/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18539209]

Fuck Hegel, read Aquinas.

[Laura Numeroff !BmHtx5LcGM No.18539217]

>>18539209
Fuck Aquinas, read coupons

[Anonymous No.18539237]

fuck guenon, read aquinas

[Anonymous No.18539243]

>>18539217
Please delete your comment. Thank you in advance.

[Anonymous No.18539251]

>>18539237
cringe
>>18539209
based
>>18539217
cringe

Read Guenon and Aquinas, fuck modern philosophers

[Laura Numeroff !BmHtx5LcGM No.18539255]

>>18539243
Haha, sure thing bro
>but I don’t even do it haha

[Anonymous No.18539266]

>>18539251
No, read Aquinas, who already refuted Shankara and Guenon in his critique of David of Dinant.

[Anonymous No.18539306]

>>18539266
You’re wrong, because David of Dinant was a pantheist, and neither Guenon nor Shankara were pantheists, but for both of them God is transcendent to the world.

If you’d like to though you can post the criticisms of David by Aquinas and I’ll happily explain to you how they fail to refute Shankara. There is in fact actually a growing body of academic literature, dissertations etc which has attempted to reconcile Aquinas and Shankara.

[Anonymous No.18539313]

>>18539266
It is impossible for something to be something other than itself. Therefore, God is either one Being with one Essence, or is more than one being, each one with its own essence.

[Anonymous No.18539341]

For fuck's sake, please don't make this another Guenon thread. Take whatever you have to say to one of the the 37 Guenon threads that are probably already on the board.

[Anonymous No.18539525]

>>18539313
>Therefore, God is either one Being with one Essence, or is more than one being, each one with its own essence.
Is this supposed to be the refutation of David which you think applies to Shankara and Guenon? (the latter just accepts the metaphysics of the former).

Shankara’s Advaita doesn’t say that God is something other than itself, Advaita teaches that there is only one undivided Being, God, with His own essence, who uses His power to falsely project the appearance of being divided into many beings, like how the one moon appears as thousands of moons reflected in thousands of puddles at once while remaining undivided itself. Just so, in Advaita Vedanta God remains undivided and Himself only forever, at all moments, even at the same moment He is *appearing* to exist as a multitude of beings.

[Anonymous No.18539527]

>>18539306
>You’re wrong, because David of Dinant was a pantheist, and neither Guenon nor Shankara were pantheists, but for both of them God is transcendent to the world.

Cope. The arguments apply exactly to Shankara and Guenon.

>But muh pronouns prove you're wrong!

Pathetic.

[Anonymous No.18539529]

>>18539209
fuck monism, read Gustavo Bueno and whatever you want

[Anonymous No.18539531]

>>18539525
What is God? The very prime matter of existence, pure unity. The arguments of David of Dinant apply exactly to Shankara.

Guenon had a dipshit critique of Aquinas anyway.
>H-He didn't go far enough into non-being, muthafucka!
And of course didn't elaborate on it like he never elaborates on crucial critiques or counter-arguments.

[Anonymous No.18539545]

>>18539209
The Chadrlatan making everyone seethe. Nothing new. Accept that you are just a pawn in Hegel's board.

[Anonymous No.18539772]

>>18539527
>Cope. The arguments apply exactly to Shankara and Guenon.
Wrong, because David and Advaita are completely different metaphysics. Wikipedia describes David’s as follows:

“David's philosophy was that everything could be divided among bodies, minds, and eternal substances. The indivisible substrate or constituent of bodies is matter (hyle); of minds or souls, intellect (nous); and of eternal substances, God (Deus). These three, matter, intellect, and God, are actually one and the same. Consequently, all things, material, intellectual, and spiritual, have one and the same essence — God.”
Advaita Vedanta disagrees with this and says that God is irreducibly different from matter. Hence they are different metaphysics and the criticisms Aquinas makes of David don’t apply to Advaita. If you still are going to claim they are the same and fall prey to the same flaws you are either deliberately being dishonest or you are too stupid to understand the difference between “God = matter” and “God =\= matter”.

Advaita doesn’t say that mutually-contradictory things are true of God, they don’t say that God is anything other than His undivided immaterial Self, so the criticisms Aquinas makes of David are inapplicable to Advaita because they don’t hold the positions which David does.

> But muh pronouns
Is this supposed to be some tranny joke? If you had paid attention at all you’d know that the trannies on /lit/ generally dislike Advaita because it A) attacks anti-foundationalist Buddhism, B) says coomers wont reach enlightenment C) accepts and defends caste hierarchies and D) maintains God’s transcendence in contrast to the immanent world (trannies are all about immanence i.e. Deleuze, Spinoza etc)

>>18539531
>What is God? The very prime matter of existence, pure unity.
Advaita says that God is pure unity that transcends the world, that God is not the substance comprising all matter itself but rather God is the substratum or foundational ground which allows matter and the universe to appear within Himself while remaining entirely distinct from matter and the universe.
>The arguments of David of Dinant apply exactly to Shankara.
Wrong, as has been explained above.

