Stage two is a sign that disturbs that reality. Here, we can talk about a flattering photo of yourself. Stage three is the sign that pretends to represent something real, but it itself is not. Think about a stock image of a smiling family. Finally, the last stage is pure simulation. It is something that has no connection to any kind of reality. It is just a set of symbols referring to other symbols. Social media influencer culture is a great illustration of this.

To explore this issue deeper, one can analyze Disneyland. All of us have heard about it. And many of us wanted to visit or did visit it in our childhood. Is it an artificial, idealized town that looks better than any actual town does? It certainly is. Disneyland isn’t a real and functioning place to live and work.

Or let’s take any TV show, like The Bachelor. It has a script and spliced-together footage to make it seem like the events of the show are happening. And what about those juicy and yummy burgers in ads? When you actually order one in the restaurant, it is very sad-looking.

According to Baudrillard, such simulations are today just…everywhere. Instead of dealing with the real world, we increasingly deal with its images or representations. And they do not often represent reality.

Instagram Filters and the Simulation of the Self

Instagram is a great example of hyperreality. When we post photos there, we do something more than just share them. We put on a performance. Thanks to filters, our skin looks great. And face apps mean every smile is shining. And those quotes under each photo allow us to appear way cooler online.

But the reality is cruel. We do not always show who we really are. We show others who we want to be. And this edited highlights package sounds great with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation: we are copies with no original, clear model.

Yes, Baudrillard argued, images are so important that they take over reality. All our Instagram profiles are so “polished” and filtered that we are shown to be flawless. So, instead of the real “me,” you show those idealized selves in the pursuit of more “likes” and recognition.

Such worries about mistaking an illusion (or shadow) for truth go back at least as far as Plato. And today’s social media fans have an updated version of this metaphor in the Allegory of the Cave. We even start thinking that all other people have the greatest lives, and we are just miserable. And that is the case even if we understand that it is a filtered reality.

This is where imposter syndrome comes in. We feel we are falling short of something that is not real in the first place. And this leads us into confusion. We do not know who we truly are.

So, when Baudrillard said that simulation can replace reality, he was right. We are living today as our Instagram personas rather than our real ones.

Influencers and the Commercialization of the Simulacrum

But what about Instagram influencers? They are, in fact, another problem. They are not only living their lives and showing it on the web, they are selling their lives to brands. Nothing is ever personal because everything can be promotional. A morning coffee is not a moment of pleasure anymore. It’s content. A vacation is not a rest, it’s an ad for a resort.

Influences show their lives so brilliantly. They have the greatest outfits and brightest smiles, seemingly at any time. This, Baudrillard would say, is the simulacrum. Simply put, it is a copy of life so polished that it replaces reality itself.

Experiences get commercialized here. A “cozy evening in” may have a candle company as a sponsor. Even emotions such as joy or vulnerability get marketed as #relatable moments of sharing. And this is what Baudrillard was afraid of. Consumption is more important than the object itself. Only Instagram experiences are important.

Let’s get back to ancient philosophy. Do you remember what Epicurus said about joy and pleasure? He stated that they’re derived from mundane pleasures, and should be experienced firsthand, not commercialized.

But contemporary happiness depends on finding the greatest location for photos and more brand partnerships. We are asked not only to exist, but to do it tastefully, making everything just a performance. We no longer perceive reality. We just scroll through its glossy imitation.

The Collapse of Meaning in the Scroll

Scroll, scroll, scroll…that’s the beat of contemporary existence. But if we do it every day, every hour, every second, all we see in our lives are photos, memes, videos, and ads. How does it affect us? We become numb. And Jean Baudrillard names this the implosion of meaning.

All we see on Instagram is similar content. Nothing really stands out anymore. There is so much news, jokes, tragedies, and trending dances that it becomes quite difficult to decide what really counts in life.

Frequently, we forget what we do on Instagram at all. And Baudrillard warned us about this. He mentioned that in this sea of signals and signs, meaning breaks down. The world becomes a single spectacle.

