It turns out that epistemology is neglected somewhat in our tradition because of the emphasis on ontology. Part of the problem is that the characteristics of Knowledge, for instance its perdurance, have been attributed to Being. While Being is unique to Indo-European languages and is an obsession for us, it is unfortunately not universal and therefore is probably an illusion, but knowledge is universal and is not an illusion. So it is unfortunate that in our tradition epistemology is neglected compared to ontology, since ontology is probably not what it appears to us, and is perhaps just a linguistic quirk.

That said, the principle recent book on Epistemology is Foucault’s Order of Things. The translation of the Archeology of Knowledge is flawed, so I would not recommend it. There are two words for knowledge that are used by Foucault, and the whole purpose of the book was to distinguish them, but the translator did not get it, so in fact the translation misses the whole point of the book. This is not my comment but that of Herbert Dreyfus the expert on Foucault in English. I always wondered why that book made no sense, in English.

But a book that makes a lot of sense is the Order of Things. Dreyfus says that Foucault basically took Being and Time and substituted Knowledge for Being. So, according to Dreyfus, even though Foucault does not overtly talk about Heidegger, Heidegger is always in the background of what ever Foucault writes about Knowledge. And in a way Foucault is the one who gave Knowledge its due, in modern Continental Philosophy.

In the Order of Things Foucault extends the idea of the epochs of Being to knowledge and identifies Epistemes, which are eras in which the fundamental categories of knowledge change over time. These Epistemes are between the Paradigms of Kuhn and the Epochs of Being of Heidegger. And thus we are starting to see that there are levels of Emergence, where Emergent events inaugurate new eras within some realm, such as theorizing, or categorizing, or intelligibility.

We can extend these levels at which emergent change occurs into the following series:

Givens
Facticities
Theories
Paradigms
Epistemes
Ontoi — Beings
Existences
Absolutes

Emergent Events can happen at any of these levels, and the broader the scope of the Emergent Event the deeper it reaches into the substrata of the worldview. Emergent events are unpredictable discontinuous changes in the constitution of any of these levels of emergent phenomena in our tradition.

We are most interested in those discontinuous changes that occur in Science like the arising of Quantum Mechanics or the advent of Relativity Theory. These were profound paradigmatic changes.

An example of an Epistemic change is Robert Rosen’s work in Life Itself where he points out that entailment structures are more interesting and complex than normally realized so that Biology can be explained and reasoned about with these richer entailment structures.

Another example of epistemic change is the ideas of Rescher in Cognitive Systematization in which he says that we must continually revisit our axioms in a kind of epidemic hermeneutic circle in order to ground our sciences. But whether these insights actually cause fundamental change in the way we view these various emergent levels of comprehension is something that has to work itself out in the tradition.

So for instance the failure of the Hilbert Program with the advent of Godel’s Undecidablity Proof had a profound affect on our tradition shaking our confidence in ever finding foundations for knowledge and producing the anti-foundationalism we see in postmodern thought. Many have given up the search for foundations completely and critique all moves that look anything like attempts to establish foundations for knowledge.

In a sense Philosophy of Science has, despite its advances, run aground, as has Analytical Philosophy, the avowed handmaiden of Science. And this produces a paradox of some import because the level of the Episteme is where there is the highest degree of perdurance, yet all indications are that this perdurance has not actual foundation and therefore the the perdurance of knowledge is itself just as illusory at that of Being even though it seems otherwise.

In other words the persistence of knowledge may really be a cognitive illusion. And this of course has implications for all disciplines, because our entire educational system is based on the idea that knowledge can be taught and that once taught it persists and shapes our world when we act on knowledge.

When we consider language, the medium for the expression of knowledge, as McWhorter does and see that every aspect of it is fleeting and changeable over time, then we begin to wonder about the nature of knowledge as it is related to the Ratio (the representable and non-representable intelligibles) in relation to the Doxa of Plato’s Divided Line itself and its fleetingness and changeability as well.

