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.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on Non-Realism

While I have been thinking about the prevalence of 'non' as a prefix for some very important aspects of Advaita eg. non-dualism, non-difference (of cause and effect) and so forth I have been intrigued by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad's concept of non-realism which seems at first blush to be a refined position between idealism and realism. This interests me greatly and so I have been scouting around reading here and there amongst his papers to try and find out more.

Ram-Prasad seems to have a poor grasp of what realism is and a fortiori non-realism subtle or gross must elude. What is one to make of this from a 1995 paper on Dreams and the Coherence of Experience

The traditional realist claim is that objects that experience presents as existing externally, do in fact exist internally. The denial of externality appeals both to those who doubt that experience is ever veridical (in other words, who doubt that the objects experience presents are ever exactly identical with existing objects) and also to those who think that experience is veridical only if ob jects are not external.

A simple succinct definition of Realism found in a Dictionary of Philosophy:

theory to the effect that entities of a certain category exist independently of what we think. A consequence of realism in this sense is that the entities are there to be discovered, and that ignorance and error is possible.

Further down he states:

Both the Cartesian skeptic and the Berkeleyan idealist use dreams to challenge externality: a subject takes it that there is experience of a world of external objects, but there need be no such world as seems to be thus experienced. Cognition that there are external objects could therefore occur without such objects.

Did Berkeley use dreams to establish his immaterialism? Was it not a logical following through of Locke's primary and secondary qualities?
So Non-Realism is perhaps not ready to join the big Nons yet. If anyone out there knows more, please relate.