Many centuries ago, Socrates was of the same persuasion. Do you remember his questioning? He believed that having things written down (rather than spoken) would lead people to appear wise without being wise. He was like no other, afraid of such fake knowledge. Just think what he would have to say about TikTok philosophers.

Yes, social media promises a connection between people. But what does it do in reality? Our deep thoughts can become nothing in a sea of trending topics. So are we really ever heard? Or are we simply adrift in a scroll?

Escaping the Simulation: Is a Return to “Real” Possible?

There is no single answer to this question. When we look at it through Baudrillard’s lens, he would probably say “no.” Why? Because we are already too deep in simulation. We cannot understand what is real and what is staged and filtered.

But others may disagree. Yes, many people are trying to return their “authenticity.” Some take a “digital detox.” Some post just a few photos a month. Some share photos only with “close friends.” And some just delete social media apps altogether.

Thoreau, centuries ago, was writing about leaving society behind to find a place in the woods to rediscover what is truly important. That is like a little escape from reality.

But what about Baudrillard? Why was he so negative when answering this question? Because he saw hyperreality everywhere. Still, maybe if we know we are living in a simulation, we can learn to use it mindfully. Because not everything on the web is artificial. There are many real things, we just need to dive deeper.

So, is a return to the “real” ever possible? Yes, if we use Instagram mindfully. We should only post something with a deep sense. We should live for ourselves, not for others. And we should avoid staging every moment, but learn to enjoy them.

So, What Is Baudrillard’s Hyperreality and the Age of Instagram?

Baudrillard’s hyperreality theory lets us analyze Instagram differently. We see that it is not just an app for fun. It is a place where real and fake blur. We use it to portray ourselves as similar to other people, not who we are in real life.

Our pictures have many filters. Our accounts are sometimes styled by marketing experts. And what we do is follow influencers and want to look and live as they do. But these are all fake copies of reality. We are somewhere in the middle between two versions of ourselves: who we are and who we show off.

Just think about it, do your posts show what you’re doing? Or are you just trying to make them look great to get more “likes”? Are you trying to make friends? Or do you just want to create a digital “performance” so others become jealous?

According to Baudrillard, maybe we are now in a place where there are only copies (signs) without things being copied from (originals). Our online selves matter more than our offline ones. But still, we have a choice.

Instagram is not just a funny app to show off how we live. It has turned into something more sinister. It is a force that warps our sense of self. And we should take this notion into account if we do not want to live illusory lives.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a prominent German political philosopher of Jewish origin and a 20th-century theorist. Her work spanned a wide range of topics, including politics, power, totalitarianism, human rights, and the nature of evil. Arendt’s intellectual contributions were shaped by her personal experiences as a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany during World War II. She closely observed the rise of totalitarian regimes and the horrors of the Shoah/Holocaust, which profoundly influenced her thinking and writings. That’s how her most notable work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, was created. In this book, she offers her controversial analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, examining the bureaucratic nature of evil and the complicity of ordinary individuals in committing atrocities. What exactly does the “banality of evil” mean? Let’s find out.

1. Who Was Adolf Eichmann?

To fully grasp Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil, one must first confront the man at its center: Adolf Eichmann. Adolf Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi official who played a central role in orchestrating the Holocaust, the systematic persecution and murder of six million Jews during World War II. He joined the Nazi Party at a young age in the middle of 1930s, and became a member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the paramilitary organization responsible for carrying out Hitler’s policies.

Eichmann was responsible for coordinating the deportation of Jews from various countries to concentration and extermination camps, where they were overworked and murdered. In other words, he played a crucial role in the Holocaust as a whole. After World War II, Eichmann escaped capture and went into hiding in Argentina under a false identity, where he lived for over a decade. However, he was eventually tracked down by the Israeli government in 1960. Eichmann was then abducted and brought to Israel to stand trial for his crimes. The trial, which took place in 1961 in Jerusalem, garnered international attention and served as a platform to expose the atrocities of the Holocaust. This is why Arendt’s book is titled Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Arendt did not merely describe the trial; she developed an original political philosophy based on it. Arendt begins the book with general observations on the defendant Adolf Eichmann’s personality and motives, and later presents her philosophical perspective and conclusions about the trial as a whole. Accordingly, we will follow the same narrative approach. Let’s see what Arendt had to say about Eichmann.