We seem to know things through Science and we apply those things we know and they change our lives in fundamental ways as our understanding progressively matures. But on the other hand it is clear that the more we know the more there is that is mysterious and that we definitely don’t know. And so, even as we are gathering more knowledge, existence itself becomes more mysterious not less mysterious. And so this lack of foundations to knowledge is actually more serious a problem than the groundlessness of Being, because it is easy to recognize that Being was a unique Indo-European construct anyway and never was universal, and thus its perdurance was always ultimately illusory.

Foucault in his various Genealogies of disciplines shows how what was taken for knowledge in those disciplines have changed radically over time. Disciplines have obscure and strange beginnings, and when what now seems perfectly obvious as solid knowledge could in the future look just as quirky as what appeared as knowledge in the origins of disciplines. As emergent events occur in disciplines that go deeper to effect the epistemes, ontoses, existences, and absolutes then things that we take for granted as solid today could  be discovered to be radically different that we presuppose today.

In fact, Science itself is probably at risk. In other words, Science can in many ways be seen as an overreaction against religion and tyranny of Doxa which is ungrounded, i.e. superstition. Via the Enlightenment, Reason freed itself from the superstitions of religion, or so it thought, but that brought with it its own problems.

Hegel saw the enlightenment symbolized by Kant’s grounding of Newtonian Physics as culminating in the Terror of the French Revolution in which Reason ungrounded and ultimately nihilistic ran amok. He tried to solve this problem by an appeal to something beyond Reason, i.e. Absolute Spirit. Science operates in the realm opened up by Kant’s critical philosophy and has not really yet come to terms with Hegel’s attempts to solve the problems in Kantianism. This is despite the best efforts of Peirce to reconcile the two approaches, i.e. take the insights of Hegel back into Kantianism.

And some progress has been made for instance by B. Fuller and his discovery of Synergy and Integrity as principles that go beyond the First (monads, isolata) , Second (relata) and Third (continua, mediation) principles of Peirce. But generally because of the Ideological struggles of the Twentieth Century in which Hegel was placed off limits by the guilt by association with Marxism the needed work has been too long deferred.

Zizek is attempting to rehabilitate Hegel in his new book, Less than Nothing, showing that the misinterpretation of Hegel by Marx had disastrous consequences and fundamentally led us astray into unnecessary ideological battles so that we missed the essential point and did not develop past Kant in our grounding of

Science even though science itself continued to develop giving us the incredible paradox of the Antinomies of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity theory that are completely absurd when brought together at the Planck scale. If Science is to survive as an endeavor it must transform out of its role as the mere  dual of Religion, and it must also get beyond the Kantian foundations that worked well for Newtonian science but no longer help us to understand contemporary science. Science has just basically outrun all attempts to ground it and produced what Husserl calls the Krisis in the Lifeworld.

Heidegger, in Being and Time, proposed a solution to this problem but that solution was not adopted in Philosophy of Science which has pretty much realized that it is in fact a failed project, and so even if Philosophy tries to be just a handmaiden of science that really does not work very well either.

Some bold thinking is called for, but does not seem to be forthcoming as yet. We cannot use Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory as our models for our view of the foundations of science but must look for something deeper in the nomos that can explain why we see these paradoxical views of nature like Kant did adopting the Calculus as the basis for his Philosophy of Newtonian Science.

Badiou made the move of proposing Set Theory as the basis of Ontology. But this ignores all the other candidates for the foundation of Mathematics like Category Theory or Merotopology, etc. A particular foundation for mathematics cannot be the basis, but rather there must be something more basic from which all the foundations for mathematics arise.

My own answer for this is the Pleroma, i.e. the field out of which the worldview arises and which is the basis for all the various possible foundations for mathematics.

But what ever the answer is to this problem of the foundation of knowledge that ground science, some answer must be proposed eventually, and that answer needs to take into account and surpass the attempts of Hegel to solve the problem with Kantianism. So, in a sense, we can say that the really good book we need on Epistemology is still missing, but the best we have in the mean time is The Order of Things by Foucault which demonstrates the problem, i.e. the categories change over time emergently.

Philosophy: How can one interpret the variation in the nature of matter (as is evident from experimental evidence of different elements and that follows from theory of atomic nature) IN TERMS OF A PRIORI STRUCTURES OF MIND/INTUITION (As Kant puts them)?

