In Buddhist thought, the inclusion of its own negation is a dialectic relationship,
negation being understood as a basic category, rather than the absence of a
category. An object is recognized as what it is by a process of excluding
everything that is not that object. In this conceptualization of the individual,
change is inherent, which also has implications for universals. Some Buddhist
thinkers reject universals altogether, and for those who do acknowledge
universals, they do not exist as immutable Platonic ideal forms, but only in the
mind.
Tādātmya is a non-essentialist concept of identity that rests on the faculty of
distinguishing ‘from the other’. It has been called ‘identity in difference’ and is
in this sense suggestive of conceptualizations of ‘identity’ nowadays current in
the social sciences. According to the most basic Buddhist principles of
reasoning, identity is a construct rather than a state of affairs; it is in the mind,
not in the world; for in the ever-changing reality perfect sameness is impossible.
The individual is not understood as an isolated entity, but as an interrelated part
of the impermanent universe. Nevertheless, there is also permanence, for the
universe follows two eternal principles: spirit and substance. The former is
stable, the latter fluid. Logic is a matter of spirit conforming to the basic
principles of thought, negation, and contradiction, which do not change.
These two principles are understood in like manner in East and West; yet they
are applied in the logic of identity differently. This is important to keep in mind,
as scholars dealing with identity in other disciplines invariably insist that their
thinking obeys the laws of logic.
Conclusions
Leibniz’s law of the identity of indiscernibles conforms to the laws of logic. It
defines identity as strict self-sameness, which is consistent, but raises the
difficult problem of what counts as the same. By framing identity as a semantic
problem and introducing a distinction between the meaning of an expression
(sense) and what it stands for (reference), Frege provided a partial solution to it,
but vagueness continues to pose a major difficulty for the logic of identity. Non-
Western logics that differ from the Aristotelian tradition offer an alternative in
that they view every concept as including its own negation as a property, rather
than the absence of properties.