2. Eichmann Believes He Followed the Categorical Imperative

As is the case in any court hearing, Eichmann was first given the opportunity to speak for himself. In other words, he was given the chance to defend himself and prove that he is not guilty of the crimes for which he is being punished. In his speech, Eichmann states that he has always sought to follow Kant’s Categorical Imperative. The categorical imperative is an ethical principle, or moral rule, proposed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that articulates how we should act if we aspire to be moral beings. This principle holds that we should “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” So in a way, the principle is not only a moral guide for the individual to distinguish right from wrong, but a universal law that everyone should follow.

However, it is hardly the case that Eichmann simply followed a universal moral law. Arendt pointed out that Eichmann misunderstood Kant’s categorical imperative completely. She argued that Eichmann failed to recognize that the legislator of this universal moral law is morality itself, which is to say that it is we, ourselves. In Eichmann’s formulation of the categorical imperative, the legislator is Hitler, as Arendt noticed.

However, Eichmann maintained during the trial that his opinion of Hitler changed with the implementation of the Final Solution (the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews). In consulting his own thoughts, he realized he was no longer the master of his actions. Yet, by that point, it was too late to alter his course.

Arendt remarked that Eichmann’s inability to think for himself is also evident in his speeches at the trial. He demonstrated his unrealistic worldview through the lack of communication skills outside official records, bureaucratic tone, and nazi clichés. Although Eichmann may have had anti-Semitic leanings, Arendt said that he did not display “the strong hatred of the Jews.” As it seemed, he personally had nothing against them. In fact, Eichmann had many friends who were fanatic anti-Semites, but he was not one of them. Thus, Arendt pointed out that his actions were not led by hatred and malice, but by blinded devotion to the regime and his need to belong somewhere, to be a part of something.

3. The Observations of Eichmann

Arendt noted that Eichmann is not particularly intelligent. He was not able to finish high school, like his siblings did. His father handed him his first job at his own mining company, and later he found his first stable job in sales through a family friend. Eichmann’s recollection was also shown to be inaccurate on multiple occasions during the trial. He demonstrated a poor memory: whenever the judge asked him questions, he could not recall the events or when they occurred. Instead, he could only reference moments significant only to him, which were important moments from his career, and not the direct events that he was being tried.

As Arendt remarked, Eichmann’s frequent self-contradictions revealed a fundamental inability to think from any perspective but his own. This cognitive void was so profound that, in Arendt’s view, he would have preferred the infamy of execution as a major war criminal over the indignity of living as a nobody.

During his pretrial detention, the Israeli government assigned six psychologists to examine Eichmann, and none of them found any signs of mental illness. One psychologist even claimed that his attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was highly desirable, while another expert said that the only unusual thing about Eichmann is that he is more “normal” than the average person. Additionally, a minister who regularly visited Eichmann after each hearing stated that Eichmann was “a man with very positive ideas.”

4. Arendt’s Conclusion on Eichmann

From these statements, many people have concluded that events such as the Holocaust can make even ordinary people commit horrific crimes with adequate and simple hints at conducive periods or places, but Arendt strongly disagreed with this interpretation. Instead, she insisted that moral choice remains present even under a regime of totalitarianism and that this choice has political consequences even when the one who is making the choice is politically powerless.

Arendt thus ended the book with the following statement:

“And just as you (Eichmann) supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the Earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhibit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the Earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.” (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963)

5. On the Legality of the Trial

After discussing Eichmann, Arendt highlighted several aspects of the trial, its legality, and wider political context.