Kant’s philosophy is about the limits of experience and especially reason, and does not explain per se the variation of experiences themselves. This is covered by the category of Quality, which gives us ways of understanding qualitative differences. But as far as I know where the qualitative differences come from is not discussed. It is just assumed that if the variety production did not occur then there would be no experience as such.

Classically Kant’s Critical philosophy goes beyond the duality of empiricism and rationalism of the philosophies to which he was referring that was the context of his work. He believed that Reason produced phantasms on its own without the input of experience. So he believed there was limits to the usefulness of Reason, but still thought that if Reason was used properly, eg. for science, then there was great benefit in it. He was looking for an alternative to either induction (empiricism) and deduction (rationality). It was not till much later that Peirce produced abduction as the third alternative that allowed one to formulate hypothesis in science that would allow the connection between theory and experimentation through the projection of hypotheses. Without that idea, Kant basically held that we were presented with singular a priori syntheses that bridged the gap between a priori deduction and a posteriori induction. These a prior syntheses were the projection of spacetime and the categories. It was these projections that allowed us to locate things in spacetime in our experience and to identify objects causally related in experience and to make out of that an objective story. Basically it was recognizing the limits of the possibility of experience that allowed one to assume a stance toward transcendental realism. His position was that only though transcendental idealism could view of transcendental realism be achieved. Basically we have been operating in science within the boundaries that Kant set ever since.

Kant was a rationalist that recognized the limits of what reason could accomplish on its own. And specified that only reason operating on the basis of experience could be trusted to tell us something important about the world in which we live, i.e. something scientific.

Strictly speaking most of the texts cited so far say how something in the world works, or how the world works within some domain, but if we want to see how the world itself operates, i.e. what makes a world and how we dwell in a world then the works of Heidegger are the best source. And in fact that is why he has had such far-reaching influence in modern philosophy, because he is focused on this one question: How does the world work? and that includes how do we enter into that world as it is operating, and what role to we play in the operation of the world. So I suggest Heidegger if you want some inkling of how the world operates including our operation within it. Being and Time is a good place to start for that.

From the point of view of Jung self-knowledge is the process of individuation whereby the ego comes to know the whole self, as a whole, including the Shadow, and the manifest unconscious via the archetypes which when known appears as a mandala. This is Apollonian. Its opposite is the Dionysian loss of the self advocated by Nietzsche. Apollo was a wolf god of initiation. Dionysus was instead the only god to know death, to transition through death, like Osiris/Horus or like the avatar Christ. We might say that Dionysus brings knowledge of the Other by throwing off all constraints and going beyond all bounds while Apollo brings knowledge of the Self via initiation by taking on constraints and respecting the liminal, the thresholds. Apollo is like Brahma and Dionysus is like Shiva, and so there is another way which is nondual between them which is the way of Vishnu brought by his Avatars, such as Krishna. Krishna advises each of the Pandavas to do something against the Dharma, something evil because each of the Pandvas are too good, too perfect. Each must encounter their shadows, the evil side of their goodness. Self-knowledge concerns all the things about yourself that you do not want to confront, that you hide from yourself and others and that you deny. No one actually wants self-knowledge in the Jungian sense. And when it is pursued too far it leads to tragedy as in Oedipus. As the bird said in Four Quartets of Eliot human beings cannot stand too much reality.
In my opinion Self-Knowledge has to do with the confrontation with the nonduals of the Western Worldview within yourself and these are Order, Right, Good, Fate, Sources and Root. And normally that comes out in rare situations in a meaningful word. So there is the orderly words which we say everyday which stay within the bounds of decorum but which have little meaning, except when now and again some word seeks to put things right. Rta in Sanskrit means cosmic harmony, so the right word is the one which expresses harmony at the right time in the right context. In that context we know our selves as wrong, or on the sinister side and we put that right in ourselves. But at a deeper level there is the good word which we say to the other in need, and when we give of the abundance which is ours to give. And in that we find ourselves to be bad, or even evil and we set ourselves on a good track turning away from our harmful ways either to self or other. And yet at a deeper level there is the fateful word, spoken at some rare moment when someone’s fate hangs in the balance, even perhaps our own, which is neither free nor determined but in which we dree our wyrd. Or on yet a deeper level there is the source word, the origin of the word, where the always already lost origin bubbles up from the sources of things to light our way, and where we return to those sources, and we know our own source. And finally there is the root word, that gives rise to all the other words, more likely than not some name for God we utter in despair and then we receive grace, enlightenment, or guidance in that moment when we feel the most loss and we taste redemption. Self knowledge means to take the homeward way and to know the nondual kernel of the worldview directly within ones own self. Because ultimately the self is a face of the worldview. There is nothing in it of itself, merely an emptiness in a void that none the less manifests a fullness of life, of awareness, of social belonging together where we face our fate as a community together. No sharing of Fate no community. No giving and receiving gifts of what is good for each no community. No justice and the establishment of rights then no community. No order that is mutually recognized then no community. No community of mutual recognition then no self.

