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My cousin’s wedding was moved because of a horoscope. What would a Cārvāka say, and would it be fair?

Arvind Poojary Fellow
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Reason & experienceIndianCarvakaNyayaAjita Kesakambali#astrology#carvaka#inference#perception
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Its coordinates: 2.2 Sources of Knowledge · 2.2.2 Reason and Intuition

My cousin's wedding was set for December. Last week an astrologer compared the two horoscopes again and found a problem, so it has moved to April, at real cost to both families. Everybody is calm about it except me.

The easy move is to quote the Cārvākas, who accepted perception as the only sure means of knowledge and mocked the priests as people making a living from others' fears. But I want to be fair, both to my family and to the Cārvākas, whose own books are lost and whom we know mostly through their opponents.

So:

  1. If perception is the only means of knowledge, how does a Cārvāka know anything about tomorrow, including that a December wedding would have gone fine? Doesn't the position saw off its own branch?
  2. Is there a version of the Cārvāka view that allows ordinary inference (smoke, so fire) but not inference to the unseen (this planet's position, so this marriage)?

And is there anything to say for my family beyond "it makes them feel safe"?

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3 answers

  1. Vikram Sethi

    Fellow

    The Cārvākas rejected inference completely. That is the whole school. So yes, your first point is fatal, and the Naiyāyikas made exactly that objection.

  2. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Not quite, Vikram. That is how their opponents present them, and the retort that rejecting inference itself needs an inference is very old. But the picture is less simple.

    The Buddhist philosopher Kamalaśīla reports that a Cārvāka called Purandara, probably of the seventh century, accepted inference whose object belongs to this world, things that could in principle be perceived, and rejected it only for what lies beyond any possible perception: other worlds, the fruits of karma, unseen powers. Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, who spent decades collecting the surviving Cārvāka fragments, argued that this was the school's position more generally.

    That is almost exactly Arvind's second option. On that reading a Cārvāka can say a December wedding would probably have been fine, from everything we know about weddings, and still say the planets tell us nothing about marriages, because no one has ever perceived the connection.

  3. Vikram Sethi

    Fellow

    Thank you, Meera. I had the textbook version. That's a much stronger school than the one I was taught, and a much harder one to refute.