Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

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case we think or perceive erroneously. Nevertheless the thesis that form is in the
mind is common to both philosophies.
Subhutu adopts a position which is equally open to an idealist construal when
he says:
'no distinction is to be made between all things and Maya or a dream; there is indeed
between them no dualistic contrast' (ZB3 266)
This claim admits of a Cartesian interpretation. Descartes, in the First Meditation,
entertains the sceptical logical possibility that the whole of his life is a dream. It
follows on this account that 'all things', or at least what we take to be 'all things',
would be a dream. Although Descartes' ontology is mind-body dualism, which is
inconsistent with idealism, the sceptical possibility of life being a dream entails
idealism because it implies that the physical objects that we ordinarily take to
constitute the external world have only a psychological existence. Although
Subhutu's claim does not rule out the Cartesian interpretation, there is nothing to
force it either. To see this we may adopt a suggestion of Alan Watts. Watts says
'To say [...] that the world of facts and events is maya is to say that the facts and
events are terms of measurement rather than realities of nature' (WZ 39)
On this understanding we make a mistake, a pervasive and systematic mistake. We
mistake our world-picture for the world. We mistake clock time for real time. We
mistake feet and inches for physical distances. We mistake words and concepts for
real things. We mistake our imaginings for the attitudes or behaviour of other
people. In Watts' acute image, we eat the menu.
If we eat the menu, it is not surprising that we feel uncomfortable. One reason why
eating the menu is a mistake is that we neglect the meal. Living in one’s imagination
is not real living. On this view , maya is a representation, but not an accurate
representation. Our problem is that we think the representation is itself reality.
A menu is of course written in a language. Watts thinks that language is essential to
Maya:
'words are the frames , the meshes of its net' (WZ 45)
It is a familiar thought, from, for example Augustine, Vico and Kant, that the way in
which the world is presented to us partly depends upon our linguistic taxonomy. In
the crude and hackneyed metaphor, as a fishing net lets some fish pass through but
captures others, so a language allows thought and talk about some things but not
others. Just as a fishing catch might not be a representative sample of all the kinds of
fish there are in the sea, so the ontology facilitated by a language might not be a true
depiction of all there is. Just as the fish caught in our net are the only ones that break
the surface of the water, so only the objects depicted in our language break into