[Anonymous No.18539794]

>>18539772
The critique still applies because the question is about assuming a pure unity free of any distinction.

And yes, Shankara is just a subtle pantheism since he practically deifies prime matter, prakriti, by placing it in ishwara.

Your only response is to say that your god is different from the Christian God, because your god is actually smug self-annihilation at its purest.

[Anonymous No.18539800]

[Anonymous No.18539809]

[Anonymous No.18539816]

Remider that guenonfag is a literal schizo and annoys everyone on the board.

[Anonymous No.18539831]

[Anonymous No.18539838]

>>18539209
I'm interested in ethics. Any particular recommendations short of the entire Summa?

[Anonymous No.18539839]

This is the fruit of Guenon and Shankara.

Be an annoying shill online with no life, replying to yourself in your own threads for bumps. Absolutely pathetic.

[Anonymous No.18539877]

>>18539838
Alasdair Macintyre's work.

[Anonymous No.18540374]

>>18539794
> The critique still applies because the question is about assuming a pure unity free of any distinction.
How so? the specific criticism you raised was raised against someone saying God was something other than itself, that is, being one being with one essence, while also being multiple beings with multiple essences. This is a contradiction because it’s violating the law of non-contradiction.

Simply stating that God exists as a pure united, undivided existence without distinctions is not saying “God is something other than Himself”, it’s not violating the law of non-contradiction. I don’t understand why you believe that the argument Aquinas raises against David would still apply to this conception of God, which is different from David’s. Can you elaborate on what you think the issue or contradiction is and why the critique still applies? So far you haven’t but you’ve just been vague.

> And yes, Shankara is just a subtle pantheism since he practically deifies prime matter, prakriti, by placing it in ishwara.
It’s not deification of matter because for Shankara matter/the elements lack the attributes and status that belong to the uncaused cause of all things, God/Brahman. The world and elements lack intelligence and are part of Hiranyagarbha (which is caused), or the world egg, which if anything is closer to Plato’s demiurge than God, while Brahman is comparable to Plato’s Good or the One. There is nothing in Advaita teachings which indicate or suggest that people should worship or feel reverent towards matter.

>Your only response is to say that your god is different from the Christian God, because your god is actually smug self-annihilation at its purest.
Wrong, because Brahman is the eternal Self, He cannot be self-annihilation because He exists forever which is mutually exclusive with annihilation. Smugness has no role to play either because one can only feel smug in relation to other beings, but when there is only the infinite undivided Being there is nobody else one could feel smug in relation to, any sort of egoistic comparison becomes impossible.

[Anonymous No.18540678]

>>18539800
I’m not sure what Madhva means there by “denying the witness of experience”, Advaita doesn’t deny the existence of the non-dual consciousness which they consider to be the underlying foundation of all mental activity, the necessary window through which it takes place and which it presupposes, the innermost ‘I’ or Self.

>>18539809
Yes, it is correct as Madhva points out that to say that Atman is not different from Brahman is the same as saying Brahman is not different from Brahman. It’s also correct to say that the human being is urged to turn to Brahman, since their Atman is already Brahman, the human being is instructed to recognize the already-existent reality of which they are presently ignorant, instead of trying to attain a union which doesn’t already exist. If it didn’t already exist and then begun when it was produced, then it wouldn’t be eternal since eternal things have no beginning.

Advaita doesn’t say as the picture seems to allege, that the human being is supposed to disappear, the liberated man who has knowledge of the Atman is still aware of the world around him and the mind, body etc.

>Further, if the human being is appearance, to whom does the appearance appear? To Brahman? If so, the Absolute presumably misleads itself.
the eternally-liberated Absolute of Brahman doesn’t observe the human-appearence, the witness of the human mind is the witness-consciousness or Sākṣī, which isn’t the same as the eternally-liberated, spotless, omniscient non-dual Brahman as He truly exists in Himself. Sākṣī occurs when there are jivas having their mind being illuminated by the light of awareness, for the jiva, the self-shining consciousness seems to be the observer of its mind and for the jiva it seems to become “witness-consciousness”. The already-liberated Brahman in absolute reality has no relation with maya and so for Brahman there is no mind who He witnesses. Brahman can be considered as illuminating everything without observing it, for observation implies duality which would interrupt and contradict Brahman being undifferentiated non-dual self-revealing Sentience, only the jivas feel like the consciousness illumining their mind is Sākṣī, while the Brahman-Atman doesn’t experience itself as Sākṣī and so He isn’t deluded or mislead as Madhva alleges.

[Anonymous No.18540688]

I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 9th century AD quasi-buddhism.

[Anonymous No.18540749]

>>18539772
theres basically no difference between impersonal monistic metaphysics and pantheism

[Anonymous No.18540762]

>>18540688
this. our guenon and shankara expert, guenonfag, even recently endorsed the shankara=cryptobuddhism thesis.

[Anonymous No.18541022]

>>18540749
Advaita Vedanta isn't monism or pantheism because it says the universe and God are irreducibly different from each other, while any monistic doctrine would necessarily need to have a single thing which makes up both God and the universe in order to be monism.