Arendt first mentioned that Eichmann’s abduction from Argentina was an illegal act of state, and that he was subsequently tried in Israel despite being accused of no crimes committed on Israeli soil. Israel signed the 1950 UN Genocide Convention, which rejected universal jurisdiction and required that defendants be tried “in the territory of which the act was committed” or by an international tribunal. The court in Jerusalem did not apply any of these options, as Arendt rightly remarked.

Second, she described the trial as a “show” organized by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. She argued that Ben-Gurion intended to shift the trial’s focus away from Eichmann’s individual actions and toward the collective suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

However, she credited the presiding judge, Moshe Landau, because she said that he did his best not to turn the trial into a show. This was quite a difficult thing to do due to Ben-Gurion’s high position and the thousands of journalists who came to Jerusalem to witness and write about the trial.

She added that the trial was also staged in front of an audience, which further complicated the job of the judges. This was because Ben-Gurion had outlined the crimes before the trial started, in a number of articles that were designed to explain why Israel had kidnapped the accused. So, the whole trial reached a level of popularity that nobody wanted to miss.

6. How Did the Trial Go?

Furthermore, Arendt also claimed that many witnesses who were called to testify were not directly related to Eichmann’s actions but instead recounted their personal experiences during the Holocaust. This often diverted attention from the central issues at hand and made the whole trial chaotic, speculative, and therefore, null. This was exactly when the trial started to collapse and turned into a show, as the focus was put on the victims rather than the accused.

Arendt also remarked that Eichmann’s actions were not criminal under the German legislation. At that time, in the eyes of the Third Reich, he was an obedient citizen. In Arendt’s words, he was tried for a “crime in retrospect.”

In the trial, Eichmann stated loud and clear that he did not feel any guilt for the crimes that he had presumably committed. He also said that he did not feel any hatred towards Jews or towards those who condemn him. His attorney, Robert Servatius, said that Eichmann was simply doing his job: “He did his duty; he not only obeyed orders, but he also obeyed the law.” However, it’s important to mention here that although Arendt agreed with this statement, she still considered Eichmann’s crimes to be horrible and thought, like the majority of the people in the courtroom, that he should be hanged. This leads her to her famous concept, namely the banality of evil. Let’s finally see what Arendt means by that.

7. The Banality of Evil

Arendt introduced the concept of the “banality of evil” by the end of the book. As has been shown, Arendt argued that Eichmann, rather than being a monstrously evil figure, embodied a chillingly ordinary and bureaucratic mindset. She contended that his actions were not motivated by a deep-seated hatred or sadistic tendencies but rather by a combination of obliviousness, obedience to authority, and a desire to fulfill his assigned role within the Nazi regime.

Arendt’s explanation was that Eichmann was neither a fanatic nor a psychopath, but an extreme form of the ordinary person who relied on clichés in his defense rather than thinking for himself, and was motivated by personal professional advancement rather than ideology.

It has always been considered that individuals who commit crimes are inherently evil. If we were tasked with drawing an evil man, it would surely be a figure with sharp teeth and an imagination capable of the most horrible acts. This is an image deeply embedded in our culture. However, Arendt disapproved of this conception, arguing that even ordinary people can commit horrendous crimes. This is why she formulated the term “the banality of evil,” which suggests that evil manifests when people abdicate their moral responsibility and blindly conform to higher authorities, as Eichmann did.

The term “banal” itself suggests something ordinary or even ignorant, standing in stark contrast to the conventional image of a grand masterplan or a vile mission. In this sense, banality does not mean that Eichmann’s deeds were mundane, nor that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us; rather, it implies that he was driven by a kind of thoughtlessness that is unexceptional at its core.

Madness is one of the most misunderstood experiences in modern society. In some cultures, it is considered a crisis that signals the beginning of Shamanic initiation. In others, it is a cause for ostracism and dehumanization. R. D. Laing understood madness. Unlike his contemporaries, he never lost sight of the humanity of those undergoing states of psychosis. Severely critical of modern psychiatry, Laing designed an experiment aimed at harvesting the fruits of madness in a safe and supportive environment. Whether the study was brilliant or outrageously unethical is still the subject of continuous debate.

