Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s19.21

v2.c26.s19.21

That Īśvara is the home of all finite existence, the material and the efficient cause of the world, is an assumption. It is quite easy to say that the concrete universal combines the reality of the universal and the particular, but the how of it is a mystery. If the relation of identity and difference, permanence and change, is unintelligible in the world of experience, it cannot become intelligible when applied to Īśvara. Śaṁkara knows that his view is open to the charge of abstract identity, but he believes that identity and difference cannot be logically related. How the two can coexist he feels that he does not know.¹ The conception of Īśvara as a concrete whole is not so much an explanation of experience as a restatement of the problem. Our experience has in it the two features of identity and difference, or permanence and change. We ask how is the experience, which is a complex of souls and things and characterised by permanence and change, to be accounted for, and we answer that Īśvara is the explanation of experience, since he combines both these features and has the world of souls and things organically related to him. To say that they constitute his body is not to explain experience. We frame a generalised concept of experience and call it Īśvara. The explanation of the experienced world is that world itself, which in its general terms is called Īśvara. Rāmānuja and Hegel hold that the ultimate reality is a one containing many. For them the rational is the real: God and the world are both real. The indeterminateness of intuition and the mystery of reality do not appeal to them. They are interested not in the real in itself but the real for thought, which has an element of negativity in it. The process of thought consists in the continual absorbing and transcending by mind of its own discrepant and rebellious parts. So all spiritual life is an unceasing struggle with refractory elements. Divine life is regarded as an eternal activity. To think of the world as a logical unity or a single system is to think of it as the manifestation of one perfectly determinate principle in an infinity of details. But we should not overlook the difficulties attending this conception of the highest as the concrete universal or the union of the finite and the infinite.