Realism in Advaita part 1

 

Advaita throws the word ‘real’ and its antonym ‘unreal’ about freely leaving the casual reader or the sitter at the feet of Swamiji, guruji, and the internet oracle, confused.  Is Advaita a type of subjective Idealism which holds that the world is a dream or ‘like’ a dream in that it is experienced and vanishes on waking, an ‘insubstantial pageant’?  Fear not, let this mini-guru with more than a hint of tin in his water pot put you right.  One thing I have though, if not enlightenment, is a fair reading in general philosophy that allows one to sift the nuances of the levels of reference.  Am I then referring to the vyavaharika/pratibhasika (absolute/relative) distinction?  Not quite.  Let me first deal with the opening question purely from an epistemological point of view.  What are we aware of when we experience something?  Is it an internal occurrence in our minds  that by some process represents the external reality or is that an overly complex way of saying that we experience an object?  Effectively, experience of the object is the immediate thing and all else is an over elaboration of the febrile mind and a derealising distraction.  There is a tiny, shy, half-truth in that.  My counter would be that Adi Shankara catered to the seeker who requires rational clarification.

The other, frequently met with, counter to this question of epistemological stance is the Orientalist - ‘really this Realism/Idealism dyad is a Western preoccupation that does not apply in Vedanta’.  Again, Shankara took it seriously though Vedanta’s answer to the aporia (puzzle) is so to speak, non-binary.   What else does non-dual mean if not that?  In any case the attempt to navigate between the Scylla and the Charybdis of Internal and External has also a long history in Western thought from, I would hold, Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and the modern revival of Panpsychism.

This is a long menu and the first item must be the neglected - what is the nature of the person, the mind/body complex that is in a world of objects?  

I’ll be back.