Advaita Vedanta and Leibnizian Metaphysics
This is a huge, daunting subject which I can only scratch the surface of. A book or PhD thesis could easily be written on it and do a much better job than I can here. Keep in mind also that I am not an expert on Advaita. A brief summary of the Advaita Vedanta is given at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta#Philosophy ' "Advaita" (Sanskrit: not-two) refers to the identity of the true Self, Atman, which is pure consciousness and the highest Reality, Brahman, which is also pure consciousness. Followers seek liberation/release by acquiring vidya (knowledge) of the identity of Atman and Brahman. Attaining this liberation takes a long preparation and training under the guidance of a guru. ' Here we will only roughly compare the metaphysics of Leibniz with that of the Advaita, not the religious aspects of Advaita. Both are essentially Idealist. In general, Brahman, being the highest Reality, corresponds to Plato's One, the Creator, but Brahman has many more aspects than Plato's One, which I leave to other scholars to elucidate. Atman corresponds roughly to Leibniz's monad for a person. The relation of a person's monad (which I will call Self, which is what Leibniz calls a person's spirit,l meaning the conventional soul) ) to Plato's One (Leibniz's rough correspondence to Brahman) is similar to Advaita's goal of unity or Advaita between Atman and Brahman, but this is not a fixed goal in Leibniz, it happens at a rapid pace in rapid sequential steps in Leibniz in everyday perception and action, in which the Self is a passive slave to the One, its master. So in Leibniz there is never a complete fusion of Self and the One as desired in Advaita, The One is the active agent in periodic communion with the One much like a shepherd with his sheep. In Leibniz there is imperfect communion of the Self with other selves, which Christianity calls the 'communion of the saints'. By imperfect is meant that as in all human perception, there is some distortion to various degrees, depending on the person, which limits the range of inter-communion with other saints and the environment. Salvation is not clearly defined in Leibniz, as far asI have been able to find out, but certainly communion of the Self and the One is found pleasurable and enlightening. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
