When I discuss Brahman, I
primarily am discussing Brahman in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. In
this tradition, Brahman is not comparable to the Christian God, as
people often mistake. In the Advaita Vedanta tradition, Brahman is
reality, is one, is bliss, and is structureless and propertyless. There
are no distinctions in reality.
In the Western tradition,
physics and philosophy has been developed by many, such as Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, and Einstein, just to name very
few. What is the foundation of these theories? And what is common to
these theories? There may be several answers to these questions, but I
have focused on one:
These
theories ultimately describe things (ordinary material objects, basic
building blocks, locations in space, etc.) as being in various
relationships to one another.
All theories of science
and philosophy in the Western tradition involve a mereological
structure (i.e., they all involve composite items, items made
of parts). For example, in physics, a quark is part of an
atomic nucleus; in mathematics, a number if part of its given
number set or number line it belongs to. In ordinary daily life, one is
a part of society, and one’s thoughts are a part of their
consciousness. My students are part of the university, and the
sun is part of the galaxy.
What is it that makes one
item part of another? How is it that any item can be a
part of any other item? The only way to answer these questions is to
espouse a philosophy of relationships, where relations connect
objects (parts and wholes), and where these connections give rise to
reality.
The part-whole relation
is a connection between parts and wholes. A relation of part-to-whole
(allegedly) connects, for example, the mountaintop to the mountain, or
the mane to the lion, or, as another example, a relation of
part-to-whole connects a number to the number line. The people who study
the very specific nature of these relations are philosophers, and if
their descriptions were found to be incorrect and the
relationships they discuss are found to be impossible, then it would be
fair to say that the best theory of reality we have is one where reality
is in fact without any parts and wholes. In other words, regardless of
what we think we believe about reality from what our senses tell us, it
would instead be the case that reality is a single item.
In the two parts of my
article, "Western
Analytic Metaphysics Reduces to a Philosophy of Brahman,"
I go through the theories philosophers have come up with to describe any
of the relationships between parts and wholes, and I show that all of
them appear to only be describable in contradictory terms. If I am
correct, our best description of reality then would be one where reality
is considered partless (it has no parts, and reality is one).
If one seeks a description of reality, then
the one thing that is reality is describable in a way that is identical
to how Brahman is described. But if this is the case, then our best
description of reality is one where reality = Brahman. So, in summary,
if my reasoning in "Western
Analytic Metaphysics Reduces to a Philosophy of Brahman"
is correct, then the errors of Western metaphysicians (and physicists)
reveal that our best description of reality is a philosophy of Brahman,
and Western metaphysics and physics are to be apparently replaced by a
philosophy of Brahman.
