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Advaita Vedānta, Augustine, Aztec, G.W.F. Hegel, Hebrew Bible, James Maffie, Krishna, Kyoto School, Laozi, Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, nondualism, Śaṅkara, Satan, theodicy, Zhuangzi
I have considerable sympathies for nondualism and have started in recent years to think that it might be true. But there is an important qualifier to any such view. Namely: I do not think that there could possibly be an omnipotent omnibenevolent God. The problem of suffering is just too intractable.
Many nondualists, especially Sufis, would identify the nondual ultimate with that God. And I cannot accept that view. For similar reasons I am skeptical of a Vedānta view where the ultimate is sat: both being and goodness. There is too much being that is not good.
For this reason I have been inspired by a wonderful passage in Nishida Kitarō’s “The logic of nothingness and the religious worldview”:
It is another paradox, but God as the true absolute must be Satan too. Only then can God be said to be truly omniscient and omnibenevolent. This is the God who as Jehovah required Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac (see Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling). This is the God who has required the negation of the person itself. A God who merely opposes, and struggles with, evil is a relative God, even if he conquers over evil. (Last Writings 74)
This is Christian (and Jewish) language that no orthodox Christian could endorse; in some eras one could have got burned at the stake for saying it. But I think it is quite right. Hegel, rightly trying to see the truth in everything, looked for the truth in both Christianity and Enlightenment atheism; I’ve argued that one should go further and see the truth in Christianity and Satanism. But what Hegel does get about Satan, I think, is that evil does need to be a part of the ultimate; the ultimate cannot be pure goodness. If, with Augustine, one identifies badness with nonbeing or absence, one still has to wrestle with the obvious presence of that same badness that one has defined as absence. (Coldness is in a sense a form of nonexistence, but it still exists.) Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta runs into a very similar problem: if all existence is a unity constituted by truth and goodness, and perceptions of multiplicity are just explained as ignorance, then how can that ignorance possibly exist?
The visions of nonduality that I find compelling are those which find ways to acknowledge badness, evil, error, ignorance, falsehood, even non-being as part of the ultimate in some meaningful way – such that, as Nishida says, God must be in some sense Satan. This is what makes Krishna a more compelling God-figure to me than Yahweh or Jesus as usually conceived: he is not omnibenevolent, the multitudes he contains include morally bad ones. (Nishida’s reading of the Abraham story, in this regard, is quite powerful – but it does necessarily imply the heretical conclusion that God is not omnibenevolent!)
Another way to put this, perhaps, is that a true ultimate should not have an opposite. Goodness, a benevolent God fighting Satan, even truth – these could not be real ultimates, for there are things they do not contain. Hegel’s Spirit (Geist) is a powerful concept for that reason: it has no clear opposite, it contains oppositions within itself.
I was led to some of this thinking from an unusual place: James Maffie’s long and fascinating account of Aztec philosophy. On Maffie’s account, the Aztecs identified a supreme principle called teotl that contained within it both order and disorder – though the Aztecs valued order over disorder, and thought the order itself was a proper balancing of order and disorder. Even so, order itself was not the supreme principle, it had to be something larger.
I’m not in much of a position to judge the accuracy of Maffie’s account of the Aztecs. But I have found something constructively compelling in that account: like Hegel’s Geist, teotl is a nondual ultimate that finds room for badness and error, for that which we devalue. I suspect the same may be true of Daoist dao 道, which Laozi says is in the piss and shit, and about which Zhuangzi tells us to avoid affirming and negating (shi/fei 是非) distinctions. This is not a view that classical monotheists could endorse: for Augustine one has to shi God and fei nonbeing – the latter being that evil that later Christians would personify as Satan.
For Nishida’s part, he finds a Buddhist candidate for an ultimate which deals with the question in a different way (a way expanded on by his disciple Nishitani in Religion and Nothingness). The ultimate they point to is śūnyatā, emptiness or zero-ness. This is why I think it is appropriate to use the term nondualism (a translation of advaita) rather than the Western term “monism”: here the ultimate is not a One but a Zero. Unlike Hegel’s Geist, emptiness does not contain everything – but it still grounds everything, it is in some sense their principle. And it is not inherently good; it just is – and, in a crucial sense, simultaneously is not. For it underlies both being and non-being.