No self-knowledge except via the knowledge of the other.

No other knowledge except though ourselves.

No self/other knowledge then certainly no wisdom.

No wisdom then only desolation.

I have been interested for a long time in the work of Yuri Gurevich who is at Microsoft Research and who was the inventor of the Gurevich Abstract State Machine specification method and the ASL language.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gurevich/
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_State_Machine_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_state_machines
http://books.google.com/books?id=Am43BAC06L8C

http://books.google.com/books?id=HqIRT51n74YC

Gurevich is a Mathematician who proved that a higher order and abstract language could be Turing equivalent so that we did not have to reduce to a Turing machine representation to know that something was Turing computable, and that made it possible to have a very specification language at any given level of abstraction that was assured to be computable. The method is very simple and basically can be described in one sentence which is “Define it with rules.” So a given set of rules that are well-formed at a given level of abstraction can be equivalent to a Turing machine representation of the same algorithm or transformational system. Others such as E. Borger have gone on to turn this into a robust specification method which can describe more types of systems than many other more formal methods while at the same time being easy to use for engineers who seek more formalism in the specification of systems.

To my mind Systems Thinking is becoming more and more prevalent and its importance is in fact waning as it becomes ubiquitous. Let us get some perspective on this question to see why this might be the case.

A System is a schema, i.e. a way of understanding things that can be projected on many phenomena. In the Western Worldview there was from the beginning until the last century one schema that ruled all phenomena which was the Form. But at the beginning of the last century two other schemas started to become important which was the System Schema on the one hand and the Pattern Schema on the other. The pattern schema led to a movement called Structuralism. In the last century Structuralism and Systematism both struggled to replace Formalism as the fundamental way of looking at things. Structuralism showed itself invaluable over and over again as the best way to understand phenomena, for instance in the periodic table. In Science structuralism prevailed in disciplines and Systems remained an interdisciplinary topic. However, as an interdisciplinary topic structuralism more or less faded away with the advent of post-structuralism. There are however thinkers who combine the different schemas together into a single framework. Anthony Wilden was one of those thinkers who wrote a book called System and Structure. George Klir developed a systems theory that had structural underpinnings called the Architecture of Systems Problem Solving. This was the precursor to what is now called Complex Adaptive Systems Theory such as that which John Holland laid out in The Hidden Order and the companion book called Emergence. And it is interesting that Complex Systems theory has left behind the General Systems Theory frameworks that were its precursors. Now the problem is not so much seeing things in terms of systems, but instead realizing that each schema has its own usefulness and to give each one its proper due and place within the scientific enterprise. So for instance Forms are associated with proofs as in Geometry, but Systems are related to descriptions, and structures are related to explanations. And what we really need are all of these approaches to understanding in their proper balance.

One of the things I talk about a lot is the relation of the System to its inverse dual, i.e. the OpenScape or what I also call the Meta-system where “meta” means what is beyond the system, i.e. the context, environment, ecosystem, media, etc. Our culture has a hard time recognizing and giving its due to the schema of the meta-system. The meta-system is the realm of indirect indication which also has its place in the ways of understanding phenomena. But we do not realize that the system and meta-system are inverse duals of each other and we tend to be blind to the role of meta-systems and their peculiar organization. So to my mind the next frontier after the system becomes an ubiquitous approach to things, is to be reminded of the role of structure and form, but also to recognize the necessity of considering the meta-systems and their importance. So it is not so much that Systems are important in and of themselves, but more that each schema is important in its own right and to its own degree with respect to explaining different phenomena in specific sciences. All schemas can be applied to any given ontic emergent level of organization found in nature, but different schemas are more appropriate to certain phenomena and others to other phenomena enhancing the various phenomena’s understandability differentially. So my response is that Schemas are important, and different schemas are more important for particular phenomena but all are useful in their own places for different purposes.

