• Title/Summary/Keyword: Richard Rorty

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Return of Self-identity and Story of the Other which disappeared in Advaita Vedanta (아드와이따 베단따의 자아정체성 귀환과 사라진 타자의 이야기)

  • Park, Hyo-yeop
    • Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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    • v.126
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    • pp.109-132
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    • 2013

  • The most important vocabulary in Advaita $Ved{\bar{a}}nta$, which is anthropology and soteriology on the self, is of course '${\bar{a}}tman$' or 'the self', to which '$an{\bar{a}}tman$' or 'the other' is in opposition. As $Ved{\bar{a}}ntic$ system revolves around the concept ${\bar{a}}tman$, it can be compared favorably with 'final vocabulary' of Richard Rorty. Moreover, $Ved{\bar{a}}ntic$ system can be termed as 'a return of self-identity', in which a process of returning is from a deceived self to the true and original self. After all, story of '$an{\bar{a}}tman$' or 'the other' in $Ved{\bar{a}}nta$ seems to have no significance at all. However, discourse about the other can also lead a something fruitful. There are such doctrines in $Ved{\bar{a}}nta$ that support a procedure of self-realization not according to the Hegelian dialectic but to the transposition and continuous antagonism between the self and the other, as a special meaning of viveka (discrimination) that fixes a boundary between the self and the other, a destruction of falsehood that is more important than establishment of truthfulness, a transposition of the true and the false before and after self-realization. Thus the other is not disappeared but only hidden, even after accomplishing its own methodological role, and the same is with discourse about the other. To revive forgotten vocabulary in $Ved{\bar{a}}nta$ is an attempt to reconstruct devaluated story by means of shifting the pivot of discourse from the self to the other. The essential thing in this attempt may be to revive the conceptions of 'effort' that is intently concealed and of 'self-inquiry' that has lost its true meaning. Out of these, a systematic and continuous self-inquiry, consists in having a scenario on the question 'Who am I?' and utilizing that scenario by experience without interruption. A work of reconstructing the lost narratives in $Ved{\bar{a}}nta$ can be feasible only when the history of self-inquiry is redescribed in the system itself, provided that object of inquiry is not 'a self as the self' but 'a self as the other'.