When comparing two different topos of culture – Western and Eastern (Indian) – regarding the understanding of the essence of consciousness, it was found that consciousness is the key constant for understanding any culture. The analysis of the two most prominent Western thinkers of the 20th century (M.Heidegger and A.Badiou) showed that all European culture from its origins (in ancient Greece) to the present day, in fact, forms superficial thinking, which we call reason. That is, in European culture, an endless process of “playing beads”, sorting (renaming) words and concepts is carried out in order to choose a formula for understanding a particular concept of culture, science or philosophy. From the analysis of the texts of the German thinker, one can see that European thinking has become confused in the search for the beginning and basis of thinking. From the study of the texts of the French thinker, one can conclude that even with A.Badiou, we are still on the surface of consciousness. And all these processes of searching for or naming the truth do not make it possible to understand the deep processes of consciousness. A.Badiou and M. Heidegger, following Plato and Aristotle, stopped at the approaches to understanding the true deep essence of consciousness (but if Plato and Aristotle closed access to the deep processes of understanding consciousness, which were still visible in the pre-Socratics, then A. Badiou and M. Heidegger, rather, are painfully trying to find the lost path of the Greeks to consciousness). Analyzing the concept of Sri Aurobindo, we can conclude that man is the being who is guided by the soul and, according to its manifestation, can descend to the lowest level of consciousness (in the material dimension) and, conversely, rise to the highest divine level of consciousness (in the divine dimension of the existence of the soul). In other words, the same idea runs through most ancient Indian texts that consciousness can be located at different levels of a person’s ascent to the divine essence. Thus, we see the main difference between modern ideas about the essence of consciousness in ancient ancient and Indian texts. The hierarchy of consciousness in Indian texts is built mainly vertically (more precisely, in the ontological plane – from divine nature to material). Moreover, in some ancient systems, for example, Jainism, Sankhya, Bhagavadgita (more precisely Bharata), some variations of Vedanta, one can find a direct ontological interpretation of the connection between consciousness and soul (including the divine). A similar hierarchy of consciousness in ancient thinkers is built, rather, horizontally (in the epistemological plane), which is the result of the hierarchical construction of sciences, namely, logos (logic), physics, metaphysics, etc. Although, according to M.Heidegger, in the Pre-Socratics (primarily, Heraclitus and Parmenides) elements of deep ontological thinking were still visible, which were subsequently lost (as M. Heidegger says, forgotten). The meaningful contours of European philosophy begin with the search by ancient sages for the essence of being, nature, truth, idea, good, but not the origins of thinking. The countdown of Indian philosophy (based on the earliest texts) is viewed from the search for a hierarchy of worlds of thinking, starting with the divine. This is the fundamental difference between European and Eastern thinking.
Viktor Okorokov (Tue,) studied this question.