What are some problems or counterpoints to Oneness or Non-Dualism

Question

I have a pretty decent understanding of what its proponents think, but I can’t seem to find anything criticizing the view as more places link back to pro-oneness sources. So in to get both sides of the issues what are reasons to reject oneness/non-dualism.

Answer 1

If you're talking about this:

On the other end of the range is the Advaita Vedanta school (advaita = not two) which is well-known in the West but not as dominant in India. It reads the theocosm/Brahman as one/non-dual, and takes God and the cosmos not to be really distinct, i.e., God = the cosmos.

... then a basic critique of existence monism reads:

Existence monism targets concrete objects and counts by individual token. It holds that exactly one concrete object token exists (the One). It represents an interesting and historically important form of monism, albeit one which is widely regarded as deeply implausible. Consider any two concrete individuals, such as you and I. The existence monist must either deny that at least one of us exists, or deny that at least one of us is a concrete object, or hold that we are identical. This is hard to swallow. (It is important to distinguish existence monism from priority monism, which does not have this implausible implication.)

... The existence monist and nihilist can of course just “bite the bullet” by accepting [the horrible linguistic consequences of the blobject] but claiming overriding arguments otherwise. But this is a dialectically difficult situation for her: whatever support the premises of her arguments otherwise might have will almost certainly pale in comparison to the support [the problem of the horrible blobject] provides for existence pluralism. Not for nothing are existence monism and nihilism widely dismissed as crazy views.

Further along, they discuss more of the back-and-forth of the existence-monist/blobjectivist dialectic, with a subtle bit of wit here and there (I recommend it highly; c.f. the question of plurally many empty possible worlds).

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A more obscure reason to question the classical nonduality picture, although perhaps to rehabilitate it in another direction nevertheless, concerns the cofinality relation in the mathematical theory of ordering generally. Some numbers are cofinal with themselves, whereas other numbers are cofinal with some always-smaller number. Inside the world of normal arithmetic, all cofinality relations are relatively trivial: cf(0) = 0, cf(1) = 1, and cf(n) = 1 for all n > 0. However, the regular/singular distinction quickly blossoms into a jungle of greater possibilities among the transfinite numbers and is a key identifying feature in the characterization of weakly inaccessible cardinals (which have a peculiar feature such that, if a ZFC world is equipped with weakly inaccessibles, it is possible to force a world where the Continuum is inflated to the size of some weakly inaccessible cardinal).

Provably in (relatively) normal such mathematics, aleph-zero is also self-cofinal, while having the defining property of strongly inaccessible cardinals too (otherwise, 0 has the same property, but 1 doesn't), namely it's not the powerset of any small number. In the odd event that one forgets about the replacement axioms, one can tailor the world to be cofinal with aleph-zero, which usually seems absurd, because "intuitively" the absolute infinity of the universe (of sets) should be self-cofinal, too. (This desire to preserve the autofinality of the set world as a whole is sometimes invoked to deflect proposals of much higher functions than replacement gives us by itself, on the ground that equipping those functions with replacement would make them too powerful and volatile to mesh correctly with the rest of their encompassing theory.)

So, then, it is unknowable in ZFC what the answer is to the question, "How many weakly inaccessible (self-cofinal) limit numbers are there?" except we can say, "At least 3: 0, 1, and aleph-zero," or maybe, "At least 4: 0, 1, aleph-zero, and the number of the whole set world V."

Now, the internal meaning of cofinality is a sort of esoteric parthood relation: the "number of parts" in the 0-ordering is 0, the number of parts in the unit-ordering is 1, and then all further finite numbers can be reduced to succession {n, n+1...}, so the parts of their order are again 1 in number. But then the initial level of infinity also represents an order that cannot be broken into a smaller number of parts than it already represents, whereas there is a barely-larger cardinal aleph-omega that can be broken into omega-many parts (and |omega| = aleph-zero). So the existence monist is styled as claiming that the parts of the One are not real, or are not objects apart from the horrible blobject, or whatever along that line, and 1 as a pure number has this special property of unbreakability; but once we pass to a sufficiently infinite domain of objects, we find purchase for the idea that the plurality of the world has a concrete existence (and so is not merely an amalgam of linguistic wishes we make, that we might make sense of our finite knowledge of the infinite world, but plurality is given, though far beyond the naivete of mere duality).

Answer 2

The Problem of Discussing and Debating Non-dualism or Oneness

Zen master:

Words cannot describe everything.

Words evoke distinctions which give rise to duality such as the distinction between dualism and non-dualism, monism and dualism, the name of God and the nameless God, ad infinitum. There are no words to describe the source beyond distinctions wherein distinctions arise.

Answer 3

Ramanuja (an exponent of "Vishishtadvaita" or "qualified non-dualism") had a number of critiques of Advaita, but one in particular stands out to me. I'm paraphrasing the gist of his argument here; I don't have an exact source.

Advaita says that all diverse individuals are unreal, while the only reality is nirguna Brahman (Brahman without attributes). Ramanuja asks, whence does this seeming but unreal diversity of individuals arise? The Advaita answer is that the appearance of diversity arises from nescience/ignorance. Ramanuja then asks, of what subject is this ignorance predicated? It cannot be predicated of individuals because individuals are unreal. Nor can it be predicated of Brahman, because Brahman is Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss). As pure Consciousness, nirguna Brahman cannot be ignorant.

I would add my own observation that Advaita (and other similar "non-dualist" systems such as Buddhist Madhyamaka and Yogacara) commits the homunculus fallacy--that is, the fallacy of explaining a phenomenon in terms of the same phenomenon. Or the fallacy of explaining a class defined by certain properties in terms of a member of the same class. It's a fallacy because it fails to explain what it purports to explain.

What Advaita has to explain is, if the diversity of individuals is unreal, then why do there appear to be many individuals? And it answers that diverse individuals appear to exist because of ignorance. The problem is that ignorance is one of the diverse appearances that Advaita needs to explain. So the explanation fails.

Note that the same critique can apply to forms of Mahayana Buddhism. I.e. If all relative dharmas are empty/illusory, why do they appear? A: Ignorance. But ignorance is a relative dharma. So this is the homunculus fallacy.

If you want to know more about Indian philosophical critiques of Advaita, Ramanuja is a great place to start.