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This moderate and restrained estimation of reason is at the heart of Sankara's response to the Samkhyan charge that Brahman as portrayed by Advaita cannot be the cause of the perceptible world. He argues that it is not inconsistent to say that Brahman is the cause of the world, even if Brahman and the world differ in many evident ways; causes and effects frequently differ in important respects, and it would be pointless to speak of cause and effect were the two alike in every respect. The fact that material reality is not conscious and is imperfect does not prove that it has a non-conscious, imperfect cause. In any case, there is at least one important continuity: the world does exist, and every element of it shares at least the fact of existence with Brahman. (UMS I.1.6)
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Here, and throughout the rest of UMS II.1,62 the Advaita strategy is to demonstrate that its viewpoint does not contradict reason on any given issue, but also that reason never achieves a broader systematization according to which everything the upanisads say can be organized reasonably. It is here that the superiority of the upanisads is shown: only to it, in all its textuality and indirection, can one attribute an adequate, practical narration of what the world is really like. |
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UMS II.1 thus helps its readers to mediate the tension between the world which reason constructs on the basis of what it can understand, and the always more complete worldview expounded by scripture. There is never a place from which to examine reason's and scripture's claims impartially; one does not decide eventually, at some point, that scripture is more reasonable than reason. Only after one submits to scripture and is imbued with its way of constructing the world can one think properly about the possible, limited and never entirely systematic contributions of reason exercised without reference to scripture. |
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2. Arguing the Advaita Position: UMS II.2.1-10 |
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a. The Structure of UMS II.2 |
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Before considering our second example, II.2.1-10, let us view the general project of II.2. The agenda of UMS II.1 was to demonstrate that every vexed issue (cause and effect, the agency of the self, the problem of evil) could be analyzed |
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