The Night in Which All Absolutes are Abstract

The comparison of Brahman with the noumenal is one that is quite easy to make, and one that I have made numerous times in the past. Brahman is like the Ding-an-sich, but non-formal. It is not a precondition for our understanding, but rather an object of experience (as a model?). Brahman can be found, seen, and experienced as the non-phenomenal. A kind of experience of non-experience that is only such because of the initial sundering. It is a concretized process, one of initial unity followed by separation and then the inevitable reconciliation. But this answering in regards to the process still does not adequately answer Hegel's critique of Schelling's Absolute (which applies to Kant's Ding-an-sich of course, being a more formal version of Schelling).

Schelling's Absolute, "the night in which all cows are black" (says Hegel), was one in which  opposition could not be found. It was the naive unity which could not help but differentiate itself and thus undermine itself. This differentiation of the concept is shown to be necessary by Hegel (as in the Greater Logic). However, what if Brahman was not a concept such as Schelling's Absolute, not a non-differentiated and thus empty idea, but a concrete unity, that is, a concept in which both separation (Trennung) and identity are to be found? The explicit working-out of the concept of Brahman ought to be different from the Hegelian Logic due to the non-practical nature of that Logic (while formally the Absolute Idea is not transcendent, I have a certain suspicion that unless one integrates experience and conceptuality explicitly and practically, and not just a formal equation of the two, then one cannot really have overcome the difference; this is where Hindu philosophy comes in handy).

Hegel remarks that "indeterminateness and emptiness of representation" is "altogether the same as what an Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, looking only at the tip of his nose, externally motionless and equally unmoved in sensation, representation, phantasy, desire, and so on, he inwardly says only Om, Om, Om, or else nothing at all. This dull, empty consciousness, taken as consciousness, is just this - being" (Hegel, The Science of Logic, Cambridge 2010 edition, p. 73).

Perhaps it is supererogatory to state that Hegel (and pretty much all Europeans of the day) has no idea what he is talking about. I aim to find exactly why this is true, philosophically at that.