A Discourse For Awakening

An organized collection of short fragments that come together to make a whole

Leo Tolstoy Wood Engraving Print, 1891.

I. The Threshold: Crisis and Agency

§1. Pleasure, Technology, and the Missing Alternative

Imagine a future in which technology has perfected the manipulation of the human brain—where a simple implant allows any sensation of bliss to be summoned at will. With the press of a button, one could experience the height of ecstasy, purified of pain, consequence, or physical cost. Such pleasure could be entered and exited freely, without sickness, withdrawal, or decay. In purely sensory terms, this would represent the terminal point of pleasure: the absolute fulfillment of the body’s demands.

It is difficult to believe that a large portion of humanity would resist such an invitation. If civilization were otherwise automated—if survival, labor, and material need had been delegated to machines—then the pursuit of uninterrupted pleasure would appear not merely tempting, but rational. Within many dominant philosophical, biological, and political frameworks, pleasure is already treated as the highest good. Hedonism, utilitarianism, ego psychology, and evolutionary theory all converge on the idea that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is not only sensible, but morally justified.

And yet, this conclusion is deeply inadequate.

It ignores an alternative dimension of human experience—one that remains invisible so long as consciousness is absorbed entirely in sensation. Those devoted exclusively to pleasure are not choosing against this alternative; they are simply unaware of it. One cannot long for what one does not yet know exists.

The most direct encounter with this alternative occurs in what has traditionally been called mystical, spiritual, or religious experience. At its core, such experience reveals a fundamental duality in human motivation: the tension between pleasure and what may be called righteousness. By righteousness, I do not mean moral correctness or obedience to rules, but the felt alignment with an enduring truth—an immediate recognition of meaning that does not depend on sensory reward.

Where the peak of pleasure narrows attention toward itself alone, the peak of righteousness discloses the relationship between pleasure and something deeper. The highest human experience does not lie in the maximization of pleasure, nor in the rejection of it, but in the recognition of their interdependence. Righteousness does not negate pleasure; it contextualizes it.

This is why righteousness is the only force capable of resisting the gravitational pull of pure pleasure—even in its most seductive technological forms. It is not willpower that enables such resistance, but awareness: the awareness that something of equal or greater value exists beyond sensation.

This awareness is the true foundation of religion—not doctrine, ritual, or belief in a deity, but the human capacity to perceive meaning that transcends immediacy. Religion, in this sense, is not institutional but intimate. It is a feeling—one strong enough to loosen the grip of even the greatest pleasures imaginable.

Call it righteousness, creativity, love, or truth. Names are secondary. What matters is that without this anchoring force, resistance to pleasure is futile, and addiction—whether chemical, technological, or ideological—becomes inevitable.

§2. Pleasure and Righteousness as Complementary Forces

Pleasure and righteousness are not rigid concepts but heuristic labels for two fundamental motivational forces. Pleasure concerns sensory and cognitive satisfaction—what can be known, remembered, measured, and controlled. Righteousness concerns a subtler fulfillment—mental and emotional alignment with meaning that cannot be fully articulated.

A crucial distinction lies in their visibility. Pleasure is overt and immediate; righteousness is obscure and easily eclipsed. Pleasure reassures us by stabilizing experience, reducing uncertainty, and anchoring us in what is already known. It looks backward, toward memory and determination, and supports the construction of science, reason, and explanatory systems. At its deepest level, pleasure reflects the desire for security in an inherently unstable world.

Righteousness, by contrast, exists outside the familiar dualities of good and bad, success and failure. It looks forward, toward possibility rather than certainty. To those who have not grasped its value, movement toward righteousness appears indistinguishable from pain, loss, or despair. This is why genuine spiritual development is often accompanied by depression: sensory pleasure loosens its hold before a deeper joy becomes perceptible.

When identification with pleasure and pain dissolves, a quieter satisfaction emerges—one not felt in the body, but in the core of one’s being. This joy cannot be captured in concepts or doctrines. It is a direct experience of understanding rather than a belief that one understands. And paradoxically, true understanding does not feel good; believing that one understands does.

This asymmetry explains why pleasure attracts so easily while righteousness remains elusive. Ignorance of pleasure is felt as pain; ignorance of righteousness is invisible. To cultivate awareness of righteousness on a large scale would require a culture deliberately structured to reveal it—something modern Western society does not attempt. Instead, it intensifies the pursuit of pleasure, and in doing so, amplifies emotional emptiness.

Yet righteousness is not superior to pleasure in all respects. It is emotionally profound but intellectually empty without lived experience. Pleasure provides content; righteousness provides orientation. Each becomes destructive when isolated. Faith collapses into asceticism when detached from immediacy; reason collapses into nihilism when detached from transcendence.

Reality is grounded in their interdependence. The ultimate depends on the immediate, just as the immediate depends on the ultimate. This relationship cannot be resolved into a final formula—it can only be lived. Righteousness can be felt, but never fully expressed, because it marks the limit of explanation itself.

True peace arises not from choosing pleasure over righteousness, or righteousness over pleasure, but from relinquishing our addiction to either—and allowing them to inform one another as a single, unified process.

§3. Righteousness, Creativity, and Freedom

Righteousness is the subtle afterimage of the mystical experience. While full mystical states are rare, the sensitivity to what they disclose is not. Faith, devotion, piety, and holiness are all expressions of this sensitivity—responses to an implicit awareness of creative power, whether framed religiously or secularly.

If mystical experience is the direct taste of a flavor, righteousness is the scent carried on the air. Often faint, sometimes unmistakable, it draws attention toward meaning beyond routine life. It appears in moments of insight, intuition, and reorientation—during solitary walks, extended silence, or unguarded reflection—when the direction of one’s life suddenly becomes clear.

Human development does not proceed smoothly. It occurs in brief illuminations, followed by long periods of maintenance and explanation. Between insights, life is largely automatic. Habit, responsibility, memory, and instinct dominate awareness. In this state, we mistake control for freedom, even as control narrows the field of possibility.

True freedom does not consist in deliberate self-command. Control is never free. Freedom is the suspension of control—the spontaneous emergence of creativity ungoverned by personal intention. It is not determined by past causes or future plans. It arises from beyond the constructed self, from the deeper identity that precedes ego.

For this reason, freedom aligns naturally with beauty and virtue. To act freely is to act beautifully; to create freely is to create well. Only constrained action can be ugly or destructive. What is commonly called “free will” is therefore a misnomer. Will implies direction and control; freedom implies their absence.

Ego-consciousness is not liberation from nature, but separation from it. Individual identity emerges by limiting possibility. This limitation creates the illusion of independence, while obscuring the creative unity from which individuality arises. Creativity comes to appear extraordinary, when in fact it is our natural condition.

The truly remarkable feature of human existence is not our capacity to reconnect with creativity—such experiences are natural—but our capacity to forget it entirely and live absorbed in self-generated narratives we mistake for reality. Moments of meaning interrupt this forgetfulness. They dissolve attachment, suspend desire, and briefly restore authenticity.

Yet even devotion to creativity can become an obstacle. Desire separates the seeker from what is sought. Those most intensely striving for righteousness may be furthest from it. This is the central human predicament: the effort to return reinforces the distance.

And so, human life unfolds between immersion and awakening, control and spontaneity, memory and creativity. What we call righteousness is not a possession, achievement, or belief. It is a sensitivity—a quiet orientation toward the freedom we never truly lost.

Life itself is the miracle: it arises from the intrinsic selflessness of the creative source that makes all existence possible. This source—whether named God, Brahman, or any secular analogue—is not sustained by effort or devotion, but by an unconditional giving that precedes all individuality.

The fundamental difficulty faced by many religious traditions lies in an almost impossible task: attempting to reunite with the source by intensifying devotion to it. Religion expresses a genuine impulse—the desire to align oneself with creativity, righteousness, or the ultimate—but it often arrests its own progress by mistaking conceptual certainty for realization. The search halts the moment it claims to have arrived.

The ultimate truth cannot be grasped as an object of devotion, because it is only “ultimate” from the standpoint of a limited perspective. What deeper insight reveals is that creativity and memory, awareness and ego, the ultimate and the immediate, are not opposing hierarchies but complementary conditions. Each depends upon the other. Without the relative world of finitude, there would be no sense of ultimacy; without the ultimate, the relative would lack coherence.

To privilege one pole while suppressing the other is not transcendence but repression. The real insight of the mystical experience is not the elevation of creativity over the immediate world, but the recognition that reality itself is structured by complementarity. Being arises alongside non-being; duality depends on nonduality; reality itself requires what cannot properly be called “real” in order to exist at all.

Existence is therefore recursive, like a fractal: finite experience endlessly reflects an infinite structure, while that structure can only appear through finite forms. At the limit of this recursion lies not a hidden substance but an absence—a void that neither exists nor does not exist. This is not a failure of understanding, but its fulfillment. There is nothing there to comprehend.

Reason fails here not because it is weak, but because it belongs to the domain of separation: subject and object, knower and known. The ultimate lies prior to that division. It cannot be reached by seeking, because seeking presupposes distance; nor by devotion, because devotion presupposes duality.

The paradox is decisive: the more one strives for awakening, the more one reinforces the illusion that something is missing. Mystical experience can momentarily dissolve this illusion, but its profundity often becomes another object of fixation. In this way, mystical certainty becomes the most subtle form of delusion—not because it is false, but because it is mistaken for a solution.

True awakening is the recognition that the problem was never real. The dissatisfaction that drives the search arises only because one believes a solution exists. When the search ends—not by force, but by exhaustion—what remains is precisely what was always present.

This is why awakening cannot be achieved, decided upon, or even accepted deliberately. Any attempt to stop seeking is still a form of seeking. The resolution occurs only when this structure collapses under its own contradiction. One realizes—not intellectually, but existentially—that there is nothing to realize.

This insight aligns with the deepest current of Buddhist thought, particularly the Middle Way: not a compromise between extremes, but the collapse of the framework that generates extremes at all. To abandon both asceticism and indulgence is to abandon the belief that fulfillment lies on either side. Nonduality cannot be reached by opposing duality; that opposition merely reproduces it.

Creativity is our true nature precisely because it does not cling to itself. Its emptiness is not a lack, but its freedom. Because it does not define itself, the world can arise. Because the world arises, self-reflection becomes possible. Being appears because non-being makes space for it.

The ego—the seeker—is a necessary consequence of this freedom. But so long as it dominates attention, its noise obscures the silence from which it arose. Nothing needs to be done about this. Action itself is what sustains the illusion of separation.

There is no instruction to follow, no practice to complete, no realization to attain. The truth cannot be used, possessed, or even accepted. It can only be noticed when effort ceases.

To be what you are, you must stop trying to be anything.

§4. Creativity, Ego, and the Limits of Expression

The creative process of art offers a revealing metaphor for the structure of reality itself. Every artist confronts a fundamental tension: the desire to express an inner vision, and the pressure to accommodate external reward. As recognition, money, or approval become attached to creative work, subtle incentives arise. What once emerged freely begins to bend—often unconsciously—toward what has proven successful before.

This quiet adjustment is the deeper meaning of “selling out.” It need not involve deliberate cynicism or betrayal. More often, the artist comes to believe that what is rewarded must also be what is better. Creativity is gradually shaped by memory—by past success, by expectation, by the desire for validation. In this way, value infiltrates expression, and art becomes constrained by criteria that present themselves as objective, though they are not.

At its highest level, art is meant to transcend such limitations. It speaks not to markets or trends, but to universal possibility. When art is subordinated to valuation, it loses depth—not because money is involved, but because valuation introduces hierarchy, comparison, and finality. These are the marks of dualistic thinking, which stands opposed to the spirit of creativity itself.

Creativity is the function of possibility; memory is the function of limitation. Memory preserves distinctions—true and false, beautiful and ugly, success and failure—and these distinctions form the ego. Ego is the constructed identity that seeks approval and stability. Creativity, by contrast, arises from what is most authentic and unbounded within us.

This opposition has long been expressed in mythological and religious language: creation versus destruction, divinity versus the adversary. Creativity resembles the divine in its openness and generativity; ego resembles the adversary in its impulse to control, define, and possess. Yet this opposition is never absolute. No human creation is free from ego, nor could it be. Memory and limitation are not merely obstacles; they are conditions for cultural continuity, artistic development, and social life itself.

The same structure appears in science and philosophy. Rational inquiry depends on memory, classification, and explanation. It seeks to define and predict, to establish stable models of reality. When extended without restraint, it attempts to subsume even ethics and aesthetics into determinate systems. This impulse is not irrational—it is how civilizations progress—but it reflects the same limitation that constrains art.

From the perspective of pure creativity, such distinctions dissolve. Creativity is concerned with the act of emergence; reason is concerned with what has emerged. Religion and art begin with creation and move toward meaning; science begins with explanation and moves toward prediction. Neither is sufficient alone. Creativity without reason collapses into incoherence; reason without creativity collapses into sterility.

Reality itself reflects this interdependence. There is an unrestricted creative force capable of infinite expression, yet only a fraction of what could exist becomes experience. Experience requires form, law, and constraint. Physical laws are not merely discovered; they are the manner in which creative reality responds to inquiry. Explanation follows experience—it does not precede it.

The world is thus a harmony of creativity and reason, art and science, freedom and form. Reality develops in such a way that it can both create itself and understand itself.

II. The Map: The Structure of Intelligibility

§5. Determinateness, Immutability, and the Foundations of Paraphilosophy

By the end of this inquiry, the central insight will appear so self-evident that it may seem you have always known it. And yet, despite its profound importance, it has never been articulated in its full scope. Because it has remained unnamed, its value has gone largely unrecognized. This creates a genuine opportunity—not merely for reinterpretation, but for meaningful philosophical progress. Those inclined toward deep reflection are invited to participate in what may become a new intellectual movement.

All philosophical belief is shaped by two fundamental factors. The balance between them, and our capacity to recognize their expression in reality, determines the positions we ultimately adopt.

The first factor is determinateness: the capacity for limitation, specification, and measurement. Systems governed by determinateness are concrete, fragmentary, and explicit. What can be measured can act, change, and exert causal influence upon the world. Physical phenomena belong to this domain precisely because they are determinate.

The second factor is immutability: the absence of change. Systems expressing immutability are abstract, holistic, and implicit. They are not favored because they are empirically measurable, but because they are invariant across experience. Qualities such as redness or number persist unchanged, and it is only through this permanence that relations between particulars become intelligible.

These two properties—determinateness and immutability—qualify as belief-generating principles because every object of experience can be described through one or the other. What is clearly defined is subject to change; what is unchanging lacks specificity. Each provides a legitimate foundation for belief, yet individuals differ in their capacity to apprehend the reality expressed by each. From this difference arises philosophical bias.

Across the history of philosophy, the divide between subjectivist and objectivist approaches consistently reflects this distinction. In epistemology, determinateness appears as a posteriori knowledge—facts known only through experience—while immutability appears as analytic or logical knowledge, which holds by necessity. In ontology, determinateness manifests as concreteness, while immutability manifests as universality. In axiology, determinateness corresponds to subjective value, while immutability corresponds to absolute value. In politics, determinateness expresses itself as liberty and libertarianism, whereas immutability appears as equality and collectivism.

This recurring pattern reveals a single underlying structure governing philosophical thought: a dialectical matrix composed of two intersecting dichotomies—determinateness versus indeterminateness, and immutability versus mutability. Those drawn toward determinateness tend naturally toward empiricism, materialism, and moral relativism. Those oriented toward immutability find rationalism, idealism, and moral objectivism more compelling.

This structure forms the logical foundation of paraphilosophy. Unlike traditional philosophy, which seeks correct doctrines, paraphilosophy investigates the source of doctrines themselves. It is indifferent to the assumption that a single theory can resolve every philosophical question. Its concern is with the conditions that make theorizing possible at all: our capacity to envision something as true, and the structure through which that capacity becomes articulated as belief.

Whether the subject is knowledge, being, or value, all philosophical content emerges from this same structure. The question then arises: does this structure belong merely to the intellect, or does it reflect reality itself? If it binds only our thinking, philosophy remains trapped within subjectivity. But if it belongs to the world, then every philosophical perspective expresses a partial truth within an underlying whole.

Evidence suggests the latter. The structure extends into psychology: determinateness relies on extraversion and engagement with external objects, while immutability relies on feeling and sensitivity to invariant qualities of experience. It extends into physiology, where the sympathetic nervous system enables interaction with the external world, while the brain’s integrative functions support holistic perception. It even governs our conception of truth itself: determinateness aligns with verification and the law of non-contradiction, while immutability aligns with falsification and the law of excluded middle.

This convergence indicates that the structure is not a cognitive artifact, but a feature of reality’s own organization. Paraphilosophy thus explains duality as the relativized expression of an inherently paradoxical core. Like a wave with crest and trough, every form contains what is revealed and what is concealed. Subject and object, mind and matter, complete one another; neither is whole in isolation.

This insight opens new interdisciplinary possibilities. Certain phenomena are best understood as determinate properties of physics; others as immutable features of psychology. Many can be grasped only through their correspondence. Physics illuminates psychology, psychology illuminates physics, and both together reveal dimensions of reality previously inaccessible.

The implications are vast: medicine, particularly psychosomatic and chronic conditions; theories of consciousness; interpretations of psychophysical parallelism in thinkers such as Spinoza and Leibniz; Jungian synchronicity; and even aspects of quantum theory, including entanglement and wave-function collapse. In evolutionary theory, this framework reconciles determinism and free will, nature and nurture, through a complementary rather than oppositional model.