Amod: Your phrase “No opposite for the ultimate” also connotes what I have long felt is a practical implication of a nondualist idea of the ultimate: nonadversarialism. Ultimately there are no adversaries. The word “Satan” means “adversary” in Hebrew. So Nishida is wrong to say that the ultimate “must be Satan too”. The ultimate is zero Satan—but also, as you have argued, zero God.
This sounds like mere playing with words, and perhaps it is, but I’ve had moments in intense conflicts when this idea is powerful medicine that cuts through my adversarialism. This nondualist idea of the ultimate doesn’t refer to goodness or beneficence (which would have an opposite), but nevertheless for me this idea has always had beneficial effect on my mind.
Hey Amod, long time reader, first time poster :) My nickname’s Nemo and I have a BA Philosophy from the UK. I’ve read your blog since 2016 after finding academic Philosophy unsatisfactory and have been on my own journey.
I have to say that the strength of the idea of Non-dualism without god(s) is exactly because it forces one to evaluate what we shun in a new light. It’s the psychological effect of getting to know Emptiness deeply that’s what convinces me of its truth. It’s helped me ‘roll with the punches’ so to speak, and allows me to come to terms with psychological suffering more easily.
Welcome, Nemo! Good to have you here.
I think this is a really important point, an ethical implication of metaphysical nondualism – one that I think of as closely tied to the Daoist points above. The idea that we should not affirm or negate, but simply dwell within the flow, seems like a key ethical tenet of Daoism, in a way that ties to serenity. I see it then entering into Chinese Buddhism; I think it’s in that sense that John Dunne refers to modern mindfulness as “nondual”, though it typically avoids discussion of nondual metaphysics. I have found that nonjudgemental approach helpful in my own recent meditation practice.
Hi Amod, always a pleasure to read you… and even more so on this topic!
Yes, non-duality is tricky, because the mere fact of talking about it with words and thinking about it with an analytical frame of mind are inherently dualistic operations. The non-dual claim is that there is a non-dual realm of consciousness that is 1) accessible in the right conditions, and 2) more fundamental and always underlying the ordinary mind that we know, but not describable by it.
So talking about non-duality always reverts to talking about a conceptual model of non-duality within the dualistic mind. It’s an inescapable barrier that thinking cannot abolish. That’s why spiritual traditions make so much use of analogical reasoning. Vedanta talks a lot about how the state of nonduality is a separate regime of consciousness, different from the usual three state of waking, dreaming and deep sleep.
Even with this caveat, I think any thinker of non-duality would agree that there is no opposite to the ultimate. If something can have an opposite, it’s firmly within the realm of duality. So no conceivable idea of God can be the ultimate.
What does it mean then when all sorts of spiritual traditions say that the ultimate is somehow “good”, as in Buddha Nature, or the “ananda” part of Sat Chit Ananda? I think if we take seriously the claim that the ultimate cannot be characterized in any way, we have to interpret this as a claim within the realm of duality. The classic testimony that the experience of a liberated being is “blissful” is only a translation into dualistic words, in the sense that the previous common experience suffering has ceased within the realm of time – yet the sages always say that what one discovers is timeless and is recognized as having been always the case.
A related claim within the world of multiplicity is that the good is somehow more fundamental, or closer to the true nature of things, than the bad. This idea has been explored in many ways, and I think it makes sense. It’s easy to trace back most kinds of evil to some misplaced or misunderstood goodness. Hate springs from fear which springs from self-protection which springs from self-love. Fear of death or change transparently comes from self-love too. Of course in the process something has to go wrong, some kind of exaggeration or cognitive mistake, otherwise it would be love from beginning to end.
I think it was Tibetan Buddhism that has a beautiful creation myth where originally humans have everything they need and there are no worries, food literally falls from the sky at the right time. But at some point they start keeping a bit aside “just in case”, and then they become dependent on it and it stops coming on its own, so that from there on they need to work and cultivate it.
I wouldn’t worry too much about notions of God in non-duality; Advaita Vedanta is theistic, non-dualistic Buddhism is not, but they are very recognizably making the same main points and pointing to the same kinds of practices and states of realization. God may or not be part of one’s mental picture of what relative truth looks like, but for one who is committed to a non-dual absolute, the mental model of the relative is not so important.
Skaladom said: “It’s an inescapable barrier that thinking cannot abolish.”