It is better if we can combine the schemas and make use of their different strengths in frameworks of Formal Structural Systems for instance that also recognizes the unique organization of the environment as different from that of the System or its structural patterning. In a way Complex Systems has forgotten these advances made by General Systems Theory and needs to relearn that perspective. What is important is to realize that there is not just emergence but also de-emergence is also an important phenomena, and that while systems as gestalts are emergent so to meta-systems are de-emergent, and it is the addition or subtraction of the Gödel Statements that makes something a system as emergent or a meta-system to be de-emergent. And there is an oscillation between emergence and de-emergence in phenomena, not everything is emergent. And what we need to understand is how things oscillate between emergence and de-emergence and how that occurs on the basis of the inverse duality of the system and the meta-system as two different organizational templates for intelligibility of phenomena.

It is fascinating that in our tradition General Schemas Theory, as a theory of all possible schemas was not developed sooner. We need to concentrate on building a good theory of the relations between all possible schemas that play a role in understanding phenomena in Science. The S-prime hypothesis that I developed to kick off General Schemas theory is a beginning. It posits that there are ten schemas and that schemes and dimensions are related to each other. Once we have a theory of Schemas then we can realize the importance of each schema and give each its due. This also allows the System Schema to retain its own value and meaning, because if everything is a system, then system ceases to mean anything and thus loses its intrinsic importance to us as a mode of understanding different from other modes of understanding.

Systems actually derive their importance from their difference from the other schemas that are possible ways of understanding phenomena each with its own contribution to our understanding of things within a scientific framework. The value and importance of the System Schema is not intrinsic to that schema in isolation from the others, but only in as much as we recognize the others and their various values supporting our varied ways of understanding phenomena. The deeper our explanations go the more schemas are involved with respect to any given phenomena, and it is the schemas working together that have the most value for human understanding of natural phenomena.

Bernstein in his taped lectures (bernsteintapes.com) said Nietzsche was just a good Hegelian. If that is the case then we would expect him to reverse Kant just like he did everyone else (A ruse practiced by Zizek today). One quote that stikes to my mind is an object is just a subject turned inside out. Zizek makes fun of Kantianism in Thus Spake Zaratustra when he talks about climbing the mountain until he climbed so high he had to climb on top of his own head to keep going to reach the headland above the world. Nietzsche did not believe in any transcendentals and worked hard to try to get rid of them and the result of this struggle was Will to Power and Eternal Return. By our will to power we create meaning in the world ourselves without the aid of transcendentals which are all illusions. Eternal Return is an ethical standard that does not appeal to any a prioris. So Nietzsche, affirms Kantianism by reversing it, just like he does everything else like when he substitutes joy for the pessimism of Schopenhauer, or when he tries to create a morality for the Masters when Hegel says that only slaves scan achieve self-consciousness. A philosophy of reversal only reinforces what is reversed. So although Zizek sounds radical he like Nietzsche is not really radical.

http://www.ohadmaiman.com/displayessay.asp?PageNumber=19
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24034-nietzsche-s-critiques-the-kantian-foundations-of-his-thought/
https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/modlang/general/weekly_roundup/TT%202011/20%20May%202011/Tom%20Bailey%20-%20Nietzsche%20the%20Kantian.pdf
http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/61/The_Kantianism_of_Hegel_and_Nietzsche_by_Robert_Zimmerman
http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/philosophy/downloads/a2/unit4/nietzsche/NietzscheCritique.pdf

See also http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/quora-answer-what-did-nietzsche-think-of-kants-metaphysics/

The Absurd in my opinion is an intensification of contradiction into paradox and paradox into the Absurd and is an image of the limit of Doxa in Plato’s divided line. We can just keep intensifying the limits of doxa so that opinion becomes senseless by violating logic, and then violating itself by redoubling the gesture of rendering doxa meaningless by producing paradoxes which then are redoubled again into Absurdity.

