challenged Advaita on philosophical turf, arguments focused not on the exist-
ence of a creator-God, but on the degree of reality of the world, and on how
the undifferentiated Absolute could give rise to this lower realm. It was in this
context of dispute that the Advaita dialecticians Shri Harsha and Chitsukha
subjected every concept to analysis which dissolved it in the unreality of
contradictions, leaving the non-dualist Absolute as the sole reality. The episte-
mology-metaphysics sequence was propelled to considerable heights as mono-
theism grew in medieval India. The angle of approach is different than in
the Islamic and Christian West, where the reality of the world is the starting
point from which proofs of God are mounted. In India, because the domi-
nant school in the post-Buddhist period is an impersonal transcendent mysti-
cism, proofs of the world become the crucial question. In either case, the
tension for philosophical argument is generated by the strength of anthropo-
morphic monotheism.
Deep Troubles: Free Will and Determinism, Substance and Plurality. A deep
trouble is a doctrine containing a self-propagating difficulty. Alternative paths
open out, each of which contains further puzzles. Exploration of such conun-
drums becomes a chief dynamic on the medium to higher reaches of the
philosophical abstraction-reflexivity sequence. Intellectual life gets its energy
from oppositions. It thrives on deep troubles because these provide guaranteed
topics for debate. Once a deep trouble is discovered, it tends to be recycled
through successive levels of abstraction. The recognition of deep troubles
enables us to reformulate with greater precision a basic principle of intellectual
creativity: oppositions divide the attention space under the law of small num-
bers, not merely along the lines of greatest importance to the participants, but
along the lines of the available deep troubles.^21
Monotheism is fruitful for advance along the abstraction-reflexivity se-
quence because it is a major source of deep troubles. One of the simplest of
these is the issue of free will. The question of free will arises only at a level of
abstraction capable of generating contradictions within a pair of opposing
concepts. On one side there must be the generalized notion of omni-causality,
on the other side an equally abstract and general notion of moral principle.
Anthropomorphic monotheism is virtually defined by the combination of these
two abstractions: God’s unity and power is exalted to the extreme; at the same
time, the apotheosis of human virtues makes God into the essence of right-
eousness and justice. The issue does not arise in polytheism, nor in transcendent
mysticism, nor under an immanent cosmic world principle. That is why the
issue of free will is an important one for Islam and Christianity (and in the
secular philosophy that follows after it), but not in Chinese, Indian, or Greek
philosophy.
A version of the free will deep trouble does arise in the non-monotheist
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^837