Nyāya arguments for a First Cause

As I noted in an earlier post, arguments for a divine First Cause can be found in Indian philosophy, particularly within the Nyāya-Vaiśeșika tradition.  They are defended by such thinkers as Jayanta Bhatta (9^th century A.D.), Udayana (11^th century A.D.), Gangesa (13^th century A.D.), and Annambhatta (17^th century A.D.).  Translations of the key original texts and some of the most important studies in English are not easy to find, but useful discussions are readily available in books like Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti’s Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyāya Dualist Tradition, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A Comparative History of World Philosophy, and Parimal G. Patil’s Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India.

As with Aristotelian and Leibinizian versions of the cosmological argument, the Nyāya arguments are not arguments for a temporal First Cause.  On the contrary, the material universe is regarded as having always existed.  To be sure, the world is thought of as being cyclically created, destroyed, and recreated, but the material substrate underlying it persists throughout.  This substrate is conceived of in atomist terms.  The objects we perceive are wholes composed of parts.  The smallest perceivable parts are called triads, each of which is composed of three dyads, which are imperceptible.  Dyads in turn are each composed of two atoms, which, naturally, are also imperceptible.  The atoms, unlike the composites made out of them, neither come into being nor pass away.  They are the basic furniture of the material universe, indivisible and indestructible.  For the Nyāya atomist, there must be some such level of parts because otherwise things would be infinitely divisible, and thus have an infinite number of parts.  And in that case we would not be able to account for the different sizes of things, since if everything had an infinite number of parts they should all be of the same size.  (Compare Zeno’s paradox of large and small, from which he draws a very different lesson!)  The Nyāya view is also that a material effect is always made out of preexisting matter, so that the fundamental, atomic level of matter is not a kind of effect.

So, what Nyāya arguments for a First Cause purport to explain is neither the beginning of the universe (for it had no beginning) nor the existence of the atoms (for they are regarded, not as a kind of material effect, but rather as the basic preconditions of there being any material effects).  What such arguments purport to explain is rather the most fundamental sort of material effect, the kind that underlies every other, viz. the existence of dyads.  The reasoning is not that if we trace effects backward in time we’ll get to a temporally first effect, such as the Big Bang, and have to ask what caused that.  It is rather that if we trace effects downward here and now we’ll get to a metaphysically most fundamental sort of effect, the existence of dyads, and need to explain that.

Nyāya arguments also deploy a distinctive version of the principle of causality, according to which any effect requires a causal agent that is aware of the material stuff out of which the effect is made, desires to bring that effect about, and wills to do so.  The stock example is that of a pot, whose maker is aware of the clay out of which it is made, desires to make that clay into a pot, specifically, and wills to do so.  Why suppose that every effect has such a cause?  The Nyāya answer is that artifacts (pots, etc.) provide many confirming instances of this general principle, and that atoms are not counterexamples because they are not effects in the first place.  Moreover, though the atheist would claim that composite material things that are not artifacts (stones, etc.) are counterexamples, this charge (so the argument goes) begs the question.  For whether or not such objects are at least in part the effect of a causal agent with awareness, desire, and will -- namely God, as cause of the dyads out of which the objects are composed -- is precisely what is at issue.

No doubt the atheist will balk at this move, but Chakrabarti not implausibly suggests that it is really no different from the sort of move materialists commonly make in response to objections raised by dualists.  To take just one example (mine rather than Chakrabarti’s), if a dualist claims that material phenomena are all directly knowable from the “third-person” point of view whereas mental states are directly knowable only from the “first-person” point of view, the materialist will typically respond that by itself this claim begs the question and is thus no refutation of materialism.  For the materialist might argue that whether mental states really can be directly known only from the “first-person” point of view is precisely part of what is in question.  If the materialist regards this as a legitimate way of disarming a seemingly obvious counterexample to his position, why can’t the Nyāya theist similarly disarm the purported counterexamples atheists would raise against his version of the principle of causality?

With this background in place, I suggest that we might summarize the basic thrust of Nyāya arguments for a First Cause as follows:

1. Dyads are the fundamental sort of effect.

2. Any effect is the product of a causal agent which has awareness, desire, and will.

3. So dyads are the product of a causal agent which has awareness, desire, and will.

But why suppose there is a unique causal agent of this sort, and why attribute the divine attributes to such an agent?  The Nyāya approach to answering such questions might (roughly following Chakrabarti) be summarized as follows.  For the reasons already given, the causal agent in question must have awareness, desire, and will.  But it nevertheless cannot be comparable to a human causal agent.  For one thing, since human beings are composed of dyads, their existence presupposes dyads and thus cannot be the explanation of dyads.  For another thing, being imperceptible, the atoms out of which dyads are composed are not the sort of thing of which human beings can be aware, and a causal agent of the sort the argument posits must be aware of the materials out of which it makes the dyads.  So, the causal agent in question must, unlike human beings, be incorporeal.  Since it exists before the fundamental effect does, it must be without beginning.  If it is without beginning it must also be simple or non-composite, otherwise it would itself have parts and would exist only after those parts are combined.  If it is simple and thus without parts to be broken down into, it must be everlasting.  And considerations of parsimony (what in Western philosophy is called the principle of Ockham’s razor) tell against there being more than one such causal agent. 

Naturally, the Thomist is bound to find the overall project of such arguments congenial.  But he is also bound to take issue with the details.  Even if we were to accept atomism or some variant on atomism -- in the traditional philosophical sense of “atomism,” that is (naturally I do not deny the existence of atoms in the modern sense in which the term is used in physics) -- atoms would, for the Thomist, still have a cause.  For they would be composites of substantial form and prime matter and of essence and existence, and (as the Nyāya argument itself emphasizes) what is composite requires a cause.  (See pp. 177-84 of Scholastic Metaphysics for exposition and defense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic critique of atomism.)  Thus, the Nyāya argument is, from a Thomistic point of view, not radical enough in its attempt to trace the world to a divine cause.  Still, we cannot be too hard on it on that account.  That what is composite has a cause is an absolutely crucial insight in natural theology, and it is key to the Nyāya approach.

So, the Thomist would disagree with the claim of premise 1 that dyads are the fundamental sort of effect, but he would certainly agree with the deeper point that whatever the most fundamental composites turn out to be would require an efficient cause.  There are also problems with premise 2.  Here I think the atheist would be right to complain that we can’t draw general conclusions about efficient causality from the example of artifacts, because artifacts are rarer (indeed much rarer) than effects where no cause having awareness, desire, and will is evident.  So, while we are certainly justified in holding that composites, including non-artifacts, must have an efficient cause, getting to a cause that has awareness, desire, and will would require much further argumentation. 

Still, there is something to what the Nyāya approach is saying.  For the Thomist, we must attribute to any causal agent active potency or power; potencies or powers are always directed toward the generation of a certain effect or range of effects; and what is in an effect is always first in its total efficient cause in some way, whether formally, virtually or eminently -- this last point being the Scholastic “principle of proportionate causality.”  (See chapters 1 and 2 of Scholastic Metaphysics for exposition and defense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to efficient causality.)  These features are arguably analogous to those which the Nyāya premise 2 attributes to efficient causes.  In particular, active potency or power is analogous to “will,” the directedness of a cause toward its effects is analogous to “desire,” and a total efficient cause’s having what is in the effect before the effect is generated is analogous to “awareness.” 

But of course, non-human natural causes do not really have “will,” and non-animal natural causes do not really have “desire” or “awareness.”  For the Thomist, most of the efficient causes operative in the natural order are completely devoid of sentience, intellect and will (even if they ultimately derive their causal power, at every moment at which they operate, from a divine First Cause).  The Nyāya approach, tying efficient causality as it does directly to awareness and will, seems to threaten to lead to occasionalism.