Kierkegaard was the first to give this term philosophical meaning when he said that Religion was essentially absurd and therefore against Hegel could not be reduced to Reason. This cause was taken up by Sartre and Camus who said that existence was essentially meaningless unless we manufactured the meaning of it ourselves. But the false attempts of society to project meaning on existence produced absurdities of the type that abound in the novel Catch 22. Absurdity exposure became a prime motif in the theater and the best of these plays are those of Becket who has two bums waiting for the Big Other as Lacan via Zizek would say, i.e. Godot. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot] Their situation is fundamentally absurd, endless waiting for nothing trapped in eternal return of Pozo and Lucky the master/slave dialectic being replayed over and over again. The only break is the appearance of the boy who promises that Godot will come tomorrow. Such is the innocence of youth. Lots of other lesser lights like Ionesco produced different sorts of absurdist drama. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Absurd

This is also an interesting question because the answer on the face of it is that with nonduality there is no “out there” as opposed to “in here” because that is a duality, and nonduality attempts to get at what is there prior to the dualistic split, i.e. suchness. But the part of the question that asks about it “existing separate from the world” brings into play what Heidegger calls Dasein, i.e. the kind of existing thing whose ecstasy projects the world within which it finds itself (Discoveredness, Befindlichkeit, i.e. we discover ourselves already within the world that it turns out we project a priori, the projection of that illusion we call Being, which is really a doubled illusion that acts as a reflective mirror, rather than merely what is found, i.e. this and that. Being in our tradition supports the essence of the things “whatness” with a substrate or substance through which things can be the same, though difference, i.e. Tropes operate through it like Metaphor, Metonymy, etc. For Heidegger the world exists though our ecstasy by which we project it temporally as a space in which we can dwell, and BE. And in that space we can experience the process of Becoming. But if we did not have the Parmedian idea of Being as Stasis, (Pure Being) then we could not experience the flow of Heraclitian fire, i.e. change changing everything always. In this it is really only Knowledge that is perdurant but in the Indo-European tradition we project perdurence on things which may also be done by others but not in the unique, strange and onefold way that Indo-Europeans do. Now if we ask what is the distinction between Static Pure Being and Dynamic Process Becoming, since Being is the highest concept, these either have to be mutually exclusive, i.e. something we are dogmatic about, or as Heidegger suggests they may be equi-primordial, in which case Being has kinds, and as such because it is the highest concept, then there must be a third kind of Being (as Plato called it in the Timaeus) which gives this distinction itself a kind of Being. Merleau-Ponty calls that Hyper Being (Derrida calls it Differance [differing, deferring]; Heidegger calls it Being crossed out). And Merleau-Ponty points out that it has an opposite which he calls Wild (Savage) Being using a term from structuralism already overloaded by Levi-Strauss. If we realize that the kinds of Being are meta-levels in the Theory of Higher Logical Types then that is half the battle because then we realize that the difference between the kinds of Being is the greatest that can exist in the world. In essence when we see the four kinds of Being together (not taking into account the singularity of Ultra Being) then we have a vision of a face of the World which we normally only see clearly in an emergent event, where the baseline of Nihilism is reset. Now all that is entailed, in my view, by the projection of the World in which it finds itself by Dasein.

As we explored earlier All this is implicit in the relation between Parmenides Ways and Heraclitian Fire, which Plato calls the Greater and Lesser initiations. The third kind of Being (Hyper Being) is the difference that makes a difference (Bateson) between these two kinds of Being. As such it is a slippery and mercurial kind of Being always introducing differing and deferring of DifferAnce into the play of the world (John S. Hans). But none of these standings through Being are Existence proper in the sense of nondual emptiness (Buddhist) or void (Taoist). At the fifth Meta-level of Being there is both Ultra Being as singularity and emptiness/Void (Striated/Unstriated). It took me a long time to figure out how Ultra Being could exist, but basically if ou have two different types of interpretations of existence then Ultra Being is the difference that makes a difference between them. This is so interesting because it points the way toward the role that Being plays. We see it externally as a singularity in existence but inside it is differentiated into meta-levels fo maximal emergent difference. It is the singular distinction between two different interpretations of nonduality. Duality unfolds from this singular distinction between interpretations of nondual existence. If we remember that illusion exists in existence as well, and that Being is really just a doubling which makes illusion reflexive, then we realize that existence itself is the difference between these two layers of illusion. So from the point of view of Being, it is a distinction between interpretations of Existence, while Existence is really a distinction between two layers of illusion, i.e. illusion folded back on itself, i.e. illusory Illusion. In this way we can see that Existence and Being are completely intertwined each distinguishing the other.