How R.D. Laing Understood Madness

D. Laing considered madness a perfectly rational adjustment to a mad and dysfunctional world. In a society that values suppression over expression, conformity over authenticity, and homogeneity over diversity, madness is not only natural, but inevitable. Laing considered what society calls ‘sane’ the true mental illness, for how can humans be well adjusted to a society whose tenets are fundamentally against human nature? As he notably argued in The Politics of Experience, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” (Laing, 1967).

As one of the founders of the anti-psychiatry movement, Laing called for a radical reassessment of how we view sanity and challenged the alienating and derogatory assumptions that predominate common perceptions of mental illness. “Our ‘normal’ ‘adjusted’ state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, many of them so special and so dangerous to the social order” he continued (Laing, 1967).

Laing viewed states of psychosis as natural ways of coping with an insane world, our psyche’s innate attempt at healing and rebalancing itself.

Instead of throwing psychiatric labels, he tried to listen to those undergoing these states, legitimizing their experience and helping them navigate it as it presents itself. He argued that the vivid world experienced by those labeled ‘insane’ is qualitatively identical to the inner world of those considered ‘sane’, the only difference is that the former lost their ability to conceal it from others. Like Carl Jung, Laing did not consider psychosis a problem that abundant doses of medication must suppress, but an opportunity, if manouvered correctly, for metanoia — a fundamental psychological transformation.

Why the Kingsley Hall Experiment Was Revolutionary

The Kingsley Hall experiment was revolutionary because it challenged the psychiatric model of mental illness. In 1965, Laing founded the Philadelphia Association with a group of colleagues who shared the same ethos. He didn’t only strive to change the general perception of what is considered ‘mental illness’, but offered a proposal to change the entire model of psychiatry. In 1965, the Philadelphia Association leased Kingsley Hall to house a community of people experiencing states of psychosis.

Laing and his colleagues also moved to the establishment and treated residents with utmost dignity and respect, refraining from shock therapy, medical interventions, and typical therapeutic approaches characterized by coercion or repression. News of the unorthodox experiment echoed worldwide, attracting psychologists, celebrities, and artists from all walks of life. The Kingsley Hall experiment became a revolution that destabilized the status quo of psychiatric institutions, creating a ripple effect into a counterculture and anti-psychiatry movement. However, just like any revolution, it was met with an equal amount of enthusiasm and hostility.

Why Did the Kingsley Hall Experiment End?

According to the Philadelphia Association, the Kingsley Hall experiment ended due to the expiry of their lease in 1970. However, by that time, numerous reports had been filed against the experiment that resulted in negative publicity, which could have contributed to that decision. Although the experiment ended, members of the Kingsley Hall community lived to tell their story, revealing how their experience has deeply influenced the course of their lives. Most notably, Mary Barnes, a nurse who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, recounted her transformative experience in her co-authored book, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness. In Kingsley Hall, Barnes was allowed to regress into an infantile state completely.

Rather than suppress her impulse, her psychiatrist, Joseph Berke, encouraged her to give in to the experience fully. After painting a wall with her feces, Barnes discovered a medium that would help her heal and completely change her life – art. The state took its own organic course, but eventually, Barnes left Kingsley Hall a transformed person and pursued a career in art. Most importantly, she became a testimony of the true potential of R. D. Laing’s approach to healing.

The Kingsley Hall experiment received as much negative criticism as it was praised. While many have rebuked the ethics behind the experiment, we must wonder whether a perceived failure of application is sufficient to invalidate the ideas that form its basis. The legacy of R. D. Laing does not lie in the perceived success or failure of the Kingsley Hall experiment, but in his lucid and humanitarian understanding of one of the most misunderstood experiences in the world.