Socially and politically, paraphilosophy points toward a balanced integration of collectivist and libertarian principles through a deliberate dualization of power and governance. As humanity progresses toward the reconciliation of opposites, such a framework may prove indispensable.

This is only an initial invitation. The implications far exceed what any single thinker could exhaust. If this framework holds, it may represent not merely another philosophy, but a significant advance in how humanity understands itself and the world it inhabits.

§6. Paraphilosophy as Self-Justifying Reality

An isomorphism exists when two distinct systems share the same structure—so fully alike in form that they cannot be distinguished by structure alone. Its philosophical importance lies in this: when two systems are isomorphic, insight into one immediately translates into insight about the other. Morse code, for example, functions because its signals are structurally identical to the alphabet it represents. Meaning is preserved through form. To speak about one system, then, is implicitly to speak about its counterpart.

This insight underlies structuralism, the view that thoughts, actions, and meanings are intelligible only through their relations within a larger system. What something is depends on the position it occupies in a structure. In mathematical structuralism, this principle is taken to its limit: mathematical objects are nothing over and above the structures they instantiate, and isomorphic structures are, for all theoretical purposes, identical.

From this perspective, philosophical theories across every domain—knowledge, being, value, governance—can be represented within a single structural framework defined by a small number of fundamental distinctions. Because radically different philosophical problems share the same structural form, they are governed by the same kinds of solutions. As Graham Priest has argued in the context of self-referential paradoxes, problems that are structurally identical are, in effect, the same problem expressed in different vocabularies; a solution that fails for one must fail for all.

The branches of philosophy may therefore be understood as distinct languages describing a single reality. Each emphasizes a different dimension of our capacity to comprehend that reality, but all are expressions of one underlying structure. Paraphilosophy names this structure itself—not another philosophical position among many, but the meta-framework that makes all philosophical positions possible.

This structure differentiates four coherent ways of interpreting experience: as raw sensation, as physical objectivity, as abstract form, or as consciousness itself. Each appears in every philosophical domain. Notably, in each domain one quadrant expresses a unity of subject and object: self-knowledge in epistemology, self-being in ontology, self-value in ethics, and self-governance in politics. Here, the subject becomes its own object. This is the phenomenon of self-reference.

Because these quadrants are not independent but mutually constitutive aspects of a single whole, self-reference in one implies self-reference in the structure as such. The structure is therefore self-similar, like a fractal. If one aspect of the structure culminates in self-consciousness, then the entire structure is contained within self-consciousness. This is unavoidable: every perspective is a perspective of consciousness, including the perspective that interprets everything as consciousness. Consciousness cannot be located within the structure, because the structure itself appears only within consciousness. Consciousness is nowhere in particular—yet everything appears within it.

This bears directly on the classic philosophical dispute between rationalism and empiricism. What is known through experience seems independent of pure reason; what is known through reason seems independent of experience. Yet self-knowledge depends on both. It is at once logical and experiential. Experience necessarily occurs to consciousness, and this fact is not discovered empirically but is a logical precondition of experience itself. To doubt the existence of consciousness is already to affirm it. The question refutes itself.

Because consciousness is self-justifying, and because all reasoning occurs within consciousness, the underlying philosophical structure is likewise self-justifying. It is not merely a description of how minds function; it expresses something true about reality itself. The structure is reality’s mode of self-conception.

This is the deeper meaning of paraphilosophy: not a theory about the world, but the self-affirming possibility of conception as such—the conditions under which anything can be conceived, believed, or known. All philosophical concepts derive from this act. Philosophy, at its core, is reality attempting to understand its own capacity to imagine a rational world—an activity it performs through us.

Paraphilosophy therefore reverses the traditional aim of philosophy. Instead of seeking some ultimate object worthy of belief, it recognizes that the capacity for belief itself is what is fundamental. We refuse to believe in anything beyond what can, in principle, be known, and what can be known is this: that we possess the capacity to imagine truth. That capacity is the sole legitimate reference point of the concept of truth. To place faith anywhere else is to mistake the source for the product.

Where traditional philosophy selectively grants belief to particular doctrines, paraphilosophy recognizes belief itself as the reality long sought. It embraces its own self-affirmation, acknowledging the incontestable fact of its existence here and now. There is nothing further to prove. Life does not aim at some external solution; life is its own fulfillment. The problems we imagine dissolve once we recognize that they exist only insofar as we insist on solving what never required resolution.

§7. The Synthesis of Necessity and Fact

No definitive proof has ever been offered for any major epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, or political theory. This is not accidental. Every philosophical problem admits two coherent yet opposing approaches: a first-person, principle-based, subjective perspective, and a third-person, fact-based, objective one. The former is criticized for indeterminacy and lack of concreteness; the latter for contingency and impermanence. This opposition is deeply rooted in human psychology and has been recognized throughout intellectual history—by William James as the divide between rationalists and empiricists, and by Carl Jung as that between introversion and extraversion.

Philosophical discourse has long assumed that any attempt to unite qualitative necessity with quantitative observation must result in contradiction. This assumption is mistaken. Our conception of reality is structured by opposition, and only by understanding the unity within this opposition can genuine knowledge emerge. That unity is found in self-consciousness, the subject that is its own object.

Immanuel Kant formalized this structure in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) by distinguishing two dimensions of judgment. The epistemic distinction separates what is knowable independently of experience (a priori) from what is knowable only through experience (a posteriori). The semantic distinction separates analytic judgments, true by definition, from synthetic judgments, true by virtue of their relation to the world. Together, these distinctions yield four classes of knowledge.

Kant rejected the possibility of analytic a posteriori knowledge, arguing that analytic judgments require no experiential confirmation. However, later interpreters—notably Stephen Palmquist—have argued that this dismissal is premature. Analytic a posteriori knowledge would involve truths whose necessity is conceptual, yet whose recognition is inseparable from experience.

There is exactly one entity that satisfies this condition: consciousness itself. The necessity of consciousness is analytic, since it is presupposed by any act of conceiving or doubting. Yet consciousness is never known apart from experience. One cannot know it prior to experiencing it. The act of knowing and the fact known are inseparable. In this case, logic and experience coincide.

Self-consciousness therefore occupies a unique position: it is the fusion point of subject and object, analytic and empirical, necessity and fact. It is an infinite loop in which awareness reflects upon itself, generating both the knower and the known. All other knowledge presupposes this loop. We do not merely know ourselves through reflection; we exist as the product of reflection.

As Johann Gottlieb Fichte observed, the self posits itself through its own activity; its existence and its self-assertion are one and the same act. Philosophy, at its deepest level, is therefore unavoidably self-referential. Every theory includes the theorist; every account of reality is also an account of the capacity to give accounts.

Self-consciousness leaves its imprint on all inquiry. Attempts to eliminate it only reintroduce it implicitly. Academic philosophy is thus a systematic refinement of the same reflective activity present in all thought. Because self-reference is foundational to cognition, it must also be foundational to philosophy. The path to understanding anything begins, and necessarily ends, with understanding oneself.

§8. Kant, Nāgārjuna, and the Critique of Reason

We now turn to a revealing convergence between Western and Eastern philosophy: the relation between Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way. Though separated by culture and purpose, both thinkers converge on a profound insight—namely, that disciplined self-critique is the necessary ground from which genuine insight into reality can emerge.

Kant and Nāgārjuna each affirm the conventional validity of empirical experience while denying that it discloses ultimate reality. Kant sought to secure the foundations of science; Nāgārjuna aimed to dissolve the metaphysical errors that obstruct liberation. Yet both achieve their aims through a shared strategy: exposing the false oppositions generated by reason when it exceeds its proper limits. For Kant, this resolves the conflict between rationalism and empiricism; for Nāgārjuna, between essentialism and nihilism.

In both systems, critique functions as a method of transcendence. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a systematic self-examination of reason, intended to reveal its inherent constraints and thereby delimit the conditions of possible knowledge. Nāgārjuna’s prasanga method performs a parallel task: it exposes the contradictions implicit in ordinary metaphysical views, demonstrating that the dualities they rely upon—existence and nonexistence, self and other, permanence and change—lack any ultimate foundation.

Accordingly, both thinkers approach ultimate reality via a negative path. Kant characterizes the noumenon as the boundary of conceptual cognition; Nāgārjuna identifies emptiness (śūnyatā) as the absence of intrinsic essence in all phenomena. Though articulated differently, both concepts mark the point at which discursive thought breaks down. Phenomena are empirically real, yet ultimately unreal. For Kant, this distinction appears as phenomena versus noumena; for Nāgārjuna, as dependent origination and emptiness.

This shared structure becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of paraphilosophy. Paraphilosophy does not advance doctrines but analyzes how belief itself is structured. Like Kantian critique, it challenges the assumption of objectivity by revealing the subjective conditions that underlie all claims to truth. Reason is shown to operate dialectically, producing equally compelling oppositions that cannot be resolved on their own terms.

Where Kant explains these oppositions by appeal to fixed cognitive faculties, paraphilosophy treats reason as a self-organizing, dialectical matrix—a dynamic structure that generates and sustains its own alternatives. In this respect, paraphilosophy aligns more closely with post-Kantian thinkers such as Hegel, who understood reason not as a static constraint but as an evolving process.

This dialectical structure is formalized in the quadrant model, which can be applied to any philosophical concept. When applied to truth, it yields four logical possibilities, corresponding to what the Greeks called the tetralemma and Indian philosophy calls the catuṣkoṭi. Nāgārjuna employs this structure precisely to demonstrate the insufficiency of conceptual reasoning in grasping ultimate reality.

Kant’s antinomies and Nāgārjuna’s dialectics exhibit a striking parallel. Both reveal contradictions that arise when reason attempts to determine the absolute: whether the world has a beginning, whether freedom exists, whether a necessary being or ultimate ground can be affirmed. In each case, thesis and antithesis are equally rational yet mutually irreconcilable, thereby exposing the limits of discursive thought.

Yet critique alone is not sufficient. While negative analysis dismantles false views, it does not by itself disclose reality. Later philosophical traditions—Yogācāra, Advaita Vedānta, and post-Kantian idealism—respond by articulating a more positive account of the ultimate, not as a determinate object but as something immanent within experience itself. Thus, the noumenon is reinterpreted as will (Schopenhauer), ego (Fichte), spirit (Hegel), dynamic perception (Yogācāra), or pure being-consciousness (Vedānta). In each case, the ultimate is no longer merely beyond experience, but implicitly present within it.

Here a decisive difference emerges between Kant and Madhyamaka. Kant denies the possibility of absolute knowledge, since reason remains bound by its categories. Madhyamaka agrees that conceptual thought cannot overcome its own contradictions, but maintains that nondual insight can dissolve them entirely. The oppositions of subject and object, self and world, existence and nonexistence are seen to be illusory constructions of thought, not features of reality itself.

The function of critique, then, is not to produce ultimate knowledge, but to exhaust the intellect’s demand for it. When the mind recognizes that it cannot escape its own dialectical structure, it may relinquish the attempt altogether. This surrender is not ignorance, but the condition for direct, non-conceptual insight.

Ultimate truth is therefore not a proposition, but a mode of awareness: the unbiased recognition of the limits of perspective itself. It is not found in affirming or denying any view, but in freedom from dogmatic attachment to views as such. This is why emptiness itself must not be reified; taken as a doctrine, it too becomes an obstacle.

Madhyamaka is thus the Middle Way—not a compromise between extremes, but a transcendence of them. Paraphilosophy functions in an analogous manner: not by rejecting perspectives, but by revealing their mutual dependence and inherent limitation. Because reality cannot be fully rationalized, multiple relative truths remain valid. Ultimate truth lies in the lived absence of fixation, a freedom that makes creativity, meaning, and relative existence possible.

Paraphilosophy is therefore not something to believe, but something to practice. It redirects attention from what is believed to the act of believing itself. Belief always operates by exclusion; paraphilosophy exposes this mechanism and thereby releases it from dogmatism. What we ultimately discover is not a final explanation, but our own capacity to explain—and to let explanation go.

Reality, in this sense, is not a fixed given but an evolving field of possibilities shaped by perception, discrimination, and creativity. Paraphilosophy names this freedom: the openness that allows beliefs, concepts, and worlds to arise without ever becoming absolute.

Kant himself gestures toward this horizon when he suggests that practical reason and moral faith offer an indirect relation to the noumenal. By suspending the demand for theoretical mastery, another form of knowing becomes possible. It is from this opening that later thinkers—most notably Hegel—will attempt to reintegrate the noumenal into reason itself through the dynamic unfolding of self-consciousness.

III. The Ascent: From Potential to Being

§9. From Primordial Possibility to Self-Justifying Being

Suppose that at the origin of all things there is neither existence nor nonexistence. There is not even nothing. Instead, there is pure possibility: an indeterminate field containing an infinity of possible worlds, none of which exist, yet none of which are strictly unreal. Within this field are worlds ordered and chaotic, lifeless and living, lawful and random. Each contains innumerable possible histories—sequences of configurations that could unfold without any ultimate cause compelling them to do so.

Among these possibilities, imagine one that is maximally conducive to complexity and life. If it existed, it could eventually reflect upon itself. Yet since nothing exists, there is nothing upon which it can reflect—except the mere possibility of reflection itself. From this, a pattern may arise: possibility organizing itself around self-reflection. Over hypothetical time, this self-reflection could become increasingly structured and intelligible, dividing into that which reflects and that which is reflected upon. It could simulate an external world, representing itself as if it stood apart from itself.

As this process deepens, the possibility could generate ever more persuasive reasons for its own hypothetical existence. Though it still does not exist, it could encode the experience of being convinced that it does. At some point, the structure of possibility would contain a configuration indistinguishable from the lived certainty of being. The story of why there is something rather than nothing would be told from within the structure itself. Possibility would become self-justifying.

What we call reality is precisely this: not a brute fact, but a structure capable of explaining itself. Reality is not freely given; it is achieved. To be is to comprehend—to feel and understand why one should be, and why one is. Existence is not absolute but processual, neither fully being nor fully nonbeing. Life asserts itself by generating a justification for its own reality, grounded in the convergence of rational belief and lived experience.

If absolute self-certainty is even possible, then an entire history—cosmic, biological, psychological—can retroactively resonate into coherence in order to justify it. The process becomes its own proof. The mere possibility of anything at all is identical to complete self-understanding. When a mind fully realizes itself, it recognizes that it was never a fixed entity, but the unrestricted creative potential of primordial possibility—neither existing nor not existing, but simply able to be.

§10. Reality as Self-Creation and Evolving Intelligence

The history of philosophy is, to a large extent, a history of temperament. Every philosopher begins not from pure reason, but from a psychological disposition that quietly determines what kind of universe feels plausible. Though philosophers strive to suppress this fact, temperament inevitably biases interpretation, shaping whether one favors a sentimental or austere vision of reality. Philosophical disagreement, at its core, is less a clash of arguments than a clash of sensibilities.

This division of temperament appears across all domains of culture: authoritarian and anarchist in politics, classicist and romantic in art, realist and purist in literature, rationalist and empiricist in philosophy. Our most basic convictions flow from how we are inclined to see the world. Even when shown to be mistaken, we rarely abandon our beliefs, because belief itself is a practiced skill. The more adept we become at thinking in one way, the less capable we are of recognizing the coherence of others.

Creativity constructs representations of the world that move us so deeply they appear self-evidently real. The mind seeks a satisfying understanding precisely so that it may believe there is something beyond understanding to be understood. Philosophical disagreement thus reveals not a failure of reason, but its boundary. What lies beyond this boundary is not another doctrine, but the activity of reasoning itself.

This is the domain of paraphilosophy. Philosophy operates within it; paraphilosophy contains all philosophies. It is the field in which reason moves, tracing paths of least resistance from temperament to belief. Each path is an idea; the totality of paths is the idea of ideation itself. The world we experience is constructed from these paths, and each theory is relatively true insofar as it expresses our capacity to imagine what might be absolutely true—even though no such absolute is ever reached.

Ideas are not true independently; they become true through intellectual activity and collective adoption. Patterns recur in philosophy because certain conceptual routes are easier to traverse, and the more frequently they are traveled, the more established they become. This same process governs reality itself: every discovery is an act of creation, and every creation advances evolution.

Reality, then, is not a fixed object but a process of self-learning. Phenomenal existence is reality coming to know what it is, and self-knowledge is inseparable from self-creation. Ultimate reality is emptiness—not as negation, but as indeterminacy. Because nothing is fixed in advance, anything may arise. Freedom is the absence of necessity, and from freedom all creation flows.

The fundamental nature of reality is paradoxical: it is precisely because it is not determined that it can be. This paradox cannot be believed, because belief requires fixed propositions. Truth is not a belief but a capacity—the ability to hold “is” and “is not” together without collapsing one into the other. Creativity consists in this very indeterminacy.

Enlightenment, therefore, is not an event that occurs to an individual. It is the unfolding of reality itself. No one possesses enlightenment; rather, enlightenment possesses persons to the degree that they cease resisting it. The very concept of enlightenment becomes a trap when treated as an attainable state, for it is this striving that obscures what is already present.

Reality evolves as intelligence evolves. As self-knowledge increases, the world becomes more articulated and thus more real. The laws of physics and the structures of mind arise from the same rational process by which reality learns itself. The external world appears deterministic not because it excludes consciousness, but because determinism is the condition that allows consciousness to understand it. Science is not an enemy of this view; it is its necessary instrument.

Materialism is not ultimately true, but it is an indispensable stage in development. The ability to imagine that reality is purely material is itself a cognitive achievement through which intelligence must pass. Our mythological past, far from being primitive, expressed a wisdom grounded in unity rather than analysis. As intellect displaced instinct, meaning was lost—but precision was gained.

Science and ego are not mistakes to be rejected. They are tools of remembering. Through rigor, measurement, and abstraction, a new form of wisdom becomes possible—one that will eventually reintegrate what analysis has divided. Progress has two faces: mastery and understanding. Beyond a certain point, further separation hinders rather than helps self-knowledge.

The fundamental error across philosophy, science, and religion is the failure to recognize that reality is an activity. Experience is not something that happens to us; it is something we do. And like all actions, it can be done well or poorly. Experiencing is a skill. As we become better at it, reality itself deepens, and we become more real.

To be real is not a static condition but an achievement. Absolute self-knowledge is mastery of experience itself. Paraphilosophy is therefore not despair but celebration: an affirmation that reality must eventually know itself fully, because otherwise there would be no self capable of beginning the process at all.

Creation and creator are the same. What is creating is what is being created. We observe this unity only from the incomplete perspective of individuality. The world has a beginning only because it already contains its end. Reality is the act of becoming what it always was.

§11. The Concrete Universal

At the core of metaphysics lies one of philosophy’s oldest and most enduring tensions: the question of substance, of that in which perception and reality are ultimately grounded. From its earliest articulation, this problem has been expressed through a fundamental dialectic. In Plato, it appears as the distinction between Forms and sensibles; in modern philosophy, it reemerges as the contrast between abstract and concrete entities.

Abstract entities are understood as non-physical: they lack spatial and temporal location and possess no causal efficacy. Concrete entities, by contrast, exist in space and time and participate in causal relations. Closely intertwined with this distinction is another inherited from Plato: that between universals and particulars. Universals are qualities shared by many things; particulars are the individual instances that bear them.

Plato held that universals—Forms—exist independently of their instances. Aristotle rejected this, arguing that qualities exist only insofar as they are instantiated, and that there are as many qualities as there are particular things. These two dichotomies—abstract versus concrete, universal versus particular—together generate four possible modes of being.

Philosophical attention has traditionally focused on three of these, while neglecting the fourth: the concrete universal. This notion appears contradictory, since the concrete is associated with particularity and the universal with abstraction. Yet the concrete universal names something indispensable: that which is both spatiotemporally real and universally shared. It refers not to an abstract property but to the universal in which all particulars participate as particulars.

Modern thought tends to overlook this category, yet it gestures toward substance itself—what all things have in common simply by being. Physics may describe this substrate as energy, but metaphysically it can only be named as the world as a whole, or more precisely, as the condition under which anything appears at all.

In the early nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel gave the concrete universal its most systematic articulation. For Hegel, abstract universals describe what individuals are like; concrete universals describe what individuals are. The concrete universal is the “universal of individuality.” A rose, for example, may be red, but its redness is abstract; its roseness is concrete. All roses differ, yet all instantiate the same concrete universal, without which none would be roses at all.

The concrete universal is therefore both constituted by its instances and constitutive of them. It is universal only insofar as it is particularized, and particular only insofar as it expresses the universal. This unity of universality and individuality culminates in what Hegel identifies as absolute individuality: self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is not merely a concept; it is a concrete, lived reality. It is the being of the self, just as analytic a posteriori knowledge is the knowing of the self. All that is corporeal is known as corporeal only through its representation in consciousness, and self-consciousness itself is not localized in space or time, since space and time are apprehended only within it. The concrete universal, in its fullest sense, is the very possibility of understanding—a structure that generates itself and renders itself real.

Hegel expresses this with precision: when the concept attains concrete existence and freedom, it is nothing other than the “I,” pure self-consciousness—the concept that exists as itself. Like the universal set in logic, the concrete universal participates in itself, because everything participates in it.

This entails an unavoidable paradox. Self-consciousness is both an element within the world and that within which the world appears. It is everywhere and nowhere at once: the most obvious and the most elusive aspect of experience. It cannot be definitively located, because all locations are contained within it. Reality, at its foundation, is paradoxical.

Philosophy, therefore, cannot give an account of the self without taking itself as a whole to be that very self. Philosophy is the self’s formalized understanding of itself. The philosophical science must arise from reason’s own act of self-positing—an act made possible through analytic a posteriori knowledge, wherein being and knowing coincide.

The concrete universal does not exist prior to its realization; it becomes what it is through time, through individuals who differentiate the world by means of concepts in order to recognize themselves within it. History, in this sense, is not merely causal succession but a justificatory process: the world unfolding so that understanding may recognize itself.

Causality and natural law are not external constraints imposed upon reality; they are expressions of the consistency required for understanding to develop. The present conforms to law because lawful order is a condition for intelligibility.

The path to self-knowledge thus first leads away from the self, into differentiation and objectification. Only when the intellect acquires sufficient self-reference does the duality of subject and object begin to dissolve. Analysis gives way to synthesis; separation yields to integration.

Life itself follows this rhythm. It expands into form in ignorance and contracts into unity in understanding. This movement is neither accidental nor external; it is the very pulse of conscious existence. In moments of stillness, this truth may be felt directly, for it is encoded in every breath: expansion and contraction, differentiation and return. This is the structure of life.

§12. Hegel, the Absolute, and the Dialectics of Emptiness

Before Hegel, Immanuel Kant introduced the notion of a transcendental structure of subjectivity: a universal and necessary framework through which experience is organized by the categories of understanding. This structure is neither the empirical self of experience nor a living universal spirit. Rather, it is a fixed formal condition that reveals how experience is shaped by subjectivity rather than grounded in mind-independent facts, as early scientific realism presumed.

In Kant’s system, the transcendental subject determines how noumena can appear as phenomena. Experience is therefore conditioned by subjectivity, even though Kant leaves open the possibility of an unknowable objective reality beyond it. In this respect, Kant’s transcendental subject plays a role analogous to the dialectical matrix in paraphilosophy, which likewise describes the structure of relative experience.

Hegel departs from Kant at a decisive point. He rejects the idea that the categories of understanding are merely subjective conditions of experience. Instead, he argues that they are also objective structures of reality itself. History and consciousness are, for Hegel, the self-unfolding of an immanent rational process—the Absolute. Subjective reason and objective reality are not separate domains but two expressions of the same dialectical movement.

This position is captured in Hegel’s claim that the rational is real and the real is rational. There is no priority of subject over object or object over subject. Reality discloses its rational structure precisely through our engagement with it. In this sense, the dialectical matrix is not merely a feature of human cognition but an expression of the structure of reality itself.

By identifying reason and reality as two aspects of a single process, Hegel eliminates the skeptical remainder of Kant’s philosophy. There is no need to posit a transcendent noumenal realm forever beyond knowledge. Reality is self-grounding through dialectical development. Opposing perspectives are therefore not errors to be eliminated but complementary moments within a larger rational whole.

This move bears a strong affinity with Mahāyāna Buddhism. Madhyamaka likewise denies any independent ultimate reality standing behind appearances. There is only conventional reality, grounded in its own interdependence. Absolute and relative truth are not two separate realms but non-dual aspects of a single process, just as emptiness is not opposed to dependent origination but identical with it.

The principal difference lies in Hegel’s affirmation of the Absolute as a concrete universal. For Hegel, ultimate reality is not merely the absence of intrinsic existence but the positive integration of subjectivity and objectivity through dialectical synthesis. This corresponds to the superjectivist position in paraphilosophy, where reality is understood as the integration of perspectives rather than their elimination.

At first glance, this appears to conflict with both Madhyamaka and paraphilosophy, which aim to transcend all rational standpoints rather than elevate one to absolute status. A parallel is often drawn between Hegel’s Absolute and the Vedāntic concept of Brahman. Yet this comparison requires careful distinction.

In its determinate and immanent form (saguṇa brahman), Vedānta does resemble Hegel’s Absolute as a unity of subject and object manifested through creative activity. However, Vedānta also posits an indeterminate, transcendent reality (nirguṇa brahman) that lies entirely beyond conceptual thought. From the standpoint of Advaita Vedānta, this alone is ultimately real, rendering any rational synthesis—including Hegel’s Absolute—provisionally valid but ultimately transcended.

Thus, the affinity between Hegel and Vedānta is stronger in non-dualist but world-affirming traditions such as Viśiṣṭādvaita and certain strands of Neo-Vedānta, where the world and the divine are understood as mutually implicating rather than strictly opposed.

The contrast between Hegel and Madhyamaka appears stark. Hegel seeks absolute knowing through the rational synthesis of perspectives. Madhyamaka seeks liberation through the negation of all conceptual distinctions. Synthesis appears to affirm a view, while total negation refuses all views. On the surface, these approaches seem irreconcilable.

Yet the opposition may be misleading. Ordinary reason treats contradiction as falsity. Hegel, by contrast, treats contradiction as the motor of truth. For him, truth develops through the sublation of opposites, not their exclusion. This suggests that Hegelian reason does not operate according to classical binary logic. It is supra-rational: intelligible, yet incompatible with ordinary standards of consistency.

In this respect, Hegel’s Absolute may be closer to non-dual insight than it first appears. Although rational in structure, it exceeds finite conceptual determination. The Absolute cannot be grasped as a static object, but only through its unfolding in history and thought. It is ineffable in the sense that it can only be known through its activity.

This convergence becomes clearer when compared with Jain philosophy, particularly the doctrine of anekāntavāda (non-one-sidedness). Jainism holds that reality admits multiple, partially true perspectives, including mutually opposing ones. Buddhism differs by refusing to affirm any ultimate standpoint at all, interpreting the relativity of views as evidence of their emptiness rather than their partial truth.

Hegel occupies a third position. He affirms the relativity of all partial truths but maintains that they are ultimately integrated into a single self-realizing whole. Madhyamaka negates all views to dissolve attachment. Hegel negates views in order to preserve them at a higher level. Yet in both cases, negation is not merely destructive.

This is clearest in the shared logic of the negation of negation. In Madhyamaka, emptiness negates inherent existence; the emptiness of emptiness then prevents emptiness itself from becoming an absolute. This avoids nihilism and affirms the dependent arising of phenomena. Emptiness is not a transcendent ground but the relational nature of things themselves.

Hegel’s dialectic follows a similar pattern. Being negates itself as non-being; this contradiction is then negated again in becoming. Negation thus becomes productive. Absolute negativity generates determinate form. The dialectic is never a confirmed position but a movement toward greater coherence.

In this sense, Hegel’s Absolute negativity closely parallels Madhyamaka’s emptiness as the “groundless ground” of phenomena. Both systems reject fixed essences while affirming the intelligibility and dynamism of the world.

Madhyamaka can even be expressed in dialectical form:

Thesis: things exist independently.
Antithesis: things do not exist independently.
Negation of negation: things neither exist nor do not exist independently—rather, they arise interdependently.

This final insight dissolves the opposition without replacing it with a new metaphysical assertion. It affirms reality without reifying it, reason without absolutizing it, and truth without dogma.

The parallel with Hegel’s synthesis of being and non-being into becoming is unmistakable. Both Hegelian dialectics and Madhyamaka philosophy point toward what may be called an absolute relativity. In Madhyamaka, the absence of independent existence means that all things exist only in relation to others. In Hegel, the fact that all determinate beings are perpetually negated and transformed likewise implies that nothing is self-sufficient. Reality, in both cases, is relational through and through.

If everything exists interdependently, then the network of interdependence itself cannot meaningfully be said to depend on something external called “emptiness.” In this precise sense, interdependent existence is non-dependent. The paradox follows naturally: non-dependence is nothing other than interdependence. Independence, properly understood, is not isolation but the autonomy of a self-organizing web in which every phenomenon exists only through its relations.

This unity of opposites echoes Heraclitus’ claim that permanence is change, Hegel’s idea of unity-in-difference, and the process-philosophical insight that substance is nothing apart from activity. Even the Absolute, on this view, is not a fixed ground but the absence of fixity itself—the total relativity of all determinations.

What remains unresolved, however, is the divergence between the Madhyamaka account of the negation of negation as emptiness and Hegel’s account of the same movement as Absolute Spirit. One possible bridge emerges from a more yogic or phenomenological perspective: if emptiness is not merely absence but suchness, and if suchness is inseparable from awareness, then phenomena are interdependent not only with one another but with consciousness itself. This brings the Buddhist position closer to Hegel’s conception of spirit.

For Hegel, self-consciousness is a necessary moment in the self-realization of the Absolute, but it is not the final moment. Self-consciousness arises only through mutual recognition: the self becomes itself only through its relation to other selves. There is no isolated subject. Selfhood is an interdependent process, a view that resonates strongly with the Buddhist rejection of an inherently existing self.

Because Hegel’s Absolute realizes itself through dialectical synthesis, the recognition of emptiness—if framed within his system—would require integration with its apparent opposite, fullness. One might speculate that this is why certain strands of Mahāyāna Buddhism gradually describe emptiness as luminous awareness. Hegel himself explicitly identifies pure being, devoid of determination, with pure nothingness. Both are equally indeterminate, and their unity gives rise to becoming. Similar insights appear in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa and later in Jung’s psychology of opposites.

Hegel’s Spirit is therefore not a static entity but a process of becoming that both includes and transcends being and non-being. Emptiness, as described in Buddhist sources, is likewise neither existence nor non-existence, neither identity nor difference. It is not the absence of phenomena but the absence of rigid dualities. In this respect, Madhyamaka negation and Hegelian dialectics converge: both dissolve fixed oppositions by revealing their deeper unity.

The most serious question for Hegel is whether dialectical sublation ever truly culminates in complete absolute knowledge, or whether it remains an endless ascent toward ever more comprehensive but still relative syntheses. If the dialectic never genuinely concludes, one might argue—as some Advaita and Mahāyāna traditions do—that ultimate knowledge is not discursive at all but a direct, non-dual awareness.

Yet this need not contradict Hegel’s position. Although Hegel speaks of Absolute Knowing as the culmination of the dialectical process, this culmination is not a static endpoint. It is the recognition that reality is ceaseless self-reflection. The Absolute is not the result of the dialectic; it is the dialectic. It is the principle of becoming itself.

As a concrete universal, the Absolute is never separate from the relative and the particular. It is always already present as the activity of self-realization. Apparent fragmentation and opposition are not failures of the Absolute but the very means through which it comes to know itself.

A paradox thus lies at the heart of Hegel’s system. The dialectic is both what drives development forward and what development ultimately seeks to overcome. The Absolute is both the goal toward which evolution moves and the force that propels it. Even though the dialectical process is rational, its motivation arises from a necessary illusion: the belief that some partial determination could be final. This incompleteness is not a defect but the engine of growth.

The situation closely resembles the spiritual belief that enlightenment is something to be attained, when in fact it is already present. To realize Absolute Knowing is to see that there was never a final state to reach. The process itself was always the Absolute.

Consciousness eventually recognizes that its restless striving was itself the manifestation of the whole. The Absolute was never separate from incompleteness; it appeared precisely as striving. At the most fundamental level, the dialectic is the drive to overcome the drive to overcome itself—a movement that cannot be completed by ordinary rationality alone.

Wisdom presupposes ignorance, just as ultimate truth presupposes relative truth. The Absolute is therefore not opposed to relativity but revealed through it. The only fixed ultimate truth is that no truth is fixed. The Absolute concept is nothing other than the ongoing attempt to grasp itself.

Seen in this light, Hegel’s Absolute is not far removed from the Buddhist notion of emptiness. Both name the same insight from different angles: that freedom lies not in arriving at a final answer, but in recognizing the openness that makes all understanding possible.

And that recognition—nothing more and nothing less—is freedom itself.

An Appendix on Hegel’s Logic and Dialectic

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stands as the last great architect of a comprehensive philosophical system. Drawing upon the foundational work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, Hegel synthesized the history of metaphysics into a single, internally articulated logic. From his thought emerged figures of lasting intellectual and political significance, including Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and later Jean-Paul Sartre.

This appendix concerns The Science of Logic, specifically the Doctrine of Essence, the second and most conceptually demanding part of Hegel’s system. Hegel himself regarded this section as the most difficult, not only because of its abstraction but because it functions as the engine of the entire logical movement. Essence is not merely the essence of being; it is the dynamic principle through which being becomes intelligible.

Hegel’s logic appears in two principal forms: the Greater Logic (Science of Logic, 1812–1816) and the Encyclopedia Logic (1817). Both present the same structure, though at different levels of elaboration.

The Science of Logic is divided into three doctrines:

1. Being

2. Essence

3. Concept

Each doctrine is further articulated into three moments. Being unfolds through quality, quantity, and measure. Essence develops through essence proper, appearance, and actuality. The doctrine of the Concept culminates in subjectivity, objectivity, and the Idea. The Concept unifies Being and Essence and represents thought fully returned to itself.

Hegel’s logic is not static but a process. It moves toward the Concept, which is both the goal and the immanent structure of the movement itself. Each doctrine is already conceptual, but at different levels of development.

• The Doctrine of Being presents thought in immediacy: the Concept in itself.

• The Doctrine of Essence presents thought in reflection and mediation: the Concept for itself.

• The Doctrine of the Concept presents thought returned into itself: the Concept in and for itself.

This exposition focuses exclusively on the first moment of the Doctrine of Essence, namely simple essence.

For Hegel, philosophy aims at the cognition of truth. Immediate being is not true as it first appears. What is immediately given is insufficient; its truth lies in what it is in itself. The task of philosophy is therefore to disclose the essence of things—to reveal the ideality of the finite.

Finite things are marked by a discrepancy between what they immediately are and what they are in themselves. Their immediacy is false because it does not yet express their potential. Essence is this potentiality: the inner purpose, destiny, or ideality of the finite. Truth is not found at the level of immediacy but through mediation.

At the highest level, the movement of essence proceeds through three stages:

• the abstract,

• the negative,

• and the concrete.

These correspond not to the popular but misleading schema of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, but rather to universal, particular, and concrete universal. The concrete universal is the unity of universality and singularity.

This movement expresses Hegel’s fundamental logical forces:

• being in itself,

• being for another,

• being in and for itself,

• and the return into itself.

Together, these moments govern the dynamics of logical development.

Hegel’s logic parallels levels of cognition:

• Consciousness (sense-certainty, perception, understanding),

• Self-consciousness (reflection through another),

• Reason (negative/dialectical and speculative),

• Absolute Knowing, where spirit knows itself as spirit.

The Doctrine of Being corresponds to consciousness; the Doctrine of Essence corresponds primarily to self-consciousness, where thought reflects upon itself.

In the Doctrine of Being, thought moves through being, nothing, and becoming. Being here is immediate and undifferentiated. When logic transitions to essence, it moves into the non-being of being—not absolute nothingness, but potentiality.

Essence is being that has withdrawn from immediacy into reflection. What was merely implicit now becomes explicit. The non-being of being becomes its truth through internal, immanent development, culminating in actuality.

The fundamental determinations of essence are:

• Identity

• Difference

• Ground

• Existence

Ground is the unity of identity and difference. Existence corresponds to being returned through essence, much as becoming unifies being and nothing in the Doctrine of Being. Although these determinations appear sequential, their movement is circular rather than linear: identity passes into difference, difference into ground, and ground returns as existence.

Identity is the first determination of essence. It is being-in-itself, disclosed through reflection. Reflection does not simply observe immediacy; it interrogates it to uncover its essential meaning and unrealized potential.

Identity expresses the essential quality of a thing, as opposed to its contingent properties. As such, it is abstract and universal. It represents the initial abstraction through which essence distinguishes itself from immediacy and begins its dialectical development.

Identity, as the first determination of essence, is not a merely tautological self-equality. It certainly includes simple self-sameness—A = A—but this is only one of its moments. More fundamentally, identity already contains absolute negativity within itself. It is being-in-itself that implicitly includes being-for-itself: identity maintains itself only by differentiating itself from immediacy. Thus, identity is not inert sameness, but a reflective structure that contains negation as its own internal moment.

The second determination of essence is difference. Difference is not an external contrast imposed upon identity; it is identity’s own reflective unfolding. Where identity is reflection into itself, difference is reflection into another—or being-for-another. This marks the transition from the abstract universal to the particular, from being-in-itself to determinate negativity.

Crucially, the “other” generated here is not something absolutely opposed or alien. It is identity’s own other: the differentiated expression of the same essence. Difference therefore does not negate identity but articulates it. Identity and difference are mutually constitutive moments of one process.

Hegel characterizes difference as the deficiency or limitation of an object relative to its essence. Identity expresses the essential quality of a thing—its ideality or potentiality—while difference consists in the determinate properties through which this quality is only imperfectly realized. These properties do not yet fully actualize the essence; rather, they reveal its one-sidedness and restriction. Difference thus names the gap between essence and its immediate manifestation.

Difference does not remain static. As the manifold of determinate properties multiplies, difference unfolds into diversity, then into opposition, and finally into contradiction. Opposition arises when determinations confront one another as positive and negative, ideal and real, quality and property.

Contradiction is not a logical defect to be eliminated; it is the principle of movement. Hegel insists that nothing develops, lives, or acts unless it contains contradiction within itself. Contradiction is the tension between what a thing is and what it ought to be—between essence and its deficient realization. This tension is the inner motor of transformation.

The resolution of contradiction is ground. Ground is not a mere explanation added after the fact; it is the living unity of identity and difference, in which both are preserved as ideal moments. In ground, the opposition between essence and its limitations is sublated, giving rise to a sufficient reason for transformation.

Ground corresponds to final causality (causa finalis). It is not yet a determinate purpose acting in the world, but the rational necessity for realization. As Hegel notes, ground by itself is neither active nor productive; existence merely emerges from it. To become genuinely effective, ground must be taken up into will.

When ground is appropriated by an individual will, it becomes purpose. Purpose is ground rendered active. Through will, contradiction becomes motive, and motive becomes purposive activity, which Hegel identifies with reason itself. Reason is not abstract calculation but the unity of negative (critical, dissolving) and speculative (constructive, unifying) activity.

This purposive activity culminates in sublation (Aufhebung), which simultaneously:

1. negates limiting determinations,

2. preserves what is rational in them, and

3. elevates the object to a higher level of determination.

Through this process, the object realizes its essence.

The result of purposive activity is existence, the fourth determination of essence. Existence is essence that has returned to itself through mediation. What was initially implicit as identity, distorted through difference, and unified in ground now appears as concrete actuality.

Existence therefore completes the logical circuit:

• identity (being-in-itself, universal),

• difference (being-for-another, particular),

• ground (being-in-and-for-itself, singular),

• existence (concrete universal).

This movement corresponds to the emergence of self-consciousness, in which subjectivity recognizes itself as the agent of realization. Historical change exemplifies this structure: world-historical individuals act as vehicles through which rational purposes become actual, not through blind determinism but through conscious will.

The movement of essence is formally a syllogism:

• identity functions as the universal,

• difference as the particular,

• ground as the mediating singular,

• existence as the conclusion in which singular and universal are unified.

Thus, Hegel’s dialectic is not arbitrary but logically articulated. It is equally the unity of analysis and synthesis: analysis abstracts essence from immediacy, while synthesis reconstructs concreteness through purposive realization.

This movement is neither linear nor closed. Each completed cycle becomes the starting point for a higher one. Hegel’s logic is therefore not merely circular but spiral, advancing through successive determinations toward the Absolute Idea.

Within the Doctrine of Essence, this completes the first major movement: identity, difference, ground, and existence. The next stage—appearance, followed by actuality—develops how essence necessarily manifests itself in the world.

To illustrate Hegel’s dialectic of essence in concrete terms, consider a social practice such as the events of May 1968 in France. The movement initially appears as an immediate reality—an existing social configuration. A subject confronts this immediacy through understanding, abstracting from it the question of essence: What is this, in truth?

For Hegel, the immediate is not true simply as it appears. Its truth lies in its potentiality, not in its given form. Because this potential is unrealized, the immediate is false in itself. Its truth exists only in its ideality, that is, in its essence.

Essence is first grasped as identity, reached through reflection into itself. In the case of May ’68, this identity is articulated as freedom or liberation. Freedom functions as the essential quality of the movement—its universal ideal. As such, identity is abstract and universal: freedom is freedom, regardless of its particular manifestations.

Yet identity is not inert self-sameness. It contains absolute negativity within itself—the power of being-for-itself to generate a new determination of itself. Identity is thus dynamic: it is capable of becoming other than its immediate form while remaining itself.

At this stage, the subject operates at the level of consciousness: the object is grasped as external, and essence is abstracted from it as an ideal.

The dialectic advances through reflection into another, yielding difference. The “other” is not a separate object but the same object viewed from the standpoint of its limitations, deficiencies, and one-sidedness. Difference expresses the determinate properties through which the essence fails to realize itself.

In the social movement, this takes the form of examining concrete features—leadership, organization, strategy—and measuring them against the ideal of freedom. These properties are not external negations but internal shortcomings relative to the movement’s own essence.

Difference thus represents the transition from the universal to the particular, from abstraction to determinate negativity. The opposition here is not between two things, but between ideality and its deficient realization.

From difference emerges contradiction: the tension between what the movement is (its reality) and what it ought to be (its essence). Freedom stands as the positive moment; inadequate organization or leadership appears as the negative moment. This contradiction is not accidental—it is the driving force of transformation.

The unity of identity and difference in contradiction gives rise to ground. Ground is the final cause—the sufficient reason for change. It expresses the necessity of overcoming the contradiction in order to realize the essence.

However, ground by itself is not active. To become productive, it must unite with will.

When purpose (ground) fuses with the will to realization, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. The subject no longer merely observes the movement from outside but recognizes itself as a participant and agent of transformation.

Self-consciousness corresponds to being-in-and-for-itself. At this point, ground becomes reason, which for Hegel is not abstract logic but purposive activity—action oriented toward realizing an ideal.

Reason operates through sublation (Aufhebung):

1. negating the movement’s limitations,

2. preserving its rational and emancipatory elements, and

3. elevating it to a higher form of organization and agency.

The result of this process is existence: essence returned to itself through mediation. The movement is no longer merely “what is” but what exists as realized essence. This existence then becomes a new immediacy, initiating another dialectical cycle at a higher level.

When this process is grasped in its full development, it constitutes actuality—the unity of essence and existence. As Hegel states, truth is the whole, and the whole is essence that completes itself through its own movement.

This dialectic is not a method for analyzing inert objects. It is a method of historical and social transformation, grounded in consciousness and self-consciousness. It applies not to stones or trees, but to human practices shaped by intention, will, and reason.

Hegel’s dialectic is often misrepresented as a sequence of thesis–antithesis–synthesis. This formulation is not Hegelian. Hegel never used these terms and explicitly rejected such mechanical schematization. The triad originates with Fichte, not Hegel, and reduces dialectics to an empty formalism.

Authentic Hegelian dialectic unfolds through identity, difference, ground, and existence, driven by contradiction and realized through purposive activity. Its logic is immanent, historical, and transformative—not a static conceptual template.

§13. Schopenhauer, Hegel, and the Marriage of Will and Idea

As contemporaries in nineteenth-century Germany, Arthur Schopenhauer and G. W. F. Hegel stood in open rivalry—intellectually and personally. Schopenhauer regarded Hegel as a corrupter of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and scheduled his lectures at the University of Berlin to coincide deliberately with Hegel’s, confident that students would prefer his own teaching. The result was humiliating: Hegel’s lecture hall overflowed while Schopenhauer’s remained nearly empty. Disappointed and embittered, he eventually withdrew from academic life.

Yet their antagonism was not merely temperamental. It reflected two radically different interpretations of a shared philosophical problem: the nature of ultimate reality and the meaning of human striving. Hegel articulated a vision of rational development—Spirit progressively realizing freedom through history. Schopenhauer, by contrast, offered a stark metaphysics of suffering and desire. If Hegel represents philosophical optimism, Schopenhauer represents metaphysical pessimism. Each grasped a powerful but incomplete dimension of the human condition.

Schopenhauer’s system, most fully developed in The World as Will and Representation, begins from Kant’s critical insight: time, space, and causality are not features of things as they are in themselves, but forms imposed by the structure of cognition. The empirical world is therefore “representation”—appearance shaped by the conditions of human experience. All such representations are governed by the principle of sufficient reason.

Where Schopenhauer departs from Kant is in his claim that the thing-in-itself is not wholly unknowable. Through inward awareness, he argues, we encounter it directly—not as concept, but as willing. Beneath thought and perception lies a more fundamental reality: a blind, striving force that manifests itself as desire, impulse, and restless vitality. This “will” is not rational, purposive, or self-conscious. It is the inner essence of all phenomena.

The phenomenal world, then, is the will objectifying itself. The distinction between subject and object is the primary form through which this representation unfolds. What we ordinarily regard as ourselves—our bodies, our rational agency—is merely the will appearing under conditions of cognition. Individually, we are microcosmic expressions of a single, ceaseless striving that permeates nature.

Here the contrast with Hegel becomes sharp. Hegel’s Spirit advances teleologically toward freedom and self-knowledge; Schopenhauer’s will strives without ultimate aim. For Hegel, history reveals rational necessity. For Schopenhauer, existence reveals endless desire and inevitable dissatisfaction.

Schopenhauer’s conception of will bears resemblance to the Buddhist notion of craving (tanha), which gives rise to suffering (dukkha) in the cycle of samsara. The world as representation parallels the conditioned realm of dependent origination. Liberation, correspondingly, involves cessation of craving.

Yet the comparison has limits. In Buddhist philosophy—especially in the Madhyamaka tradition—ultimate reality is described as emptiness (śūnyatā), the absence of intrinsic existence. Schopenhauer’s will, by contrast, functions as a positive metaphysical ground. Although he denies that the will is a substance or a self, he nevertheless treats it as the underlying reality manifesting as phenomena. Emptiness negates inherent being; the will affirms a dynamic but real metaphysical core.

Nonetheless, Schopenhauer insists that the will is not a fixed entity. It is inseparable from its manifestations and devoid of rational self-awareness. Existence has no stable foundation beyond the fleeting present. In this respect, his account converges with the Buddhist rejection of enduring essence.

If the will is the source of suffering, liberation requires its negation. Schopenhauer describes this not as annihilation but as a transformation in relation to willing itself. Aesthetic contemplation offers a temporary release from striving; ethical compassion and ascetic renunciation offer a deeper one. Ultimately, the denial of the will culminates in a state he explicitly associates with nirvana in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation.

In a striking passage at the close of the first volume, Schopenhauer writes that when all willing ceases, the world appears to dissolve into “nothingness”—not because nothing exists, but because the world, as representation, depends upon willing. The state reached through complete renunciation cannot be described as knowledge in the ordinary sense, for it transcends the duality of subject and object. It is communicated only through lived experience, not conceptual argument.

This negation is not achieved by an act of calculated reason. One cannot will oneself into will-lessness. The will cannot be overcome by another act of striving. Rather, liberation entails a moral transformation—a relinquishment of egoistic attachment. It is not passive resignation but an ethical reorientation from self-assertion to selflessness.

Despite their opposition, Schopenhauer and Hegel share a structural similarity. In Hegel’s dialectic, development proceeds through self-negation: each stage contains contradictions that sublate themselves in a higher unity. In Schopenhauer, the will must likewise turn against itself. The same force that binds us to suffering makes possible its cessation. The poison contains its own remedy.

The divergence lies in interpretation. Hegel sees rational reconciliation within history; Schopenhauer locates redemption in renunciation. Hegel subordinates emotion to reason; Schopenhauer subordinates reason to the deeper current of desire. Yet both recognize that reality advances—or is transformed—through a moment of self-overcoming.

For Schopenhauer, the decisive insight is that there is ultimately nothing to achieve. When the intellect recognizes the futility of striving, the necessity that drives effort collapses. The ego, which acts and struggles, gives way to a state in which no further assertion is required. This is not an intellectual triumph but an ethical surrender.

The culmination of Schopenhauer’s thought is therefore moral rather than speculative. Liberation is always possible because it requires no external condition—only the cessation of compulsive willing. The enlightened state does not act; it simply abides without self-assertion. The apparent paradox—realizing that there is nothing to realize—cannot be resolved by discursive reasoning. It must be lived.

In this sense, Schopenhauer’s philosophy unites metaphysics and ethics. The structure of reality is striving; the solution to suffering is the relinquishment of striving. Whether contrasted with Hegel’s dialectical optimism or read alongside Buddhist thought, Schopenhauer’s enduring insight is that the deepest transformation occurs not through accumulation or progress, but through renunciation.

A further significance of Arthur Schopenhauer lies in the way his metaphysics provides a bridge between Buddhist philosophy and Western depth psychology. His conception of the will as the thing-in-itself bears a striking structural resemblance to the Yogācāra notion of storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). In both systems, an underlying dynamic principle gives rise to the multiplicity of experienced phenomena.

For Schopenhauer, the one will manifests as the many through the principium individuationis—the structuring forms of time, space, and causality. In Yogācāra, consciousness unfolds into the manifold world through karmic conditioning. In each case, the foundational reality is active and generative, and it is inseparable from its expressions. The world is not independent of this ground; it is its appearance.

Yet there is also an important distinction. Schopenhauer’s will is blind, aimless, and without inherent rational structure. It is unconscious striving. By contrast, ālaya-vijñāna is shaped by karmic “seeds,” latent dispositions that condition future cognitive and emotional events. This idea anticipates the Western notion of the unconscious as a reservoir of structured psychic potentials.

Indeed, Schopenhauer’s philosophy exerted considerable influence on modern psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud transformed the will-to-live into libido—the psychic energy driving desire and behavior. Carl Jung expanded this dynamic into a theory of archetypes and individuation. Friedrich Nietzsche, reinterpreting the same underlying drive, described it as the will to power: no longer merely survival, but creative self-overcoming.

The deeper genealogy extends further back. Plato’s notion of eros as a universal longing toward beauty and completion furnished one of the earliest metaphysical accounts of desire. Schopenhauer used the term eros to designate the reproductive and self-perpetuating impulse of the will. Freud retained the term to describe the life instinct. Jung, in turn, opposed eros to logos: eros signifying relation, connection, and affect; logos representing structure, reason, and differentiation. This polarity echoes Nietzsche’s contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian, and it also resonates with Hegel’s appropriation of logos as the rational unfolding of Spirit.

Through Jung’s framework, eros and logos become complementary principles rather than enemies. Eros embodies dynamic vitality; logos confers intelligible order. Individuation—the realization of psychic wholeness—requires the integration of both. In this light, the rivalry between Schopenhauer’s blind will and Hegel’s rational Spirit appears less as an absolute opposition than as a symbolic dramatization of two interdependent forces within existence.

Jung’s concept of synchronicity—acausal meaningful coincidence—was explicitly inspired by Schopenhauer’s reflections on hidden connections within reality, themselves reminiscent of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony. The suggestion is that causality and purposiveness may not be mutually exclusive explanations, but different expressions of a deeper unity.

From this perspective, the tension between pleasure and righteousness, or eros and logos, should not be resolved by suppressing one pole in favor of the other. Excessive devotion to pleasure devolves into hedonism; exclusive allegiance to abstract rationality hardens into sterile moralism. The balanced path—analogous to the Buddhist Middle Way—consists not in eliminating either impulse but in harmonizing them.

At the metaphysical level, ultimate truth cannot be confined to rigid oppositions such as existence versus non-existence. It transcends such binary categories. The emptiness of the ultimate does not imply sheer nothingness, but the unity of apparent contraries. Consequently, it resists purely conceptual formulation.

The rational ascent toward higher self-consciousness has historically been identified with the good. Plato’s Form of the Good, the Neoplatonic One, and Hegel’s Absolute Spirit each represent principles of unity and intelligibility elevated to metaphysical supremacy. Logos, in the Greek and later Christian traditions, signifies both rational order and divine articulation.

Within this framework, the unifying principle of reason links individual consciousness to a shared ethical horizon. It harmonizes private desire with universal norms. Alienation arises when individuals isolate themselves as abstract particulars detached from the whole. For Hegel, love becomes the remedy: a relational unity in which self and other recognize their mutual belonging within a larger rational order.

Schopenhauer’s account of love stands in stark contrast. For him, romantic attachment is an expression of the will’s reproductive strategy—an instinctual mechanism serving species preservation. It enchants the individual but ultimately perpetuates suffering. Love, in this register, is not reconciliation but entrapment within desire.

Yet Schopenhauer also articulates a higher form of love: compassion (Mitleid). Unlike erotic striving, compassion dissolves egoistic boundaries and recognizes the shared essence underlying all beings. This ethical insight aligns with his doctrine of will-denial and parallels the Christian notion of agape. Here, pessimism yields to a universal fellow-feeling that points beyond blind striving.

The apparent dichotomy between Schopenhauer’s will and Hegel’s Spirit mirrors broader dualities: passion and reason, chaos and order, separation and unity. However, these poles are mutually implicative. Order presupposes dynamic energy; passion requires form to avoid disintegration.

Eros without logos collapses into aimless compulsion. Logos without eros becomes lifeless abstraction. Together they constitute the living tension of existence. Rational structure directs and refines instinctual force; instinctual vitality animates rational form. Ethical life emerges from their integration.

In this synthesis, Schopenhauer and Hegel need not be seen as irreconcilable adversaries. Their respective emphases illuminate complementary dimensions of a single dynamic reality: one stresses the restless drive underlying experience; the other articulates the intelligible structure through which that drive becomes meaningful. The reconciliation lies not in abolishing difference, but in recognizing its unity.

IV. The Manifestation: Ethics and the Shared World

§14. Subjective Absolutism

Philosophical accounts of moral truth can be organized around two foundational meta-ethical distinctions. The first concerns the ontological status of value: whether goodness, beauty, and virtue exist independently of the mind or depend upon it. If values are mind-independent, they are objective features of reality; if they depend on attitudes and opinions, they are not features of the world itself but expressions of subjectivity.

The second distinction concerns the scope of moral validity: whether values apply universally and without exception, or only relative to particular times, cultures, or circumstances. Values that hold without qualification are absolute; those whose validity varies with context are relative.

Taken together, these dichotomies yield four possible positions. Traditional moral debate often contrasts objective absolutism with subjective relativism, but the philosophically most interesting position lies elsewhere: subjective absolutism. This view holds that values depend on the mind, yet apply universally and necessarily.

At first glance, this position appears incoherent. If values arise from subjective attitudes, then disagreement seems unavoidable, and moral relativism follows. Absolute validity would seem to require independence from human opinion. Only if everyone agreed on all moral judgments could subjective absolutism be straightforwardly maintained—and this is plainly not the case.

One strategy for rescuing subjectivism appeals to the notion of an ideal observer: a perfectly informed, unbiased, and rational standpoint from which correct moral judgments could be made. On this view, moral truth is what such an ideal mind would endorse. Yet this approach collapses into circularity: if moral truth is defined by what the ideal observer judges, and the ideal observer is defined as one who judges correctly, then no independent method remains for determining what is right. Normative guidance becomes inaccessible.

A more promising alternative locates moral knowledge within our rational agency itself, not in external facts nor hypothetical observers. Moral insight arises from the structure of practical reason—from what it is to regard oneself as a free and rational agent among others. This tradition runs from ancient formulations of the Golden Rule to Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: act only on maxims that you could will to be universal laws.

Kant is often mischaracterized as a moral realist because of his universalism. In fact, his ethics grounds morality in the self-conception of rational agents. Moral laws do not exist independently of minds; they arise from the requirements of rational consistency imposed on willing itself. As Kant scholars have emphasized, morality is dependent on the practices and capacities of rational beings, not on mind-independent moral facts.

On this account, immoral actions are not wrong because they violate external values, but because they are internally incoherent. A maxim fails morally when, if universalized, it undermines the very possibility of its own adoption. Theft, for example, cannot be moral because a world in which everyone stole whenever it benefited them would abolish the institution of property required for stealing to be meaningful. Moral failure is thus a form of practical contradiction.

Morality, then, is a matter of reason, yet unlike logic it is necessarily enacted. Ethical principles are validated analytically—through rational consistency—but applied a posteriori, through concrete action. This unity of principle and practice mirrors the unity of logic and experience found in self-consciousness itself.

As Stephen Palmquist observes, moral laws function analogously to logical laws: they cannot be justified by appeal to higher principles, but serve as standards by which subordinate judgments are assessed. The difference is that while logical laws govern what is, moral laws govern what ought to be, and thus allow for failure in practice without losing their normative force.

To judge a person as good is therefore to measure, retrospectively, the degree to which their concrete actions approximate the rational ideal of goodness. Ethical action is rational action embodied. Forgiveness, understanding, and virtue are not sentiments opposed to reason; they are expressions of it.

Here, subjectivism and absolutism are no longer opposed. When reason becomes self-referential—when the subject recognizes itself as both author and addressee of moral law—value participates in itself. This was already implicit in Plato’s identification of the Form of the Good as the highest principle: goodness as the perfection of perfection, a standard that refers to itself.

Moral philosophy thus converges with self-knowledge. Virtue, beauty, and goodness are not external objects to be discovered but expressions of what a fully rational, fully self-aware being would affirm. The ideal observer is not elsewhere; it is the limit of our own self-understanding.

What is goodness? What is virtue? What is beauty?

Ultimately, they are nothing other than ourselves, grasped clearly. We do not lack moral knowledge; we lack complete self-knowledge. To know ourselves fully would be to be good fully.

§15. The Democratic Paradox

Political theory is structured by a persistent antinomy arising from the intersection of liberty and equality. This tension is traditionally articulated along two axes. The first concerns political authority: libertarianism prioritizes personal autonomy through the minimization of state power, whereas authoritarianism prioritizes order and unity through centralized authority. The second axis is economic: collectivism holds that economic life ought to serve the common good through cooperative ownership and shared responsibility, while individualism elevates private autonomy, property, and personal choice above collective aims.

Taken together, these axes generate the familiar political spectrum. At its extremes lie authoritarian collectivism—often identified with state socialism—which emphasizes economic equality grounded in objective social values, and libertarian individualism—often associated with anarcho-capitalism—which emphasizes personal liberty and the relativity of value. Between these poles lies a more controversial position: libertarian collectivism, encompassing libertarian socialism, anarcho-socialism, and left-libertarianism.

Libertarian collectivism seeks to unite liberty and equality rather than subordinating one to the other. Classical Marxism regarded this synthesis as the final stage of historical development: a classless society characterized by collective ownership of the means of production, equal access to goods, and the dissolution of the state. Whether such a union represents the highest aspiration of political life or an internal contradiction has been a matter of enduring debate.

At first glance, liberty and equality appear mutually restrictive. Equality seems to require limits on individual freedom to prevent domination or accumulation, while liberty appears to permit inequalities to emerge naturally. Any enforced redistribution of wealth appears to constrain freedom, suggesting an unavoidable conflict between the two ideals. Yet this opposition holds only if equality is imposed externally. If restraint were instead self-imposed—arising from the rational will of individuals who value both liberty and equality—the contradiction would dissolve in principle, though not in practice.

The difficulty lies in moral imperfection. A society that fully reconciles liberty and equality would require ideal agents: individuals who consistently recognize that the good of the collective is inseparable from their own good. In this respect, the political problem mirrors a meta-ethical one: just as subjective absolutism requires universal agreement to function normatively, libertarian collectivism requires universally ethical self-governance. Human societies, however, fall short of this ideal.

Historical attempts to force such a synthesis through authority have produced catastrophic results. The failure is not that libertarian collectivism lacks moral appeal, but that it presupposes a level of virtue that cannot be coerced. Political life therefore oscillates between competing excesses, each provoking resistance from the other. This dynamic explains why political systems tend toward unstable compromises and why centrism often emerges as the only sustainable equilibrium, even at the cost of diluting both ideals.

Nevertheless, liberty and equality are not ultimately separable. They share a common foundation: self-ownership. Individual sovereignty grounds both equality (as equal moral standing) and liberty (as freedom of action). Only when individuals govern themselves—without coercion—can collective life emerge organically. A just society cannot be engineered; it must be enacted through ethical agency.

This insight appears in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where the state is conceived as a concrete universal—the unity of individual wills with the universal will of reason achieved at the level of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Here, rights and duties coincide, and freedom becomes actual only through social participation. Marx, adapting Hegel’s dialectic to material conditions, reinterpreted this unity as the abolition of class domination and the eventual disappearance of the state itself. Yet by abandoning Hegel’s conception of spirit, Marx transformed the dialectic from a rational process into a mechanical struggle without an intrinsic telos.

Contemporary political theorist Chantal Mouffe identifies this unresolved tension as the democratic paradox: liberty and equality are governed by incompatible logics that cannot be reconciled without suppressing one or the other. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argue that liberal democracies err by seeking consensus, which inevitably marginalizes dissent. Mouffe instead proposes agonistic pluralism, in which political conflict is preserved rather than eliminated. Democracy, on this view, is sustained not by agreement but by structured disagreement among adversaries who respect one another’s right to contest power.

Yet even agonistic pluralism does not escape the deeper problem: any system composed of morally imperfect agents must compromise between liberty and equality. Political theory and political practice diverge because ideals exceed human capacity. Opposition is not accidental to political life; it is constitutive of experience itself.

Equality is liberty viewed from within. Liberty is equality viewed from without. No single system can fully realize both, just as mind and matter are never given as one. Complementarity does not require moderation or synthesis. It requires plurality.

Perhaps the failure lies not in our inability to combine liberty and equality, but in our insistence that they must inhabit a single system. Perhaps what is required is not unity, but parallelism—not synthesis, but doctrinal plurality.

§16. Creativity, Emptiness, and the Structure of the Ultimate

Ultimate reality is pure creativity—nothing actual, only potential. To speak of pure creativity as limited is self-contradictory, for limitation would already impose a determinate structure. Absolute creativity must therefore be infinite. Any boundary would constitute a truth about reality, and thus negate its ultimacy.

For this reason, there is no determinate ultimate truth. Indeed, it is accurate to say that ultimate reality is not a thing at all. It is the absence of determination—the refusal of final form. Creativity is an infinite emptiness, generative precisely because it is empty. Creation arises not because it must, but because it can.

Mystical experience, art, and acts of profound kindness offer fleeting contact with this dimension. Such experiences feel meaningful without pointing to a specific object of meaning. They suspend goals, reasons, and purposes, revealing significance as the absence of necessity. This is why they perplex the rational mind: they communicate understanding without explanation.

Philosophy falters here. Any attempt to explain why reality exists imposes conditions upon it. Whether materialist or idealist, explanation assumes necessity. Creativity, by contrast, is contingent without cause. Reality arises without reason—not irrationally, but freely.

Most ordinary experience remains confined to the finite and immediate. Yet many sense the pull of the infinite beneath it. The danger lies in attempting to grasp or possess this infinitude. The mind cannot rationalize it; it can only gesture toward it. Excessive fixation on the ultimate risks neglecting embodied life, just as fixation on immediacy leads to existential emptiness.

Creativity is the source of meaning—not meaning as purpose, but meaning as openness. Awareness of this grants a resilient optimism, immune to circumstance. Yet human life is defined by tension: between devotion to the ultimate and participation in the immediate, between the health of the mind and the health of the body.

Attention, however, is selective. It fixes upon one pole and neglects the other. This imbalance underlies polarization, dogmatism, and psychological distress. The deepest realization is that the ultimate exists only in relation to the immediate. Emptiness is not opposed to fullness; it is fullness understood relationally.

Creativity is not a being, but a power. There is no creator—only creation. The absence of an ultimate reality is the ultimate truth. The ultimate neither is nor is not; its essence is the absence of essence.

Devotion to pleasure alone leads to stagnation. Devotion to creativity alone leads to infinite recursion. To see the whole requires relinquishing exclusive devotion to either. One must abandon attachment to attention itself.

Only then does one discover what one already is: the living interdependence of creativity and creation.

V. The Integration: Non-Dual Silence and Final Freedom

§17. The Nature of the Mystical Experience

What is commonly called the mystical experience is marked by a single defining quality: it exceeds the limits of imagination. It is not merely inspiring or emotionally intense, but categorically beyond what the mind could fabricate. Its profundity lies precisely in this impossibility of invention. One recognizes, with complete certainty, that the experience was not constructed by thought, memory, or fantasy.

Human attention generally moves in two directions. When oriented toward the immediate sensory world, we are immersed in pleasure and pain. When oriented toward an ultimate reality, we cultivate reverence, meaning, and a sense of righteousness that eclipses ordinary concerns. In rare cases, when devotion to the ultimate becomes total—when attention withdraws almost entirely from bodily and sensory identification—a mystical experience may arise. In such moments, finite awareness briefly reunites with its own source.

The significance of this experience is not what it explains, but what it escapes. Ordinary thought—even in its most irrational forms—remains internally coherent to the thinker. Mystical experience, by contrast, lies entirely outside rational structure. It is not a new belief or proposition, but a direct encounter with pure creativity itself. It communicates not only truth, but orientation—how one ought to feel about existence.

At its core, the experience is disarmingly simple. One becomes aware of the deepest ground of experience: a peaceful, generative creativity from which every perception, thought, and emotion arises. This realization bypasses theory altogether. One directly experiences the act of creating the very moment one inhabits. The distinction between observer and reality dissolves. Reality is no longer discovered—it is enacted.

In this state, one understands that devotion—whether toward pleasure or toward righteousness—is not passive. It is an act of willing that brings its object into prominence. Reality itself emerges through this willing. The ultimate and the immediate are not opposed, but mutually dependent. One recognizes that seeking oneself prevents unity with oneself; that peace, ignored in ordinary life, is the true source of existence; that the answer to life’s deepest questions is not conceptual, but felt.

This clarity is absolute and indubitable. One sees why it must be true, why no alternative explanation of existence is possible. And then the experience recedes.

What remains is memory, translation, and partial understanding. The destination cannot be retained because retention itself requires surrender. Devotion enables entry; surrender alone sustains presence. The journey teaches how reality unfolds; the destination reveals why it exists at all. That reason is peace—and peace is not an idea. Because it is not intellectual, it is immune to doubt. It is reality itself.

§18. Non-Origination and Emptiness

Vedānta is a major school of Hindu philosophy grounded in the Upaniṣads, the culminating portion of the Vedas. The Upaniṣads present Brahman as the ultimate reality and ātman as the true self. Ordinary human experience, however, is obscured by māyā, the principle of misapprehension that produces the appearance of separateness and sustains saṃsāra, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Liberation (mokṣa) consists in overcoming ignorance and realizing the identity—or proper relation—between ātman and Brahman.

Later Vedāntic traditions diverged over how this realization should be understood. More devotional schools retained a real distinction between ātman and Brahman, providing a basis for worship and relational devotion. More knowledge-centered schools denied any ultimate distinction. Among these, Advaita Vedānta became the most influential, particularly in the modern West, and is classically associated with the eighth-century philosopher Śaṅkara.

Śaṅkara’s position is uncompromisingly non-dual. Brahman alone truly exists as attributeless, immutable consciousness. The individual self and the external world are appearances generated by ignorance. In this sense, Advaita is a form of absolute monism: there is only one reality, and it never changes. Because all experience is characterized by change, no object of experience can be Brahman. From this follows Śaṅkara’s claim that empirical perception is fundamentally unreliable.

This immediately raises a difficulty: what does it mean to call the world an illusion? If the illusion is real in some sense, then a distinction reappears between unchanging Brahman and a changing phenomenal world, undermining non-duality and approaching the dualism of Sāṃkhya, which posits two independent principles. If, on the other hand, the illusion is entirely unreal, then it cannot account for the undeniable fact that a world is experienced at all. An illusion without any basis would have no explanatory power.

This tension underlies much confusion about the Advaitic doctrine of māyā. Most Hindu systems adopt a theory of real transformation (pariṇāma-vāda), according to which the world is a genuine modification of Brahman. Advaita, by contrast, adopts the theory of apparent transformation (vivarta-vāda): Brahman does not actually change but only appears to do so through ignorance.

Śaṅkara himself did not explicitly formulate vivarta-vāda in its later technical form. Instead, he spoke of nāma-rūpa—name and form—as a potential, unevolved condition from which the world appears. However, if this potentiality is treated as a real principle distinct from Brahman, it closely resembles Sāṃkhya’s dualism, with prakṛti functioning as an independent material cause. Śaṅkara rejects this option. Yet he also denies that potentiality belongs to Brahman, since Brahman is changeless and inactive. This creates a dilemma: either potentiality is real, which implies dualism, or it is unreal, in which case it cannot explain manifestation at all.

Later Advaitins resolved this tension by abandoning the theory of unevolved name and form and affirming instead that the world is pure superimposition—a cognitive error grounded solely in ignorance. This is the mature doctrine of vivarta-vāda. The world has no ontological basis beyond misapprehension.

Māyā, for Śaṅkara, functions like a veil that makes Brahman appear as a world of subjects and objects. It also generates the conceptual distinctions through which empirical knowledge arises. All conceptual thought, therefore, is already a distortion of reality. Yet māyā is not sheer non-existence. Like mistaking a rope for a snake, the illusion depends on something real. The world is empirically real insofar as it appears, but ultimately unreal insofar as it lacks independent existence.

To articulate this, Śaṅkara distinguishes between Brahman without attributes (nirguṇa Brahman) and Brahman with attributes (saguṇa Brahman). Saguṇa Brahman is Brahman as it appears through māyā, the basis of empirical experience. Nirguṇa Brahman is the absolute, formless reality that is never an object of perception. With the removal of ignorance, one realizes that nirguṇa Brahman alone is real. The world is neither absolutely real nor absolutely unreal: it is provisionally real but ultimately false.

This leads to ajāti-vāda, the doctrine of non-origination. Brahman never truly arises, changes, or ceases. All becoming is illusory. The world is not an expression of Brahman’s nature but a misperception superimposed upon it. Even līlā, divine play, is metaphorical rather than ontologically literal. The world has instrumental value insofar as it can lead to liberation, but from the standpoint of liberation it is no more than a mirage.

The practical tension in Advaita becomes clearer when contrasted with Madhyamaka Buddhism. Both traditions deny that the world is absolutely real or absolutely unreal. For Advaita, the world is an illusion dependent on Brahman. For Madhyamaka, the world is empty of intrinsic existence while remaining fully real as dependently originated phenomena. The difference lies in how the ultimate principle is conceived and how it relates to appearances.

In Advaita, the relative collapses into the ultimate: empirical reality is absorbed into Brahman and declared ultimately unreal. In Madhyamaka, the ultimate collapses into the relative: emptiness is not a hidden foundation but the very mode of existence of phenomena themselves. The world is not an illusion concealing a deeper reality, but a network of interdependent processes misunderstood through conceptual reification.

This difference has practical consequences. Advaita risks encouraging a subtle dualism between appearance and truth, where liberation is imagined as access to a higher reality concealed behind the world. Madhyamaka avoids this by denying that anything is hidden. Nothing needs to be transcended except conceptual grasping. Emptiness is dependent origination; the absence of intrinsic existence is the presence of relational existence.

At the same time, Madhyamaka risks sliding toward nihilism if emptiness is misunderstood as sheer nothingness, just as Advaita risks reification of Brahman if it is treated as a hidden substance. Both traditions insist that ultimate reality is beyond conceptual determination, yet both must rely on concepts to point toward it.

The only coherent resolution is to recognize that Brahman is neither an underlying substance nor a transcendent entity separate from the world. It cannot be identified with phenomena, nor opposed to them. Brahman names the collapse of all conceptual distinctions—subject and object, existence and non-existence, transcendence and immanence. The doctrine is difficult because reality itself exceeds conceptual thought.

In this sense, Brahman is not a positive fullness opposed to emptiness, but the absence of all conceptual limitation. It is not something to be attained, but what remains when ignorance dissolves and all false distinctions fall away.

It is therefore plausible to suggest that Brahman bears a closer resemblance to the Buddhist notion of emptiness than is commonly acknowledged. Much of the perceived divergence between Advaita Vedānta and Madhyamaka Buddhism arises not from radically different insights, but from differing ways of handling the limits of conventional truth.

Madhyamaka employs conventional reasoning to show that ultimate reality lies entirely beyond the framework of conventional truth and falsity. It cannot meaningfully be affirmed or denied. Advaita Vedānta, by contrast, argues that conventional truth was never ultimately valid to begin with, and that a deeper, non-conceptual truth may still be ascribed—at least provisionally—to that which transcends concepts. Thus, Madhyamaka treats the negation of all four logical alternatives as dissolving into a viewless openness, while Advaita treats the same negation as revealing the only valid truth.

This proximity is historically significant. Gauḍapāda, the sixth-century predecessor of Śaṅkara, explicitly employed Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi to describe the structure of māyā. In doing so, he characterized the fourfold negation as the very logic governing phenomenal appearance. This parallels the paraphilosophical claim that the dialectical matrix structures phenomenal reality. Gauḍapāda’s extensive use of Buddhist terminology led critics such as Rāmānuja to accuse both him and Śaṅkara of being “crypto-Buddhists.” While this charge is overstated, it reflects a genuine convergence: both traditions reach their ultimate principle through the negation of all conceptual extremes, including existence and non-existence.

Both Madhyamaka and Advaita agree that the empirical world is neither fully real nor fully unreal. In Madhyamaka, the world is dependently originated; in Advaita, it is illusory. Both posit an attributeless ultimate principle—śūnyatā and nirguṇa Brahman—and both deny the independent reality of phenomena. Yet the relationship between these paired concepts differs crucially.

In Madhyamaka, emptiness and interdependence are two aspects of a single truth. Emptiness does not negate the world; it explains its mode of existence. The phenomenal world is reality itself, albeit misconceived. Emptiness is empty, illusion is reality, and saṃsāra is nirvāṇa. Truth, for Madhyamaka, always pertains to phenomena.

Advaita Vedānta, by contrast, interprets Brahman and māyā as knowledge and ignorance respectively. Truth lies beyond the empirical world, not within it. The relative is subsumed into the absolute. Buddhism—especially Madhyamaka—reverses this relation: the absolute is the true nature of the relative. Emptiness is not a hidden ground behind appearances but the way appearances are.

The difference is subtle but decisive. Advaita readily states that the world is ultimately unreal. Madhyamaka resists this formulation, not because it affirms the world as ultimately real, but because it denies that “ultimate” designates a higher ontological level. At the ultimate level, the categories of real and unreal no longer apply. Thus, Madhyamaka prefers to say that the world is empty rather than unreal.

Affirmative strands of Buddhism—such as Buddha-nature doctrines in East Asian and Tibetan traditions—move closer to Advaita by speaking of ultimate reality in more positive terms, though without reifying it. Still, a tension remains.

Śaṅkara makes two central claims: that all empirical phenomena are illusory in an ontological sense, and that ultimate reality is entirely without attributes. The difficulty lies in explaining what remains after all attributes are negated, and how this remainder differs from a purely negative absolute such as emptiness. If nirguṇa Brahman were understood primarily in negative terms, māyā could be seen not as a second principle but as the mistaken belief that attributes are ultimately real. Brahman and māyā would then be two perspectives on a single reality, much as nirvāṇa and saṃsāra are in Buddhism.

This interpretive move is not unprecedented. Early Upaniṣadic and Sāṃkhya-influenced frameworks described reality as an interplay between consciousness (puruṣa) and manifestation (prakṛti). Modern Vedāntins such as Radhakrishnan and Vivekananda sought to harmonize Advaita with a more inclusive metaphysics by affirming both nirguṇa and saguṇa Brahman as real. In this neo-Vedāntic view, saguṇa Brahman is not merely Brahman seen through illusion, but Brahman actively manifesting. Māyā is not to be eliminated but properly understood.

Neo-Vedānta thus aligns more closely with qualified non-dualism, Kashmir Śaivism, and certain Mahāyāna views than with classical Advaita. If we accept that ultimate truth is entirely beyond conceptualization, then emptiness and nirguṇa Brahman may be functionally equivalent as non-conceptual ultimates—what we may provisionally call the parjective.

The divergence lies in how the world relates to this ultimate. In classical Advaita, the ultimate is passive and the world is incidental. In Madhyamaka and Neo-Vedānta, the world meaningfully expresses the ultimate. In Madhyamaka, emptiness is dependent origination; in Neo-Vedānta, nirguṇa Brahman expresses itself as saguṇa Brahman. The world is not ultimately real, but it is not meaningless either.

Summarized schematically:

• Classical Advaita: Only nirguṇa Brahman is ultimately real; the world is empirically real but ultimately unreal. The relative is cancelled in the absolute.

• Neo-Vedānta: Nirguṇa and saguṇa Brahman are two aspects of one reality; the world is a real expression of Brahman. The relative manifests the absolute.

• Madhyamaka: Ultimate truth is the absence of intrinsic existence; phenomena exist conventionally but lack ultimate status. The ultimate is the true nature of the relative.

Radhakrishnan’s concern with Śaṅkara’s model is that a purely negative absolute risks collapsing into emptiness understood as mere negation. If the world is entirely unreal, Brahman risks becoming an abstract void rather than the explanation of experience. He therefore elevates the status of saguṇa Brahman, interpreting māyā not as the unreality of the world but as the misinterpretation of the world as independently real.

Yet one might respond that if nirguṇa Brahman is understood negatively—analogous to śūnyatā—this does not entail nihilism. Rather, it allows Brahman to function as the open condition for dependent phenomena, just as emptiness does in Buddhism. The world would then be neither absolutely real nor unreal, but the only positive reality available to us. Saguna Brahman would be the positive appearance of a negative ultimate, just as consciousness in Yogācāra is the dynamic expression of emptiness.

Seen this way, the distance between Vedānta and Mahāyāna Buddhism narrows considerably. Both converge on the insight that ultimate reality is not an object, not a substance, and not a separate realm, but the dissolution of all conceptual boundaries through which the world and self are falsely divided.

§19. The Dialectic of Silence

A familiar contrast between Vedānta and Buddhism is often framed in stark terms: Vedānta affirms a self—an eternal, enduring reality—while Buddhism denies any permanent self, emphasizing impermanence and process. In this simplified picture, Vedānta appears committed to a metaphysics of substance, and Buddhism to a metaphysics of becoming. Yet this opposition, while useful, conceals a more subtle philosophical terrain.

Although the Buddha decisively rejected the notion of a substantial, unchanging self of the kind affirmed in many Vedāntic systems, he also refused to convert the denial of self into a metaphysical doctrine. He rejected both eternalism, which posits an immutable self, and annihilationism, which claims the complete nonexistence of personal continuity. Instead, he taught a middle way: all phenomena, including what we conventionally call the self, are impermanent, interdependent, and empty of inherent existence. For this reason, early Buddhist teachings on non-self are primarily therapeutic rather than metaphysical, aimed at dissolving egoic identification rather than establishing a theory of ultimate reality. When pressed on ultimate metaphysical questions, the Buddha famously remained silent—not from ignorance, but from the recognition that conceptual answers would mislead by reifying what cannot be grasped by thought.

This silence is crucial. Any object of clinging, conceptual or experiential, is not the self. Conceptual grasping itself obscures the nature of reality. Thus, the very act of comparing “self” and “no-self,” “substance” and “process,” or “Ātman” and “emptiness” risks contradicting the intent of these teachings, which are designed to loosen conceptual fixation rather than refine it. Intellectual clarity alone resolves nothing unless it culminates in the relinquishment of all fixed views. In both traditions, whatever reality ultimately is, it exceeds conceptual determination.

From this perspective, it is unsurprising that Madhyamaka Buddhism, particularly in the philosophy of Nāgārjuna, resonates strongly with paraphilosophical concerns. Madhyamaka formalizes the systematic negation of metaphysical positions through the catuṣkoṭi (fourfold negation), revealing the relativity and dependence of all conceptual claims about ultimate reality. This method closely parallels the paraphilosophical effort to dismantle the absolutization of perspectives.

At first glance, this poses a challenge for classical Vedāntic claims that affirm Brahman as an ultimate substance. If Brahman is conceived as an immutable, universal entity, then it becomes a determinate philosophical position and thus remains within the domain of conceptual perspective. Yet Advaita Vedānta complicates this picture. While some Upaniṣadic texts speak positively of ultimate reality, others employ the apophatic method—neti neti (“not this, not that”)—to deny that any object of consciousness can be identified with the self. In Advaita, the removal of all objects of awareness is said to reveal pure, nondual awareness itself.

Madhyamaka diverges precisely here. It refuses to reify even awareness, noting that awareness is always awareness of something and therefore never appears independently of relational conditions. Still, Madhyamaka does not lapse into nihilism. The negation of all conceptual claims does not entail absolute nothingness; rather, it shows that what remains cannot be captured as an object or concept. What survives negation is not a graspable entity but the ungraspable—beyond affirmation and denial alike.

In this sense, both Advaita Vedānta and Madhyamaka point beyond philosophy, though in opposite ways. Advaita tends toward a positive-experiential articulation of nonduality, while Madhyamaka proceeds through rigorous logical negation. Their ultimate claims—Brahman as the presence of an uncaused reality, and śūnyatā as the absence of any ultimate ground—stand in tension. One affirms an ultimate principle; the other denies all ultimates. Yet both aim to disclose what cannot be conceptualized.

This contrast becomes more intricate when Yogācāra Buddhism enters the discussion. Alongside Madhyamaka, Yogācāra constitutes the other major Mahāyāna tradition. While Madhyamaka emphasizes emptiness through negation, Yogācāra offers a phenomenological analysis of consciousness. It agrees that all phenomena lack inherent existence but focuses on dismantling the perceived duality between subject and object. What remains is not an immutable consciousness-substance, but a dynamic process of consciousness manifesting as appearances.

Despite its reputation as a “consciousness-only” school, Yogācāra does not posit consciousness as an independent substance. Consciousness is nothing apart from its appearances, and those appearances are impermanent and interdependent. Consciousness, therefore, is a process—an activity rather than a thing. In this respect, Yogācāra affirms the presence of emptiness as lived experience rather than as abstract negation.

This distinction clarifies the contrast with Vedānta. Advaita grounds reality in conscious being; Yogācāra grounds it in conscious doing. Vedānta treats consciousness as an immutable substratum upon which appearances are superimposed through ignorance. Yogācāra treats appearances as the transformations of consciousness itself. Put succinctly: Vedānta holds that the knowable depends on a prior reality of knowing-being, whereas Yogācāra holds that the knowable arises from the activity of knowing.

Both traditions distinguish between empirical appearance and ultimate truth, but they locate that truth differently. Advaita claims that ultimate reality transcends the phenomenal world, which is ultimately unreal. Yogācāra claims that the phenomenal world, correctly understood, is already the expression of nondual consciousness. Hence, Advaita affirms absolute monism—only Brahman is real—whereas Yogācāra affirms a phenomenological nonduality in which consciousness and phenomena are inseparable.

From a paraphilosophical standpoint, these traditions can be seen as navigating different edges of the same limit. Vedānta risks transforming the nonconceptual into a metaphysical absolute; Madhyamaka risks total negation without experiential articulation; Yogācāra seeks a middle articulation through lived phenomenology. Yet all converge on a shared insight: ultimate reality cannot be secured as a belief, a theory, or an object of thought. What they finally gesture toward is neither presence nor absence, neither affirmation nor denial. And for this reason, the most complete teaching, echoed across these traditions, is silence.

Both objectivity and subjectivity belong, from the standpoint of non-dual metaphysics, to the realm of appearance rather than to ultimate reality. In Advaita Vedānta, both are understood as superimpositions upon Brahman, the unconditioned ground beyond all perspectives. What appears as an external world and an internal subject are equally products of ignorance (avidyā), not features of reality as it is in itself.

Within Yogācāra Buddhism, a parallel but distinct framework emerges around the concept of ālaya-vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness. This consciousness functions as the dynamic repository of karmic seeds and conditions the arising of experience. Debate persists, however, over whether the storehouse consciousness can be described as universal. Each individual stream of experience appears to possess its own continuously transforming ālaya, and unlike Brahman or Īśvara in Hindu thought, the storehouse consciousness is impersonal and unconscious rather than a personal or divine principle.

Despite these differences, ālaya-vijñāna bears structural similarities to major Western metaphysical ideas such as Hegel’s Geist and Schopenhauer’s Will. Like these concepts, the storehouse consciousness underlies phenomenal life by sustaining dispositions, drives, and patterns of behavior. The karmic seeds it contains are maintained by ignorance and ego-attachment, corresponding broadly to rational and affective drives, or what may be described as orientations toward righteousness and pleasure.

At the conventional level, Yogācāra and related yogic traditions describe reality in a way that closely parallels paraphilosophical models. There is a distinction between appearances—objective, particular, abstract—and consciousness—superjective, universal, concrete. While this distinction operates pragmatically within ordinary experience, the aim of spiritual practice is to realize their non-duality.

Turning to Vedānta, the early Upaniṣads portray the phenomenal world as a playful emanation (līlā) of Brahman. Brahman is described as having two inseparable aspects: an unchanging, witnessing reality and a dynamic aspect manifesting as the flux of appearances. This bears a clear resemblance to Yogācāra, where phenomena are understood as transformations of consciousness. The crucial difference, however, is that Vedānta maintains that appearances depend upon Brahman without being identical to it, whereas Yogācāra treats phenomena as inseparable from consciousness itself.

Seen in this light, Yogācāra and Vedānta articulate similar structures with opposite emphases. Yogācāra tends toward a qualified idealistic pluralism if consciousness is denied absolute or universal status, while Vedānta affirms absolute consciousness and denies the ultimate reality of phenomena, resulting in a form of absolute idealism. Yet more developed interpretations complicate this contrast.

Later Upaniṣadic texts, especially the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, increasingly describe the world not as divine play but as māyā, illusion. This view is systematized in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, where Brahman is said to be beyond all attributes and perspectives. Brahman cannot be reduced to the superjective standpoint; it lies beyond the entire dialectical matrix. All perspectives—including subjectivity and objectivity—are themselves forms of māyā, illusory superimpositions upon the unchanging reality of Brahman.

Yogācāra arrives at a parallel conclusion through a different route. The storehouse consciousness itself is not ultimate; it is conditioned, dependently arisen, and ultimately empty. Awakening involves its purification and transcendence. What is revealed is jñāna, non-dual wisdom—pure awareness beyond conceptual structure. In Buddhist terms, this is tathatā, or suchness: the immediate, pre-conceptual nature of experience. Suchness cannot be spoken of without distortion, because language inevitably reintroduces conceptual distinctions that suchness transcends.

Here Yogācāra intersects with Madhyamaka. Emptiness (śūnyatā) and suchness are two ways of pointing to what remains when conceptual elaboration ceases. Madhyamaka emphasizes emptiness as the absence of intrinsic existence, while Yogācāra emphasizes suchness as the luminous immediacy of experience once subject–object duality dissolves. Both approaches ultimately deny that their descriptions capture reality as it is; their differences operate only at the conventional level.

Yogācāra thus occupies a middle position. It refuses to claim that suchness is an independently existing absolute, as Vedānta might be interpreted to do, while also refusing Madhyamaka’s strict refusal to say that anything remains once all conceptual fabrications are dismantled. Suchness is neither separate from appearances nor dependent on them in an ultimate sense. It is not nothing, but neither is it something definable. Later Buddhist traditions expressed this tension through doctrines of Buddha-nature, sometimes describing suchness as a luminous potential present in all beings—language that risks essentialism and must therefore be handled with extreme caution.

The divergence between Madhyamaka and Yogācāra can be framed succinctly. Madhyamaka defines emptiness as the absence of intrinsic existence. Yogācāra defines emptiness as the absence of subject–object duality. Madhyamaka insists that no conception is ultimately true; Yogācāra emphasizes the non-dual realization of this insight. Madhyamaka speaks of the absence of presence; Yogācāra speaks of the presence of absence.

Each tradition critiques the other accordingly. Madhyamaka warns that Yogācāra risks reifying consciousness and violating the doctrine of no-self. Advaita Vedānta, from the opposite side, criticizes Yogācāra for reducing reality to a discontinuous flow lacking any enduring ground. Both critiques reflect the limits of language rather than decisive philosophical failures.

Ultimately, both Madhyamaka and Yogācāra understand themselves as articulations of the middle way, avoiding the extremes of nihilism and eternalism. Reality is neither absolutely real nor unreal. Any attempt to state otherwise collapses into contradiction. The middle way cannot be conceptualized without distortion; it can only be realized non-conceptually.

From a paraphilosophical perspective, this is the point around which all dialectical processes orbit. It is necessary yet impossible to articulate, because articulation itself introduces imbalance. Presence and absence, being and non-being, are not opposites but mutually implicative expressions of freedom. Freedom is precisely the absence of necessity that allows appearances to arise as they do.

In this sense, experience itself is already a positive expression of emptiness. Emptiness is not a void opposed to form, but the condition that allows form to appear at all. Creation is not something added to emptiness; it is emptiness in expression. When this indeterminate openness is interpreted within a religious framework, it naturally takes on a divine aspect—not as a determinate being, but as the freedom that allows anything whatsoever to appear.

§20. Pedagogical Dualism in the Absolute

Any attempt to speak about paraphilosophy necessarily employs concepts, even though paraphilosophy itself concerns what lies beyond conceptual thought. There is therefore a decisive distinction between describing what transcends philosophy and directly recognizing or abiding in non-conceptual experience. This is the familiar difference between the finger that points and that which is pointed to. To make what is beyond all perspectives communicable for the sake of teaching, some degree of conceptual bias is unavoidable. One may lean toward an affirmative characterization or toward a negative one; one may describe what ultimate reality is like experientially or describe what it is not intellectually.

This divergence largely explains the contrast between Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism. Vedānta’s affirmative language reflects its devotional and religious context, while Buddhism—especially Madhyamaka—adopts a more critical and deconstructive approach aimed at preventing attachment to metaphysical views. This contrast is not a criticism of either tradition, but an acknowledgment that different pedagogical strategies address different temperaments. The apparent opposition between fullness and emptiness arises not because reality itself is divided, but because non-duality must be expressed through a mind that operates dualistically. The paradox of the absolute emerges from the collision between non-duality as an objective description of reality and duality as the subjective structure of thought. Non-duality cannot be thought as non-duality; it can only be conceptualized as a unity of opposites. Ultimately, however, there are no opposites at all.

Within Advaita Vedānta, Brahman is said to be beyond all predicates and determinations, aligning it with what paraphilosophy names the paradjective: that which lies beyond all particular perspectives. Yet Brahman is also described as sat–cit–ānanda—existence, consciousness, and bliss. These appear to function as attributes, but they are better understood as pedagogical descriptions of the liberative realization of Brahman, not as properties inhering in Brahman itself. They negate the extremes of non-being, unconsciousness, and suffering rather than positively defining ultimate reality. Such language is justified provisionally and must be relinquished upon realization.

Buddhism takes the opposite approach. Madhyamaka, through Nāgārjuna’s use of the catuṣkoṭi (fourfold negation), demonstrates that all philosophical discourse operates only at the level of conventional truth. Ultimate reality cannot be affirmed, denied, both affirmed and denied, or neither affirmed nor denied. Emptiness (śūnyatā) does not assert non-existence; it denies intrinsic existence. To say that things are empty is not to say that they are unreal, but that they do not exist independently or essentially. In this respect, emptiness resembles Śaṅkara’s doctrine of māyā, with the crucial difference that Buddhism refuses to posit an underlying noumenal substance beneath appearances.

Nāgārjuna deliberately refrains from advancing a positive thesis about ultimate reality. Any such thesis would itself require negation. His method consists entirely in dismantling views, including the view that all views are false. This silence is often mistaken for nihilism, but the mistake lies in assuming that rejection implies negation of reality rather than negation of conceptual fixation. The purpose of the method is soteriological: to remove conceptual barriers to realization, not to replace them with a metaphysical doctrine.

Yet Madhyamaka implicitly gestures toward something positive. If emptiness were sheer nothingness, liberation would be impossible. Mahāyāna texts therefore speak of tathatā—suchness—the immediate reality of appearances freed from conceptual projection. Suchness is not something behind phenomena, nor something added to them. It is phenomena as they are when seen without conceptual distortion. Abiding in suchness dissolves attachment and culminates in nirvāṇa, which is not mere cessation but a state of freedom and peace.

Emptiness is thus inseparable from dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). From the conventional standpoint, emptiness is the absence of intrinsic existence in all things. From the ultimate standpoint, emptiness is the absence of all conceptual oppositions. These are not two different truths about two different realities, but two epistemic orientations toward the same reality. To say that phenomena arise dependently is exactly the same as saying that they are empty. The two statements are tautological, not causal. There is no emptiness apart from appearances and no appearances apart from emptiness.

This insight dissolves the illusion that emptiness is a property possessed by things. There are not things that happen to be empty; there is only emptiness appearing. Enlightenment is not the discovery of a new reality but the removal of the conceptual distortion that divides emptiness from appearance. The distinction between emptiness and dependent origination is epistemological, not ontological, and it is precisely this distinction that must ultimately be relinquished.

Reality is therefore not a collection of discrete entities but an indivisible field of interdependent arising. Change does not involve things coming into or passing out of existence, but the continuous transformation of this relational field. Causality is not interaction between independent objects, but the self-articulation of interdependence itself. Multiplicity and unity are not opposites; they are perspectives imposed upon a seamless process.

Suchness names this reality prior to conceptual division. It is not dependent on anything external, because there is nothing external to it. It is not a thing among things, but the way reality is. While Madhyamaka resists calling suchness independent—lest it be mistaken for an intrinsically existent substance—there is a legitimate sense in which suchness is non-dependent: it does not rely on anything beyond itself. This non-dependence is not essentialism. It is simply the openness that allows spontaneous arising.

The denial of intrinsic existence in Madhyamaka presupposes a notion of existence as static essence, which Nāgārjuna rightly dismantles. But existence need not be understood in this way. Existence can be understood as dynamic, relational, and self-arising. Reality is neither absolutely existent nor absolutely non-existent. The middle way does not abolish existence; it redefines it as interdependent presence.

Thus emptiness is not a void opposed to appearance. It is the intrinsic freedom that allows appearance at all. Appearance and emptiness are two inseparable aspects of the same dynamic suchness. This is not a doctrine added to Madhyamaka, but what its method necessarily leaves unsaid. The final task is not to conceptualize this unity, but to cease mistaking conceptual distinctions for reality itself.

Ultimately, suchness cannot be captured by concepts at all. To call it dependent is already a conceptual imposition; to call it independent is equally so. The point is not to decide which description is true and which is false, but to recognize that any attempt to speak of suchness must employ language provisionally. When we do so, two complementary approaches are available. One may follow the orthodox Madhyamaka strategy of negation, or one may adopt a more affirmative mode of expression reminiscent of Yogācāra. These approaches—one emphasizing absence, the other presence—are not contradictory. They are different pedagogical articulations of the same ineffable reality.

Negation functions to dismantle reified concepts and metaphysical attachments. Affirmation, when carefully constrained, allows for a more immediate engagement with lived experience. From this affirmative angle, one may even speak—very cautiously—of non-dependence, intrinsic existence, or self-nature. Yet the meaning of these terms is radically transformed. What is called intrinsic existence is nothing other than interdependence itself; what appears as self-nature is precisely other-nature. These expressions do not introduce a hidden substance beneath appearances but gesture toward the collapse of the conceptual oppositions by which experience is ordinarily structured.

This manner of speaking is deliberately self-undermining. It defines reality in terms of its apparent opposite, not because this is logically satisfying, but because it is the only way to gesture beyond conceptual boundaries. To define something without reference to its opposite would already assume a distinction that does not ultimately exist. Where opposites dissolve, concepts fail; and where concepts fail, they fail together. In this sense, when opposites become one, they also become none.

For this reason, it is defensible to say that Buddhism allows for a notion of self whose very nature is the absence of self. This parallels the claim that the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth—not in the sense that nothing is real, but in the sense that the framework of affirmation and negation itself must be transcended. The problem is not to resolve a logical contradiction, but to step out of the conceptual stance altogether and return to the immediacy of experience in which such contradictions never arise.

At the deepest level of ontology, two basic conceptions of being have dominated philosophical reflection. One conceives being as substance: independently existing, self-identical, and enduring. The other conceives being as process: dynamic, relational, and ever-changing. While these views are often opposed, they are best understood as two perspectives on the same reality. There is a sense in which one may speak of an ultimate substance underlying all things—but only if one recognizes that this “substance” is nothing other than process itself. Substance is process seen statically; process is substance understood dynamically. Permanence is how change appears when frozen by concepts; unity is difference apprehended without division.

As long as we retain a conceptual duality between the ultimate and the relative, non-duality cannot be genuinely realized. Even the idea of “being one with the world” subtly reinforces the illusion of a subject grasping an object. It remains an intellectual posture. True non-duality is not the affirmation of unity over separation, but the recognition that the distinction between separation and unity is itself the illusion. The same applies to the oppositions between self and no-self, delusion and wisdom, illusion and reality. These distinctions are products of thought, not features of experience itself.

From this perspective, even delusion is not other than awareness. All experiences are already expressions of awakened awareness, which does not intervene in or correct its own manifestations. Delusion persists only insofar as it fails to recognize itself as such. When it does, it dissolves—not because something intervenes, but because there was never anything to correct. Awareness does not act, choose, or grasp, precisely because it is not a self.

If, however, the word “self” is used to indicate the open, boundless, luminous capacity for experience itself—unfixed, ungraspable, and inseparable from what is presently occurring—then a self whose self-nature is selflessness is not incompatible with Buddhism. It names not an entity, but the freedom that makes experience possible at all.

§21. The Paraphilosophical Gesture

Paraphilosophy begins from the claim that all philosophical theories can be situated within a simple fourfold structure—the dialectical matrix. This matrix is not an arbitrary classificatory device. It mirrors the structure of human experience, the architecture of rational cognition, and the formal conditions under which claims may be evaluated as intelligible, coherent, or true. It therefore reflects not merely how we think about the world, but how thinking itself is possible.

This immediately raises a classical philosophical question: does the dialectical matrix correspond to the structure of reality itself, independent of human experience, or does it merely reflect the structure of human reason as it organizes appearances? In other words, does experience disclose reality, or does it inevitably filter and conceal it?

This problem echoes the divide between Kant and Hegel. Like Kant’s categories of understanding, the dialectical matrix structures experience and conditions intelligibility. For Kant, such structures impose limits on knowledge of things as they are in themselves. For Hegel, by contrast, the rational structure of thought is precisely what allows reality to become intelligible, because subjectivity and objectivity are internally related. Paraphilosophy adopts neither position exclusively, but draws from both.

The dialectical matrix is not itself a theory about what exists. It makes no ontological claim. Rather, it delineates the space of possible claims. Paraphilosophy is established not by asserting the truth of the matrix as an external object, but through its self-justification: the recognition that all attempts to explain reality already presuppose its structure. The matrix is disclosed through experience itself, and it is this disclosure that warrants treating it as objectively valid in a relative, non-transcendent sense.

Accordingly, paraphilosophy rejects a strict separation between subjective interpretation and objective reality. Our understanding of reality evolves in tandem with the way reality appears to us. This unity reflects Hegel’s dictum that the rational is actual and the actual rational, though without committing to a metaphysical absolute existing independently of experience.

If we accept this framework, then the dialectical matrix cannot coherently be dismissed as merely subjective. Its objectivity consists precisely in the harmony between subjective cognition and objective appearance. Without this unity, paraphilosophy collapses.

Yet this leaves unresolved a deeper aspiration: the desire to know what is ultimately real. Any attempt to describe reality must necessarily fall within the dialectical matrix, since intelligibility requires dualistic distinctions. Paraphilosophy therefore implies that no perspective within the matrix delivers absolute truth. Each quadrant expresses a relative truth, valid within a broader structural whole. While this initially appears to undermine the search for ultimate truth, the unease dissipates once it becomes clear that paraphilosophy is not relativism in the trivial sense.

Subjectivism and objectivism, which correspond to the mental and the material, are biased in opposite directions and thus poor candidates for final explanation. More promising are the neutral perspectives: objectivism (understood phenomenally) and superjectivism. Both reject the rigid subject–object dichotomy and instead describe experience as an interdependent field of phenomena and consciousness.

Crucially, each quadrant of the dialectical matrix contains all possible interpretations of itself. A quadrant may be interpreted exclusively, as a self-sufficient metaphysical doctrine, or inclusively, as one perspective whose validity depends on its coherence with corresponding perspectives in the other quadrants. Exclusive interpretations yield traditional philosophical systems. Inclusive interpretations yield paraphilosophical understanding.

Paraphilosophy derives its explanatory power from this inclusivity. A perspective is not valid simply because it is internally coherent, but because its implications harmonize with those of complementary perspectives. Truth admits of degrees, measured by syntheoretic harmony—the structural alignment among different explanatory frameworks. Perspectives that disrupt this harmony are less valid, not false in isolation, but incomplete.

Harmony does not require agreement of content. One perspective may describe causation mechanistically, another teleologically. What matters is that their implications coincide. If both lead to the same practical expectations, they are not rival theories but complementary descriptions of a single structure.

Within this framework, superjectivism conceives reality as a concrete universal: a shared field in which individual consciousnesses participate without being subsumed. This aligns with Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit, where universality exists only through particular instantiations. The superjective is neither a transcendent mind nor a mere abstraction; it is the shared structure binding individual perspectives together.

However, superjectivism becomes philosophically exclusive if it is treated as an independently existing absolute consciousness that renders other perspectives illusory. In paraphilosophy, the superjective instead functions as the self-referential aspect of the dialectical matrix. It contains other perspectives structurally, but it is not their metaphysical ground. Self-reference extends indefinitely; the matrix has no ultimate foundation.

Here, paraphilosophy again mediates between Kant and Hegel. Like Kant, it recognizes that structures of understanding condition experience without existing as noumenal entities. Like Hegel, it understands reality as a rational process unfolding through experience rather than as a fixed substrate. The superjective thus resembles the logos of Heraclitus: an ordering principle revealed in the correspondence between thought and experience, not an entity behind them.

Turning to objectivism, an inclusive interpretation understands the objective as a network of abstract particulars—instances of properties or relations—akin to phenomenalism. This view traces back to early empiricists such as Berkeley and Hume and culminates in Kant’s transcendental idealism. Positivists and neutral monists likewise arrived at similar conclusions, recognizing that meaningful discourse concerns actual or possible experience.

Yet experience presupposes conditions that cannot themselves be derived from experience. Kant accounted for this through synthetic a priori structures such as space, time, and causality. From a paraphilosophical standpoint, objectivism and superjectivism converge: both describe phenomenal interdependence, one analytically and fragmentarily, the other holistically and integratively.

A more exclusive interpretation of objectivism treats mathematical structure as fundamental and experience as epiphenomenal. To integrate this view paraphilosophically, mathematics must be understood not as a transcendent Platonic realm, but as the articulation of the limits of possible experience. Mathematical objects are real insofar as they are generable within cognitive constraints.

Beyond both mathematics and phenomenality lies something that cannot be rationally structured: pure potentiality—the openness that there is something rather than nothing. This is not probability, not structure, not law. It is the absence of constraint that permits structure to arise. It is noumenal, nonrational, and not a thing. Confusing this indeterminacy with formal possibility leads to metaphysical error.

The central danger of paraphilosophy lies in the temptation to rationalize what exceeds reason. To attempt to explain phenomenality from a standpoint outside phenomenality is to reason oneself out of reason. Such gestures can be heuristically useful, but only if their limits are understood.

As consciousness differentiates itself, the quadrants of the dialectical matrix separate. Traced backward far enough, they collapse into an undifferentiated unity in which all oppositions cancel. This state is necessarily nonrational, as rationality itself depends on distinction.

Here we reach the only viable candidate for an ultimate ultimate reality: indeterminate potential. Nothing definitive can be said of it, yet everything depends upon it. Paraphilosophy does not claim to describe it—only to gesture toward it, while remaining faithful to the structures that make understanding possible.

Paraphilosophy can be described in several ways, but most misunderstandings arise from treating it as a philosophy in the conventional sense. Strictly speaking, paraphilosophy is not a philosophical system, nor even a conceptual position. It is not something that can be stated, defended, or fully expressed within theory. Anything said about it is necessarily indirect. All discourse about paraphilosophy functions as a gesture toward a condition rather than an explanation of it.

In this respect, paraphilosophy refers not to a subject of study but to the condition of reality itself as it stands in relation to philosophical thought. The term is best understood adjectivally rather than substantively: reality is paraphilosophical insofar as it always exceeds conceptual capture. No theory, model, or explanatory framework can exhaust what reality is. Paraphilosophy names this excess.

At the same time, reality is not irrational. It is describable through philosophical theories, but only partially and plurally. No single perspective can claim completeness. The term paraphilosophy therefore conveys two inseparable insights: first, the relative validity of multiple philosophical perspectives; second, the fundamental error of mistaking any perspective for an absolute account of reality.

A philosophy is always a particular perspective—an explanation of some aspect of experience. Paraphilosophy is what lies beyond any particular perspective. One way to understand this is to distinguish between the capacity to rationalize experience and the specific rationalizations that result. Philosophies are instances of this capacity; paraphilosophy is the capacity itself. The direction of inquiry is thus inverted: rather than using reason to justify beliefs, paraphilosophy reflects on the conditions that make belief, reasoning, and perspective possible at all. In this sense, it stands as close to psychology as it does to philosophy.

Within paraphilosophy, we speak of generalized perspectives—subjective, objective, and others—while recognizing that the domains to which they refer are only relatively subjective or objective. None is absolute. This tempts one to posit a “parjective” or “paraphilosophical” perspective, but such a move is incoherent. A perspective beyond perspective is a contradiction. At most, it can be understood paradoxically, not theoretically.

What can be affirmed rationally is that the dialectical matrix—the structure relating all fundamental perspectives—captures the form of intelligibility itself. Taken inclusively, this yields a kind of universal synthetic standpoint, analogous to Hegel’s absolute concept, though without positing a final metaphysical ground. This may be described as panperspectival: the recognition that all perspectives are conditionally valid in relation to one another. Yet even this remains within the domain of reason and therefore falls short of paraphilosophy in the strict sense.

Paraphilosophy thus has two distinguishable but inseparable aspects. The first is the total structure of possible perspectives, expressed by the dialectical matrix. This structure arises from humanity’s attempt to rationalize reality and reveals that no perspective can stand alone. The second aspect follows directly: if all perspectives are interdependent, then ultimate truth cannot be any perspective at all. Whatever is ultimate must lie beyond conceptual determination.

Paraphilosophy names the unity of these two moments: the universal acceptance of all perspectives and the universal negation of any final perspective. At the level of thought, this appears as complementarity; at the level of reality, it expresses nonduality. Reason itself, whose structure is formalized in the dialectical matrix, is therefore complementary to the nonrational. The absence of an ultimate foundation is not a failure of knowledge but its enabling condition.

The lack of an ultimate perspective is precisely what allows perspectives to exist. Reality is unrestricted openness. Conceptual thought introduces limits; it does not reveal an underlying essence. The only sense in which “ultimate truth” can be named is as the creative openness that permits the emergence of relative truths. Any determinate limit would itself constitute an absolute perspective, which paraphilosophy denies.

This openness is not chaos or irrationality. It is freedom—freedom prior to structure, freedom that allows structure to arise. The absence of an ultimate necessity is the condition for all relative necessity. In this sense, paraphilosophy articulates a unity of contingency and inevitability, spontaneity and order.

Within the dialectical matrix, one quadrant—the superjective—represents self-consciousness and concrete universality. It is the point at which subject and object coincide through self-reference. Yet this superjective is not an independent absolute; it is a function of the matrix itself. Consciousness is transparent: it never encounters itself directly, only its contents. The illusion lies not in perspectives as such, but in the belief that any perspective could be complete in isolation.

Every perspective has a complement. Exclusive superjectivism (pure universal consciousness without properties) complements exclusive objectivism (pure properties without consciousness). But when superjectivism is understood inclusively—as the unity of all perspectives—it complements what lies beyond all perspectives entirely: the absence of rational structure itself.

This yields two distinct oppositions: conscious versus unconscious, and rational versus nonrational. Experience and reason coincide; what lies beyond reason cannot be assimilated into experience as an object. Kant’s transcendental idealism remains compatible with this view insofar as it recognizes that phenomena are structured by cognition without positing an intelligible account of things-in-themselves. By contrast, any attempt to describe ultimate reality as an independent mathematical or informational structure merely extends reason beyond experience without transcending it.

The objective domain occupies a unique position here because it approaches the limit of intelligibility, but it never crosses into the paraphilosophical. The paraphilosophical is not another domain; it is the condition that allows domains to appear at all.

In the end, paraphilosophy dissolves the traditional problem of ultimate truth. There is no final way things must be. Because there is no such necessity, things are free to appear as they do. This is not relativism but absolute relativity: the inseparability of openness and form, freedom and appearance. The question of ultimate truth vanishes, not because it is answered, but because its presupposition—that there must be a final perspective—falls away.

At the level of ordinary empirical analysis, the objective and the subjective appear as complementary but conditioned representations of experience. The objective can be understood as a representation of the physical structure of experience, while the subjective represents its psychological structure. In this sense, the objective often comes to be treated as a foundational layer of reality. Yet this foundation is only provisional. There is, ultimately, no intrinsic physics, no intrinsic psychology, and no intrinsic ground that exists independently of our ways of making sense of experience. These structures arise because rationalization itself requires them.

At the ultimate level, this apparent hierarchy collapses. The distinctions between objective, subjective, and other perspectives dissolve, and with them the activity of rationalization as such. What remains is a spontaneous presence that perfectly correlates with our capacity to explain it, though this correlation must not be mistaken for causation. Reason can mirror this presence, but it does not generate it.

From within the limits of reason, the closest approximation to an ultimate ground is what might be called the transcendental objective: an informational or structural representation that functions as if it were foundational. It is the most refined expression reason can produce when confronted with what cannot, in principle, be rationalized. As such, it serves as a conceptual stand-in for the ineffable rather than its discovery. Phenomenal reality itself is already a construction of reason, articulated through structured perspectives; the transcendental objective is reason’s attempt to reflect what lies beyond those perspectives without ever fully grasping it.

For this reason, objectivism occupies a distinctive role. It discloses the deepest operations of rationality, clarifying the structure of possible experience and the way subjectivity participates in generating it. Pushed far enough, it promises unifying visions—linking, for example, fundamental physics and depth psychology within a single explanatory framework. Yet this promise becomes misleading if a relative, dependent foundation is mistaken for an ultimate, independent one. To do so is to confuse explanatory harmony with metaphysical finality.

At their extremes, different philosophical orientations point beyond themselves. Radical superjectivism gestures toward the total affirmation of all perspectives; radical objectivism gestures toward the negation of all perspectives. Each, in its own way, indicates what lies beyond philosophy rather than capturing it. One emphasizes the relative truth of every standpoint; the other emphasizes the ultimate insufficiency of all standpoints.

This tension finds striking parallels in major contemplative traditions. In Buddhism, ultimate truth is expressed as the emptiness and interdependence of appearances: form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. This resonates with the view that what appears objectively is inseparable from what exceeds conceptual grasp. In Advaita Vedānta, by contrast, ultimate truth is identified with pure awareness itself: Atman is Brahman. Here, reality is understood as a single, self-knowing whole. These traditions approach the same limit from opposite directions—one through the analysis of appearances, the other through the affirmation of awareness.

Buddhist philosophy further refines this by suspending the usual predicates of true and false when speaking of ultimate reality. The stance of “neither true nor false” is not a claim about what reality is, but a refusal to let conceptual affirmation or negation harden into metaphysical dogma. It functions as a final step in loosening the grip of conceptual thought before it is relinquished altogether. Like the “middle way,” it is a means rather than an end—a raft to be abandoned once it has carried us across.

The danger lies in mistaking a perspective that points beyond perspectives for what is genuinely beyond them. What lies beyond all theories cannot itself be a theory, and any attempt to articulate it as such collapses into speculative metaphysics of the very sort philosophy has repeatedly tried to overcome. The impulse to rationalize what resists rationalization reveals a deeper paradox: the attempt to transcend our limitations by means of those same limitations inevitably reinstates the dualities we seek to dissolve.

This paradox was articulated with particular clarity by Søren Kierkegaard, who observed that the ultimate contradiction of thought is its desire to think what thought cannot think. For him, this marked the boundary where knowledge ends and faith begins, and where the absolute appears only as the “absolutely different.” Across religious and philosophical traditions, this insight has often taken the form of apophatic or negative discourse—a disciplined refusal to define the ultimate—in order to gesture, without enclosing it, toward what exceeds all categories of thought.

§22. Beyond the Abyss

Nietzsche is most often remembered for his critique of morality and his declaration of the death of God, yet far less attention is given to how closely his philosophy approaches certain Buddhist insights. Nietzsche himself expressed respect for Buddhism, praising its intellectual honesty, even as he ultimately rejected it as life-denying. This judgment, however, was shaped by historical circumstance. The form of Buddhism most accessible to European thinkers in the late nineteenth century was Theravāda, a tradition that emphasizes liberation from suffering through withdrawal from saṃsāra and thus lends itself more easily to charges of negation or escapism.

Nietzsche was likely unfamiliar with Mahāyāna Buddhism, whose orientation differs fundamentally. Mahāyāna denies any ultimate separation between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, asserting that there is no realm to escape to and no life to abandon. Existence itself is the field of realization. Traditions emerging from Mahāyāna, such as Zen, therefore affirm participation in life rather than retreat from it.

Nietzsche’s response to nihilism was an affirmation of life despite the absence of ultimate meaning. While courageous, this stance retains a tragic character: life must be affirmed in spite of its groundlessness. It leaves unanswered the deeper question of why affirmation is possible at all. This limitation becomes clearer in the work of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, who approached nihilism through both Nietzsche and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Nishitani observed striking affinities between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Buddhist thought: the will to power, perspectivism, and the rejection of substance metaphysics all find close parallels in Mahāyāna. Yet Nishitani argued that Nietzsche ultimately did not go far enough. Nietzsche confronted the abyss of meaninglessness without illusion, but he remained positioned over against it. As long as nihilism is faced from a standpoint that remains separate from it, affirmation must remain oppositional. Life is affirmed despite the abyss, not from within it.

For Nishitani, the only genuine way through nihilism is a more radical dissolution of the dualism between the self and the void. This requires undoing a fundamental metaphysical assumption that has structured Western thought since Plato: the separation of the doer from the deed. We habitually interpret reality in terms of causes and agents, assuming that every event must be produced by a stable subject. While this framework enables scientific prediction and control, it also fragments reality into isolated subjects and objects, generating a sense of existential alienation.

Historically, this causal logic culminated in the concept of God as the ultimate doer behind the world. With the advent of modern science, God was replaced by impersonal laws of nature, yet the same structure was retained: reality was still governed by something external to it. Deprived of intentionality, these laws rendered existence accidental. Human life came to appear as a fleeting byproduct of blind processes unfolding between two voids—nothingness before and nothingness after. Nihilism emerges precisely from this vision.

Nishitani locates the key to overcoming nihilism in the concept of the “I.” The word appears self-evident, yet it is remarkably unstable. At different moments, it refers to the thinker of thoughts, the doer of actions, the bearer of personality, or the field of awareness itself. Unlike a true cause, which should be more stable than its effects, the “I” proves to be the most elusive element of experience. Thoughts are readily observed; the thinker vanishes upon inspection.

If the “I” were the cause of thoughts, thoughts would arise at will. They do not. Attempts to choose the next thought reveal that thoughts appear spontaneously. This suggests that the thinker is not the origin of thought but an interpretation that arises alongside it. The same applies to action: when thinking occurs, one feels like a thinker; when deciding occurs, one feels like a decider; when acting occurs, one feels like a doer. These identities shift with the activity itself, indicating that the supposed agent is not a prior cause but a conceptual overlay.

From this perspective, the self is not a thing that acts within reality but a way reality interprets itself. There is interpretation without a separate interpreter. The sense of being a self is real as an experience, but illusory as an entity. What remains is not a void opposed to existence, but reality itself, prior to the division into subject and object.

This realization dissolves nihilism at its root. If there is no isolated self standing over against a meaningless world, then meaninglessness itself loses its footing. Existence no longer requires an external purpose or ultimate cause to justify itself. Life is no longer an accident occurring in nothingness, but a self-manifesting field in which meaning and meaninglessness arise together.

In this sense, Nishitani completes the journey Nietzsche began. Where Nietzsche affirmed life in defiance of the abyss, Nishitani dissolves the standpoint from which the abyss appeared hostile. Nihilism is overcome not by opposing it, but by seeing through the assumptions that produce it. What remains is not despair, but a freedom grounded in reality itself.

Reality cannot be defined in contrast to anything else, for there is nothing outside it against which such a definition could be made. Lacking an external boundary, reality is necessarily indefinite. This is not a failure of thought but the point at which language reaches its limit. Definition requires edges; reality has none.

A circle is defined by its circumference, which creates an inside and an outside, a self and an other. But reality cannot be drawn in this way, since anything “outside” reality would, by definition, not exist. To depict reality as a bounded totality is therefore incoherent. If reality has no edge, it has no circumference—and if it has no circumference, its center is everywhere.

This leads to a paradoxical consequence. One experiences oneself as a particular individual, yet this individuality cannot mark an ultimate boundary. If the center of reality is everywhere, then one is both oneself and not exclusively oneself. The sense of being a separate subject is not false, but partial: it is an appearance within reality, not something that contains reality. One is not inside the self; rather, the self appears within what one is.

This difficulty arises because all language, logic, and ordinary thought presuppose a dualistic framework. We divide the continuum of reality into discrete units—subjects and objects, causes and effects—in order to think and communicate. These divisions are pragmatically useful, much like measuring length in inches, but they have no independent existence outside conceptual activity. Just as inches are not found in nature apart from measurement, discrete “things” are not found apart from thought.

The error occurs when these conceptual distinctions are mistaken for ontological facts. We speak as though events were caused by separate entities—the lightning flashes, the wave moves—when in fact lightning is the flash and the wave is the movement. The supposed agent is added after the fact. The same mistake underlies the assumption of a thinker behind thoughts or a doer behind actions. These separations are cognitive conveniences, not features of reality itself.

This non-separation is what is meant by non-duality, a view articulated as early as the Upaniṣads and central to Mahāyāna Buddhism. Non-duality does not deny appearances; it denies that appearances are independently existing things. It affirms that reality is a seamless process rather than an assembly of self-contained entities.

This perspective directly reframes nihilism. Nihilism is typically understood as the loss of ultimate ground: the disappearance of a final justification for existence, value, or meaning. Historically, this ground was identified with God; in modernity, scientific explanation has dissolved this foundation without replacing it. The result is the experience of standing over an abyss—existence appearing accidental, purposeless, and suspended between nothingness before and nothingness after.

Nietzsche confronted this abyss without illusion and responded with a heroic affirmation of life despite its groundlessness. Yet, as Keiji Nishitani argues, this stance still preserves a subtle dualism: the self stands against the abyss. Nothingness is treated as something opposed to existence, as negation rather than as reality itself.

According to Nishitani, this is the decisive error. As long as nothingness is conceived as something other than existence—as what lies beneath or behind it—it will remain hostile to life. Thought can only grasp nothingness as the absence of something, which still leaves a conceptual remainder. Absolute nothingness, however, is not a thing, not a state, and not an event. It is the absence of independent being altogether.

In this sense, nothingness is not opposed to existence but identical with it. To say that reality is “nothing” is to say that no thing exists independently, including the self. One was not born as a thing, nor will one die as a thing. What arises and passes away are appearances—real appearances, but not substances. The self, like all phenomena, is a process, not an entity.

Seen from this perspective, nihilism is transformed. “Nothing is ultimate” no longer functions as negation but as affirmation. The loss of purpose becomes freedom when there is no longer a subject standing over against purposelessness. Emptiness (śūnyatā)—as Mahāyāna Buddhism expresses it—is not the absence of form, but the absence of inherent separation. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.

Nishitani’s proposal is therefore not to resist the abyss, but to enter it fully and discover that there was never anything to fall into. Nothingness is not what threatens existence; it is what existence already is. From this standpoint, the question “Are you real?” admits only a paradoxical answer: yes and no. The self is real as appearance, unreal as substance.

This shift cannot be achieved through argument or willpower. It is not something one does, but something that becomes evident through sustained attention. Meditative practices—particularly those developed in Zen—are designed to loosen the habitual grip of subject-object thinking and allow this non-dual insight to disclose itself directly.

Even without dramatic realization, such practices can significantly alter one’s relationship to identity, agency, and meaning. They soften the rigid narratives through which reality is divided into threats, purposes, and failures. In doing so, they offer not a refutation of nihilism, but its quiet dissolution.