I am not sure that I understand what you are saying here. But when I read this, I am reminded of what I said in a comment on Amod’s previous post about how nondualists “could run into an epistemic wall… and thereby obstruct inquiry into a better systemic analysis.” The situation would be even worse if nondualists were to presuppose such a wall—they would be obstructing inquiry from the start. It would be better not to put arbitrary limitations on ourselves, but instead to see how far we can go with thinking.
There is a line in a Zen poem that says: “Although it is not constructed, it is not beyond words.” If it is not beyond words, much less is it beyond thinking. Certainly much of ultimate fact will remain beyond thinking: Nicholas Rescher presents an enjoyable quantification of this discrepancy between ultimate fact and realizable knowledge in “How much can be known?: a Leibnizian perspective on the quantitative discrepancy between linguistic truth and objective fact”, in Epistemetrics, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Rescher limits his analysis to “linguistic truth”, but I think his point could be extended to any kind of cognition: “However, while finite resources will doubtless impose limits in practice, the process is one which in theory and principle goes endlessly on and on.” Who knows how far future generations could go? It would be better not to obstruct them from the start by teaching them that there is a special realm that is not describable.
Thank you and lots of interesting problems here. I realize I am just starting to scratch the surface on nondualism. Any concept that includes both Hegel and Nāgārjuna is a big tent!
Re Nathan’s point, I agree we shouldn’t assume that a nondual ultimate is ineffable: I think Hegel’s spirit is such an ultimate, but one that concepts are adequate to characterizing. It is important that many other nondualists have characterized it as ineffable, though.
To Skaladom’s point, I think it’s also then fair to say that if the ultimate is ineffable, any characterizing it as good must be done from within the standpoint of conventional truth/multiplicity and not of the ultimate itself. The question then might be, should we characterize it as good? And that I am not so sure of. I don’t think emptiness, in particular, is something good; it just is, a fact about the world that we need to accept.
Amod, if you haven’t studied the Samdhinirmocana Sutra before, that would be an interesting text to look at in relation to this topic. I mentioned it once before in a comment on your post “A book on how virtue helps us flourish”, where it came up as an example of a South Asian Buddhist text that posits a quasi- or proto-dialectical progressive encompassing of perspectives. But the text is also relevant here as an example of trying to reconcile an ineffable ultimate with the epistemic demands of analysis via a developmental account. It only goes so far, but is a really interesting early example of trying to think through these issues.
I haven’t studied it, no. That does sound like it’s worth my reading. Thanks.
On the difference between “emptiness” and “God” in relation to “good” and “evil”, see this succinct diagram by Masao Abe (on page 119 of the collection Our Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma, 1993): https://archive.org/details/ourreligions00shar/page/119/mode/1up
In Buddhist commentaries I have read, shunyata is explained not as “one” or “zero” but as “not two”. One and zero, all or nothing, are necessarily part of a dualistic framework. “Not two” is an effort at pointing out what is beyond thought.
Mipham the Great said that dualism is like the elephant that bathes in the river to wash off the dust (zero) and then rolls in the dust to dry off the water (one). The Great Perfection goes beyond samsara and nirvana, clean and unclean.
I do think there is a way in which śūnyatā really is zero – śūnya is the word for zero in Sanskrit and languages derived from it (in Indian airports you can hear them call out “shunya shunya” to announce a flight with 00 in its number). To say śūnyatā isn’t zero is akin to saying emptiness isn’t really empty – which you can still reasonably do, given the ineffable quality so often attached to it.
On “śūnyatā isn’t zero”: variations of the phrase “emptiness of emptiness” are pretty common (though this is more like zero times zero): for example, on the page following that diagram by Masao Abe that I linked to above, Abe uses “Self-emptying of Emptiness” as a section heading and says: “Emptiness that is objectified and conceptualized must be emptied.” If we think that zero has an opposite, then we haven’t reached zero times zero…
This quotation from Buddhist scholar Herbert Guenther very polemically corroborates what Jim said about “not two” in Buddhist commentaries:
“In this connection, it may not be out of place to point out that in the Sanskrit texts that have survived, the Buddhists were careful to use the term advaya (not-two) to emphasize their process-oriented thinking, while the Brahmanical thinkers used the term advaita (one-without-a-second) and thus gave evidence of the fact that they were unable to cope with the dynamic aspects of reality. These they merely saw as change, but not as a self-organizing process, and hence could not but resort to an oversimplified reductionism.” (Herbert V. Guenther, From Reductionism to Creativity: rDzogs-chen and the New Sciences of Mind, Shambhala Publications, 1989, p. 281)