Imagine coming across a red flower—you will experience it from your own first-person perspective: you may smell its scent, recall seeing it before, and feel serene. Seeing the same flower, I might feel very different: upset, perhaps, because it reminds me of my ex-partner’s shoddy Valentine’s bouquet. The same outward phenomenon here elicits two distinct experiences that are unique to the person having them, and we observe that the experience is unavailable to any other person’s perspective. I might describe my feelings to you, but you can never experience them exactly as I do. Call this the assumption of the “privacy” of our first-personal perspectives: a first-personal, insider perspective cannot be experienced with another person’s perspective.
Not only is this assumption of privacy ubiquitous in Euro-American philosophy in the form of the view that we have privileged access to our own mental states (e.g. Locke 1688/1959; James 1890/1950; Heil 1988), but it is also at the root of one of contemporary philosophy’s most famous and pressing problems—the hard problem of consciousness: the problem of how consciousness arises from physical matter. The hard problem assumes that there is a subjective and private feeling to conscious experience that differentiates it from physical processes: there is something it is like to be in a conscious state of looking at a red flower, which a different subjective consciousness cannot know, whereas physical processes can be known objectively and third-personally (Chalmers 1996; Chalmers 2016; Jackson 1986; Lee 2024; Nagel 1974). Startlingly, this assumption of the privacy of first-personal perspective is denied by a prominent tenth-century Indian philosopher named Utpaladeva.
Utpaladeva was a foundational Indian philosopher of the Pratyabhijñā/Recognition school of Kashmiri Śaivism, who articulated an idealist worldview in which a universal consciousness named Śiva (pronounced “Shiva”) creates our ordinary perspectives through His thought alone (see Pratyabhijñā: Dyczkowski 1987; Ratié 2011; Singh 1985; Torella 2013). Utpaladeva challenges the foundational assumption of the privacy of perspectives in the context of his endorsement of cosmopsychism, the view that the universe is conscious and that our ordinary conscious experiences derive from the universe’s experiences. For example, your experience of the red flower is due to the universe experiencing the red flower in the same way that you do.
However, cosmopsychism encounters what philosophers call the subject decombination problem, which requires a solution if cosmopsychism is to be a successful theory of consciousness. The subject decombination problem poses the following challenge to the cosmopsychist: how can a universal consciousness experience my ordinary conscious experience given that both our perspectives are private? The universal consciousness cannot experience the red flower in the same way I experience it, just as you and I cannot share the same perspective of the red flower (Chalmers 2016; Mendelovici 2019). Consequently, cosmopsychism leads to its own version of the hard problem of consciousness: if a universal consciousness does not co-experience our first-personal experiences, then how do our private perspectives arise (Albahari 2019; Coleman 2014; Miller 2018; Shani 2022)?
Albahari (2019) further specifies this in two perspective problems: a cosmic subject cannot ground ordinary subjects because it cannot experience their perspectives as perspectives, but only as phenomenal content (the survival problem). Moreover, a cosmic subject cannot experience a ordinary subjects’ perspectives as overwhelmingly as they do, since a cosmic subject would be experiencing everybody’s perspectives while we only experience our own (the epistemic problem). Ultimately, the issue is that our perspectives are private, in that they are phenomenally bound and unified, and cannot be accessed by each other while remaining perspectives. Your perspective will always be out of reach to me.
Utpaladeva’s denial of the privacy of first-personal perspective allows him to avoid both flavours of these perspective problems (Tenth cent./1984). Since Utpaladeva denies privacy, he needs an account of how Śiva, the universal consciousness, relates to our ordinary perspectives. I contend that he does this in his seminal work, Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (IPK) and its autocommentary (IPV), in two main ways.
