The opposition of mind to its object is the very basis of knowledge and without this duality no sort of cognition can take place, If to be is to be perceived it is equally true that to be perceived is to be. In all knowledge the distinguishable but inseparable factors opposed and irreducible to each other are the the mind that knows, the object that is known and the act or process of knowing. Imagination also has this three-fold character. The imagined world is as much opposed to the imagining mind and its activity as the solid world of perception in time and space. This being so it is the images of the mind, the ideas that are to be brought into line with things and not the latter with the former. The imagined world of perception is quite as objective as the physical world of perception to which we belong. Things therefore are not mental ideas, they are objects of mind. Instead of things being ideas, it is ideas which have the status of things. This truth is clearly realised by the idealist philosophers of India. Sankara, for example, who is commonly but wrongly supposed to be an illusionist, a thinker who denies the reality, of the world, lays the utmost stress on the opposition of what is known on mind that knows. In the absence of something distinguished from mind and opposed to it knowledge is no more possible than it is possible for a dancer to dance on his own shoulders. Epistemologically, Sankara is a thorough-going realist. He does not say that the empirical world is in any way dependent for its being on the finite mind. All that he maintains is that ultimately, from the highest point of view, it has no independent existence apart from Brahman.
(from ‘Realistic Idealism’ by Professor Hiralal Haldar )
Here is a place for that perfectly respectable term ‘holism’ which unfortunately has been degraded to the status of stuff that is good for you. Take the subject side as immediate and real and you can fall into the trap of idealism, take the object likewise and realism is embraced and with the focus on the modes of knowing you fall into Gettier hell from which there is no exit. Professor Haldar’s clear delineation of a holistic view is applicable to the Advaitic epistemology which is elaborated in full in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra.
Haldar’s essay is taken from the 1936 volume ‘Contemporary Indian Philosophy’.
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