Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 72

Some Clarifications
These pan-objectivists are so far well-entrenched. True, the transcendentalists have, with their distinction of levels in the subjective attitude, got rid of the basic contradictions. But if there is no justification of the distinction of levels and that subjective attitude on other independent grounds, postulation of these in deference only to these paradoxes would only be ad hoc. Further, these pan-objectivists have no prior idea as to what this new attitude and level distinction are precisely and in their details. 18
No doubt, the basic contradictions, are got rid of, as we have seen, if level-distinction is admitted. But, then, in order to dislodge these pan-objectivists from their uni-level objective standpoint we have to offer independent grounds for leveldistinction and for going over to the subjective attitude. In the first two chapters of this work we have elaborated these very grounds. The Advaita rejoinders to pan-objectivism, deve. loped in this section, are based on those independent grounds.
A question is often asked as to whether consciousnessat least 1--consciousness, specifically-can be separated even from body. Dialectical materialists hold that all forms of consciousness are somehow linked inseparably with physiological complications, though consciousness has, according to them, a cycle of life all its own, as reflecting or reacting upon, in specific manners, bodily or extra-bodily stimuli. Others, less revolutionary, hold that at least the sense of personal identity is no other than that of the identity of body. To the Dialectical Materialist Advaita would reply as follows:
First, Dialectical Materialism has not distinguished between pure consciousness and mental states, and, secondly, whether 18 Many of them would also dismiss the idea of 'levels of considera
tion (language)' on the ground that a higher-level consideration of a sentence of the lower-level will not really solve the paradoxes which they are meant to solve. For, the paradoxes do not concern the use of language only.