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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Christian Wolff

Nondualism without monism

01 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Deity, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Advaita Vedānta, Christian Wolff, Madhyamaka, mathematics, Meister Eckhart, nondualism, Rāmānuja, Śaṅkara, Śūraṅgama Sūtra, Upaniṣads

Monism is the idea that everything is, or is ultimately reducible to, one. This is not quite the same as nondualism, a term increasingly common in mystical circles. Nondualism is the idea that everything is not two or more – not more than one. Nondualism and monism are very similar concepts, but they’re not exactly the same.

I’m speaking here of each term’s deepest metaphysical meaning, where it refers to the ultimate nature of the universe (each term can be used in other ways as well). The general core idea of nondualism is quite widespread: that is, that the most ultimate reality should not be identified with the many plural distinct things we typically observe and the distinctions between them. The ultimate is not dual or plural, and especially, at the ultimate level there is no distinction between subject and object. Yet all of that still doesn’t necessarily mean that the ultimate is one.

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The metaphysical prehistory of qualitative individualism

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism, Self

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alexander Baumgarten, Aristotle, ascent/descent, Christian Wolff, existentialism, expressive individualism, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, identity, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Duns Scotus, Martin Heidegger, modernity, Plato, Romanticism, William of Ockham

Where does our deeply held ideal of qualitative individualism – that our differences from other individuals are of the highest significance for our living well – come from? We saw last time that it was most developed by Romantics, especially German ones. But where did they get the idea? Here as in so many cases, a characteristically modern idea has premodern roots. When German Romantics like Humboldt and Herder articulate the idea they often refer to a metaphysical “principle of individuation”, sometimes referred to by the Latin term: principium individuationis. That is, everything, in the human world at least, has a principle that makes it unique, what it is and nothing else. Where are they getting this idea? Continue reading →

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