While an abundance of theories about photography emerged throughout the 20th century, they can sometimes be limited in terms of their application to contemporary digital images. Photography fundamentally intensified the presence of images in our lives, but the digital image has become ever-present in daily experience. While photography initially increased the prominence of images, it is the digital image that has truly saturated our daily experience. Czech-born Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) offered an account of the image as a means of understanding the world around us. Unsurprisingly, we find a fundamental concern in his works with how changes in image technology affect our experience of the world.

The Image in Human Experience

Flusser approaches images from a phenomenological perspective and is concerned with the nature of human experience, particularly inheriting Heidegger’s concerns about the role of technology in shaping our existence. He develops this understanding of how we experience technology through an anthropological account of communication and media, in which the image is never experienced in isolation but always in relation to language, culture, and technology.

Caught up in these relations, an image is best understood as a signifying surface that allows us to make sense of the world around us. Images act as coded surfaces that mediate between human mental experience and the external world, to which we may not necessarily have direct access. Images are how we derive meaning from the world, both in terms of how we receive these representations and in terms of how we then imbue them with further significance.

This means that images are closely related to two fundamental aspects of human experience: imagination and conceptual thought. For Flusser, the imagination is the fundamental capacity for the production of images and for us to find meaning in them beyond the surface that is presented to us. Images are the fundamental means by which we represent the world; writing, in turn, allows us to think abstractly beyond visual phenomena. These abstractions are entirely removed from the direct experience of phenomena and demonstrate the emergence of conceptual thought.

Flusser’s understanding of images depends on this relationship between imaginative and conceptual thought, which, in turn, shapes the nature of the image: it becomes more complex as it is caught up in the interplay between imaginative engagement and increasingly complex conceptual thought.

The Photograph as Technical Image

With the rapid spread of mass media, Flusser argued that we cannot think about these mass-produced images as we have traditionally thought about pictures. For him, photographs and TV screens are entwined with technology in a way that makes them fundamentally distinct objects from traditional paintings and drawings. As such, they constitute a new species of image, which he refers to as the technical image.

Technical images are produced by complex programmed technology, which Flusser refers to as the “apparatus.” He showed that some elements of this programming are inherent to their production. Where traditional images precede language and conceptual thought, the technical image emerges within a scientific context permeated by abstract thinking. Traditional images signified phenomena within the world, but the technical image comes to signify abstract scientific concepts about the world. Such characterisation of images is also relevant to contemporary digital media.

This means that technical images do not simply represent the world but also function as “windows” on it through which we experience an increasingly complex existence. When presented with these concepts implicit in the image, we, in turn, project them onto the world as if they were naturally occurring phenomena rather than the products of human thought.

In relation to human thought, the technical image offers more abstract ways of experiencing and theorizing the world, reflecting a shift in consciousness. While we come to understand the world in increasingly complex yet difficult-to-represent ways, the technical image is intended to provide a visual representation of such an abstract and fragmented world.

The Technical Apparatus

To engage with these images as representations of the world, we must understand the apparatuses that produce them and underpin their dissemination globally. The apparatus is a form of technology fundamentally concerned with the symbolic domain of society and abstract thinking, of which the camera is a perfect example. Such apparatuses are programmed to incorporate scientific concepts into the images they produce. This technology operates by imitating human thought, such as numerical calculations, and imbues this into its products. Our projection of ideas onto the world arises because our technology already thinks for us, leading us to presuppose scientific concepts as naturalized phenomena.

Since most of us who interact with modern technology are not necessarily familiar with its internal programming, Flusser characterises the apparatus as a “black box.” Due to this unfamiliarity, we may not realize that the apparatus is performing certain acts of thinking for us. This enigmatic nature compels photographers to take more photographs to explore the capabilities of this technology. It is precisely the obscurity of this component that draws us into realizing the potential of the programming inherent in the apparatus.

With these apparatuses, we get entangled in new relations with technology. For Flusser, the photographer finds themselves caught up in a feedback loop between the camera, which determines what images can be captured, and the images taken, which realise possibilities within the camera’s programming. This relationship between the photographer and the camera program takes the form of a functional unity. This changes how we experience the world, as the photographer encounters phenomena through the technical terms by which the camera may capture them: depth of field, aperture, composition, lighting, and so on.

