Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 68

Some Clarifications
-and, for the matter of that, Indian transcendentalists in general, and many too in ths West- understand the levels to be levels of reality too, the higher being at least more real than the lower, if not rejecting it altogether. It is more real because it is more of the essence of the lower, and essence is that which at the higher level of reflection is distinguished out and found to be such that the content at the lower level can be represented in its terms as a logical construction.
These transcendentalists do not deny that the levels in uestion are levels of consideration, but all considerations must be of some content taken, at least implicitly, as real,
nless there are explict reasons to the contrary. The higherlevel consideration is not of a mere lower-level sentence. The content here is what that sentence is a statement of, i.e a real; and not merely that, in consideration at the higher level the lower-level real has been transported to that higher level, having undergone necessary changes to suit that higher level. The higher-level consideration, even as referring to the lowerlevel real, reveals certain features of it, constituting its relative essence, which were unsuspected before and which cannot be detected by that lower level consideration. A higher level consideration is not a gain. a co-ordinate consider of the same content from just a different angle. For, it is already taken as a content of that higher-level: secor a different coordinate consideration does not reveal features unsuspected before; thirdly, no account of the content from the point of view of one such consideration can be translated into the language of another; and, fourthly--what is of impor.
that modern people are more favourbly disposed toward the empirical than toward the metaphysical. This may be due to the influence of Science in modern days. But even then Science and its present-day canvassers- I mean the contemporary empiricists have to settle the
issue between perception (observation) and logic. One cannot serve both these masters at the same time unless one of these is somehow subordinate to the other. The prestion of questions today is : which to be subordinated to which? The issue started from the days of Kant and remains unsolved to this date.