First, he deflates what it means for ordinary subjects like us to have a perspective. Our perspectives appear private only insofar as they are formed by a process of perspective formation (ahaṃkaraṇa, lit: “I-making”). This is a process, beginning from infancy, where we develop a concept (vikalpa) of self that impacts our experiences of our perspective. This concept is formed by excluding everything other than our basic phenomenal experiences to differentiate ourselves from everything else:
The reflective awareness ‘I’ as the knowing subject, which because of the power of māyā of the Consciousness-principle itself, of the Lord, addresses realities that are manifested as separate such as the body, the intellect, the interior tactile sensation or that imagined entity which is the void, beyond them, similar to ether—this form of reflective awareness ‘I’ is nothing other than a vikalpa, like ‘this is a jar,’ since it excludes the various opposite entities that are manifested, such as the body and so on. (IPV I 6.4-5):
For instance, I see a red cup and think, “I am not a red cup,” or I see my mother and think, “I am not that person.” Similarly, any positive attribution of properties to myself is also just a trumped-up sort of differentiation. If I say, “I am hungry,” I actually mean, “I am not not-full”:
The entities that are manifested separately, that is, the universals are shown by the limited subjects – thanks to the power of mental elaboration (vikalpa-śaktyā) – as the object of inner reflective awareness through various names such as ‘jar’, ‘silvery’, white’, ‘cloth’, ‘cart’, and so on. The limited subjects, conditioned by the experience of these objects, then also make themselves the object of various denotations such as ‘I am thin’, ‘I am happy or unhappy’…It is precisely this manifestation of a difference between perceiving subject and object perceived, substantiated by the word, which constitutes the bond of the saṃsāra in the limited soul. (IPV IV 8)
This view of perspective formation means that the putative privacy of perspectives, taken to be so foundational to our sense of phenomenal experience, is a conceptual construct imposed by our attributions to ourselves as not being like others. In particular, the strong sense we have that nobody else can access our perspectives is because we have unconsciously excluded others from our perspectives.
Crucially, this means that there could, in theory, be a consciousness whose perspective does not develop in this exclusionary way. Such a perspective could undermine our perspectives, thus erasing the privacy of our personal thoughts. For Utpaladeva, this is the case for Śiva, the universal consciousness, but also enlightened beings who overcome such conceptualizations, ultimately recognizing their real natures: “Permeated only by the reflective awareness ‘I am this universe,’ this creation of the Lord is free from mental constructs—since no differentiation arises within it” (IPV IV 11).
Second, Utpaladeva implicitly endorses that Śiva’s consciousness is structured; just like we can experience red and green at the same time, Śiva experiences our perspectives as simply elements in His structured consciousness. A structure means elements that have relations to each other. For instance, red is more similar to orange than to green. In Śiva’s case, our perspectives hold exclusionary ties to one another: my sense of perspective is more comparable to yours (because we exclude the same types of things) than it is to a bat’s.
Not only can Śiva access our perspectives, but He, in fact, grounds our perspectives: the reason we exist is that Śiva imagines Himself as various perspectives to enjoy the process of living different lives. This requires Him to have a fundamental perspective, which is the basis for further perspectives forming, rather than being an aperspectival consciousness. Through a process of imagining, He creates conceptual exclusions within His own perspective:
The Lord, by virtue of his freedom which is perfect fulness characterized by unity with the cognizable object, manifests himself as that particular cognizing subject of that particular moment, representing him in the forms of Īśvara, Śiva, the perceiving subject and so on, acting thus for the purpose of the various practical activities such as creative meditation, etc. (IPV I 5.15).
Utpaladeva’s view can be extended to apply to the two perspective problems. For the survival problem, Utpaladeva’s view requires that the cosmic subject have a perspective, thus arguing against suggestions that there is an aperspectival cosmic consciousness. Instead, Utpaladeva’s view requires that the cosmic subject must have a perspective since this is the only way to explain how our perspectives survive within its own.
Regarding the epistemic problem, I suggest that Śiva, as a cosmic consciousness, must have a developed facility for divided attention. This means that He can experience different microsubjective experiences at once and as overwhelmingly as they do. One way to think about this is the macrosubject’s sense of perspective is decoupled from its attention; it can hold perspectives without attending to them in the way that we do.
In summary, Utpaladeva has the resources to articulate an account of cosmopsychism, which can address the subject decombination problem. His solution explains why our perspectives are private to one another while still allowing a universal consciousness to experience them. Ultimately, Utpaladeva’s rich philosophical texts provide resources for uncovering assumptions in contemporary philosophy of mind and offer new avenues for solutions.
(All translations from Torella 2013.)
Munema Moiz
Munema Moiz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto supervised by Elisa Freschi. She is focussing on the Pratyabhijñā tradition within Sanskrit Philosophy and their interactions with Buddhist epistemologists. Her goal is to question contemporary assumptions in philosophy of mind by looking at cross-cultural philosophy. Other than Sanskrit philosophy, she enjoys baking, Islamic philosophy, and reading novels.
