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The unity of all things
What is the fabric that unites the cosmos – from matter to life, to consciousness and ideas? Or is there no such unifying reality: is the universe an infinite nothingness devoid of real structure? Dr Jessica Frazier, Stipendiary Lecturer in Theology, engages with debates like these in both Western and Indian philosophy, looking for philosophical ideas of use on a global scale.
Some years ago, a philosophy professor challenged me to name a philosophical insight Asia had produced, that could not be found in the West. Everyone leant forward to listen. At stake was whether Western thought was at least as good as the sum of all other cultures –sufficient by itself for all humanity’s needs. At a more practical level, it affected whether future students would expect their teachers to read up on Indian, Chinese, African, and other philosophies. So, with everyone waiting, could I name any ideas outside Western thought that might help philosophy make progress toward a better understanding of our lives?
‘Well…’ I began, ‘there are novel Buddhist accounts of emergent mind, and a distinctive yogic view of desire. There are ethical theories that challenge Jeremy Bentham’s emphasis on pleasure and pain with a richer taxonomy of the emotions that motivate us. Or there is Mimamsa’s exposé of the hidden inconsistencies embedded in common concepts like “objects” or “knowledge”. Then there’s Bhartrhari’s ontology of language which seems to expand on Wittgenstein… but a millennium earlier. And in metaphysics there is one of my favourites – the Samkhya theory of endurant identity, with its bold conception of reality’s ultimate foundation… Choose one, and I can explain.’
By the end of the seminar, not everyone was convinced but I had some converts to the cause of global philosophy, and even hardened sceptics could see that India was as deeply engaged with philosophy’s pressing problems as the West. Later, when I was co-teaching Oxford’s first undergraduate Indian philosophy course, that philosopher’s question had become a helpful guideline. What can different cultures gain from learning each other’s way of thinking?
Students are increasingly voting with their feet – signing up for courses on Indian, Chinese and other traditions of thought. There seems to be a revolution in the works, as the world’s population feels ever more empowered to draw on a global heritage for inspiration.
In 1883 Max Müller, a Professor of Sanskrit in Oxford, wrote a piece called India: What Can it Teach Us? declaring:
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant – I should point to India.
His words echoed thinkers like Schopenhauer and Emerson who had also tried to alert their contemporaries to Indian insights, but were largely ignored by the Western establishment. Yet in the last 20 years there’s been a new surge of interest and it is becoming possible to devote oneself not only to Indian history, but also directly to the ideas it contains.
In my work I have written about self, divinity, and ethics, but recently I’ve been most interested in arguments suggesting that at the ultimate level all reality is essentially one. Monism was long a kind of secret doctrine in European thought, and it is still viewed with suspicion by mainstream philosophy and religion. Yet it was found to different degrees in key thinkers, from Plotinus to Spinoza to Alfred North Whitehead, and in India it was arguably the most common point of view. Arguments from induction, Bradley’s regress, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, causal entanglement, and the unity of perception were brought to bear, in the face of Buddhist critiques advocating metaphysical nihilism.
One image from the Chāndogya Upanisad says: imagine a single banyan seed. Through its hidden impetus it grows into a whole banyan grove. It has many aspects and emergent levels of being – from the stalks to the branches, flowers, and fruit, all of which were encoded in its original state; the verdant grove expresses a unified causality. And although the different stalks may look separate, it has a single mass of interconnected roots under the ground, linking it into one entity. Apply this image to reality itself, and you discover a single interconnected reality unfolding coherently through space and time. This is one of the world’s oldest metaphysical pictures. Although it received a rousing critique from Buddhist thinkers (who saw an amorphous void where Vedanta saw Oneness), it remains powerful and is rising again in contemporary Western metaphysics. The debate goes on; my work involves bringing these and other debates to modern students anew.