Technical Images and Mass Media

Technical images are distributed continuously through our contemporary context, in which any surface is potentially a screen for images. Unlike in painting, the notion of the “original” is no longer of great importance, as these images are more concerned with the transmission of information. Flusser takes issue with this devaluation of the objects themselves in favor of the information they carry. Having seen how the photographer enters into a functional unity with the camera, he is concerned that the information within mass culture leads to more intensive control over how media images are interpreted.

Flusser characterizes the distribution of images according to the channels in which they are divided and directed according to the interpretations they are intended to receive. Each photograph is encoded with a different significance depending upon the channel through which it is distributed. We can see this in the way particular photographers work for specific newspapers: they provide photos which are intended to be interpreted in accordance with particular biases implicit within the text of the article.

With this underpinning of mass media, the spectator finds themselves fulfilling the functions of the programming inherent within the image by interpreting it in a particular manner. We interact with images according to a “programmed” imagination that projects abstract concepts onto the world.

With similar fears as Baudrillard’s concern for “hyperreality,” Flusser claims that contemporary events are no longer part of a chain of historical events leading to a future for us, but rather occur with the sole purpose of being captured as images. We can think of social media where meals are prepared for photography rather than for consumption, or of traveling primarily to take selfies at popular tourist locations without exploring the surrounding world.

A Universe of Technical Images

This spread of images affects how we, as humans, experience the world and compels us to reconsider how images exist within it. How does it relate to the world around it? Is it a copy of the world around it? An illusion? An entity within the world? More optimistic than traditional philosophical encounters with images, Flusser sees this universe as offering new creative capacities for us if we engage with such technology critically and intellectually.

In terms of its position in the world, Flusser understands the technical image as creating a certain world of its own, akin to Debord’s critique of the lived world becoming a distanced spectacle. Images are creative entities that affect the world around them. The world comes to enact what is represented in images, becoming an effect of potentials within the programming of visual technology. In this sense, the world reflects the technical images that circulate and come to play a central role in existence.

This impacts human experience: technical images shape new modes of human perception. This new perception is the capacity to envision, in which the various abstractions emerging from the modern world come to be represented within concrete experience. This is to move from the imperceptible abstractions of modern life, such as the molecular structure of the world, back to the concrete experiences they constitute. This is to engage with the world at a superficial level: technical images require the viewer to keep their distance and not break down every element of the digital image to ensure its continued operation. Envisioning, then, is a programmed procedure that is induced within the spectator, but this is grounded in what can be considered an envisioning gesture carried out by the body.

Critiquing the Technical Image

Flusser voices concerns about the passivity that can develop when we depend upon technology to think for us. Any critical engagement with technical images must take into account the technological conditions and programming from which they emerge. Flusser sees the potential for the channels that distribute images to reinforce hierarchical power structures, insofar as these images all emerge from individual sources.

These sources determine what images can and cannot circulate. Such channels also become directed towards individuals on isolated devices, such as smartphones and TVs, which risks breaking down collective discussions and communal engagement with media.

To develop a critique of the technical image, Flusser emphasizes how we understand the technology underpinning mass media. While it is important to critique the material conditions that produce images and demonstrate the interests of those in power, this thinking must go further. We must also come to terms with the image’s automatic nature, that is, the fact that visual technology can develop as an end in itself, becoming complex to a point that we struggle to keep up with it.

Flusser proposes a humanistic critique of such technology, resisting the temptation to view machines replacing humans and instead emphasizing that such technology remains subject to human control. Against certain strands of transhuman thought, he seeks to remind us of the capacity of human agency in the face of technological mystification.

This critique is intended to emphasize the valuable elements of media that enable more democratic collective engagement with the world. In a media-saturated world, Flusser argues that any political change must involve the symbolic domain of images. As such, he aims to emphasize the ways in which media connect people, in contrast to the potentially isolating effects of such technology.