Theme
What is ultimately real
10 philosophers, 4 traditions
What is reality fundamentally made of or grounded in? Answers range from water, forms and the One to brahman, emptiness, the Dao and existence itself.
Is the world at bottom one thing or many, and is its ground something we can see, name or even think? In Greece, Thales proposed water as the first principle (archē) of all things, and Parmenides argued that what truly is must be one, whole and changeless. Plato placed the most real things in eternal forms beyond the senses, and Plotinus traced everything back to a single, indescribable One.
In India, Vedānta asked how the world stands to brahman. Śaṅkara held that only nondual brahman is ultimately real, while Rāmānuja and Madhva kept the reality of individual selves and things. The Buddhist Nāgārjuna denied that anything has an intrinsic nature at all. In China, the Daodejing pointed to a nameless Dao as the source of heaven and earth, and Zhu Xi explained the world through pattern (li) and vital stuff (qi). In Persia, Mulla Sadra argued that existence itself, not essence, is what is real.
Philosophers today still debate whether the whole is prior to its parts, a view that Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza and Hegel may have held.
Through time
6th century BCE
Laozi
Beneath all things lies the Dao, the nameless, formless source from which heaven and earth arise. Having no shape or limits, it can’t be any particular thing, so it can be described only as wu, nonbeing: “All things under heaven are born of being; being is born of wu.”
5th century BCE
Parmenides
Reason shows that what is must be “ungenerated and deathless, whole and uniform, and still and perfect”, since nothing can come from what is not. The changing world of the senses belongs to mortal opinion. Scholars still debate whether he meant that only one thing exists.
4th century BCE
Plato
The most real things are not what we see and touch but the forms: eternal, changeless beings such as beauty itself. The many beautiful things around us take their character from the one form, and the world of the senses is defective by comparison with that more perfect realm.
Drew on Parmenides
About 600 years later
2nd century CE
Nāgārjuna
Nothing is ultimately real in the sense of having an intrinsic nature (svabhāva). Things depend on causes, parts and the minds that conceive them, and these chains of dependence never end in a foundation. This is not nihilism: things still exist and work at the conventional level.
3rd century CE
Plotinus
Everything depends on one first principle, the One, which is utterly simple and beyond anything we can say of it. Its unlimited power overflows to produce Intellect, then Soul, then the physical world, each less perfect than its source; sensible things are only images of true, intelligible beings.
Drew on Plato
About 500 years later
8th century CE
Śaṅkara
Only nondual brahman, pure consciousness, is ultimately real: the single foundation on which the whole universe depends, and one with our own self. The world of many objects is real at the everyday level, but transient and dependent, just as pots and plates are passing forms of clay.
About 400 years later
12th century
Rāmānuja
Against Śaṅkara, the unity of all things in Brahman does not make the many unreal. Brahman stands to persons and things as a soul to its body: all are Brahman by forming its body, yet each keeps its own identity. Only an individual can be ignorant, so individuals can’t be illusions.
Drew on Śaṅkara
Zhu Xi
The world is a patterned whole made of qi, a cosmic vapour that condenses into all things, and ordered by li, pattern. Zhu gave li priority, since it makes possible both an ordered world and moral norms, yet li is never found apart from qi.
About 400 years later
17th century
Mulla Sadra
What is fundamentally real is existence, not essence. Existence is one simple reality that comes in degrees of intensity, and the many things of the world are its grades; essences are only the mind’s ways of making sense of it. Even substance itself is constantly changing.
Baruch Spinoza
There is only one substance, infinite and self-caused, and it is God, or Nature. Everything else, minds and bodies alike, exists in God as a mode of its attributes of thought and extension, and follows from the divine nature by necessity. There is no transcendent creator standing apart.
Sources
- Jonathan Schaffer, Monism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy