Philosophies of being in India I: Pluralism, nihilism, and monism

Abstract

AbstractIs Being a mere sum of separate things variously re‐combined over time? Or is it not there at all, arising from nothing more than the projection of a fevered metaphysical imagination? Or might it be the intrawoven phenomenon of all we experience, grounded in a single underlying all‐determining nature? This is the first of a pair of articles on the ontological issues that prompted a philosophical fork between pluralism, nihilism, and monism in India. The present article will focus on Indian critiques of metaphysical pluralism based on the apparent incoherence of ultimately individuating reality's building blocks. The second article will focus on debates about grounding of the causal powers that shape the world and fix it modally. I trace critiques of pluralism (the view found in Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma that Being is composed of plural fundamental ‘bits’) through to the competing conclusions of the Madhyamaka ‘emptiness’ view, and Vedānta's idea that there is a single ground of all Being. For the nihilists, commonsense realism about Being must be repudiated in such a way as to destroy the notion of Being itself. For the monists, the philosophical problems with a pluralistic ontology show that Being is a complex yet holistic medium, and the ground of a cosmos‐defining modal inheritance. Thus in each article I tell the story of how debates about individuation, relation, causation, recombination and modal inheritance blossomed into some of history's most radical philosophies of Being—and in each I set out some prospects for the monistic view's core ontological claims that Being is, and is one.