Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 59

A Modern Understanding of...
Schelling-understood consciousness as belonging, as an attri. bute or aspect, to another principle called Substance or Indifference, this other principle was but being (existence) reified; only while the Cartesians took it as definite something Schell. ing took it as indefinite. The Advaitin would here only point out (i) that, metaphysically, pure being is but pure consciousness (space being an affair at a much lower level, viz. that of body long transcended), and (ii) that the theory of pure being as Indifference is only a re-statement of the Saiva and sākta position, already referred to, that being is the that aspect scarcely distinguishable from the what=pure consciousness.
Hegel understands pure subjectivity as after all an abstraction-though a living abstraction at that, because it can operae by itself and weave out a whole system of abstractions — but he adds that as these abstractions inevitably lack a sense of reality the whole system --- which means, in effect, the basic pure subjectivity-has to concretize itself into mind and like things through dialectical amalgamation with its other, this other being nothing positive but just the self-negation of that subjectivity. Advaita would not very much question this mechanism of self-negation and dialectical amalgamation for its own theory is not altogether different. It would only point out that the Hegelian notion of concretization of the abstract is in sharp contrast to the central Advaita thesis that the reality of a thing consists just in its essence which is freed from whatever entanglement it has in other things, whether those other things are definite positives or a dark indefinite background or even the mere self-negation of that essence. Hegel insists indeed that true freedom consists in absorbing the other rather than escaping (getting dissociated) from it. Somehow, this is the dominant trend of Western thought. But the Advaitin would, like some present-day Existentialists, prefer to argue as follows :
(i) The so-called concrete freedom is not attainable unless one has first realized freedom-in-itself.
(ii) Otherwise, what Hegel calls concrete freedom might