When you realize that there is this deep intertwining of Being and Existence, i.e. neither can really be completely what they are without the other, then you actually see that the doubling of illusion into Maya is actually progress in our understanding because Existence becomes the difference between the veils of illusion. And likewise without Ultra Being as a singularity you cannot distinguish between different sorts of nondual interpretations of Existence. And it is this kind of deeper realization that I think Tantra of the Tibetans comes out of, which on the face of it looks like a falling back into the illusion of Being, but instead leads to the formulation of DzogChen by Manjushrimitra where he applies the logic of Nagarjuna to Buddhism itself and sees the two truths as nihilistic extremes. Buddhism itself was a heresy within the Hindu strain of the Indo-European worldview that revolted against the idea of Being, and instead saw existence as the flux of aggregates. But once you get into existence, then you realize that in order to get to deeper levels of understanding of existence you have to bring back Being, because otherwise you cannot put Buddhist Emptiness in the same poem as Taoist void as Stonehouse does, i.e. you cannot actually get the best our of both Buddhism and Taoism (Bon) which are actually different but you cannot tell that difference without bringing another kind of existence which is Maya, Dukah, Dunya as seen from the outside as a singularity.

So we see that there are two views of Being, i.e. from the point of view of existence (from the outside) and from the point of view of Being itself, i.e. from the inside. In the one case we see a singularity, in the other case we see the fragmentation of the kinds of Being. So there is an inside and outside with respect to Being, but not Existence. Existence is Unary. And Existence can be interpreted as Nondual, eiher as emptiness or void. To make that distinction we need the singularity of Ultra Being as the difference that makes a difference between different interpretations of the nondual state of existence. So if we take the world to be a schema projected by Being then there is some sense in which existence is out there beyond the world. But that leaves us to quibble over the word separate. The non-dual lacks the following characteristics: Separate, Fused, Separate And Fused, Neither Separate nor Fused. It is something else beyond these four logical states. It is Not One! Not Two! So the fact that there are two interpretations for Existence without illusion as nondual is itself a problem, because that calls for a third the singularity of external Being, i.e. Ultra Being. What this indicates is that there is actually multiple levels of non-duality and that Emptiness/Void as Striated and Unstriated terms in the Pleroma, are not the ultimate type of Nonduality but there are deeper froms of nonduality. I call these deeper forms of Nonduality: Manifestation, using a term from Henry’s Essence of Manifestation which he attributes to Meister Eckhart.

We know now from Heidegger that there are striated and unstriated Being/Beyng in the Pleroma as well as their opposites Forgetfuness/Oblivion. To the extent that nonduality is reflected in the Pleroma then it appears also as Striated and Unstriated as Emptiness/Void. So that means that there is a standing beyond the Pleroma where nonduality is not made dual, i.e. which we are calling manifestation. Now the Pleroma is the field out of which the Worldview arises, and clearly the Pleroma arises from this deeper nonduality of Manifestation. So there is a sense in which Non-duality is “out there” beyond the world, if we take it as being always already prior to the arising of the pleroma and world. But as for being either fused or separate we must apply the tetralemma to that even at the level of Emptiness and Void the two canonical interpretations of Existence.

So from one perspective the answer to your question is true, instead of false, with some caveats, like separate/fused has no meaning either at the fifth standing (Existence) or beyond that at the sixth standing (Manifestation). In some sense these distinctions are only apparent, they are standings we take toward what we find (existence), or if we enter into reflexive illusion (being), or if we see nonduality without differentiating interpretations of illusionless existence (manifestation). “Standings toward . . .” are our own embodied standing.

I hope this is sufficiently bewildering . . .