Western philosophy since Descartes has had a peculiar fixation in starting from the “cogito”, the “I think” as it’s point of departure. Ancient Greek philosophy does not appear to have had such a fixation. Rather, Plato and Aristotle etc set out to describe the world as it is with a ‘logic of the world’. This is basically what their ontology consists of; describing, explaining, or seeing the world from within the world. The “ego” is, if it is present at all in the awareness of this philosophy, simply an uncomplicated semantic subjectivity. Taken for granted. Doubt about this subjectivity appeared to arise in the west first with Descartes.
In eastern philosophy however, awareness of the ego, the subjective as a problem, appeared much earlier and was generally dealt with by it’s negation, not it’s reification a la Descartes. In extremely brief and oversimplified terms; it’s not that Vedantic or Buddhist philosophy denies the appearance of the ego, but that it is considered as an appearance (hence, illusory), a relative phenomenon of absolute reality, either Brahman or Emptiness/Sunyata. Buddhism as it was developed in East Asia came to regard this Emptiness, encountered through the negation of the ego- this non-ego- as the ultimate reality of the universe.
Concern in western philosophy with the problem of subjectivity/objectivity-of the relationship between the ego and the world- progressed, breaking through the radical dualism of Descartes to Fichte. In Fichte’s subjective idealist philosophy of nature, the individual ego is established against non-ego which is taken as the objective world. Fichte’s universal is “pure ego”, which is a universal (subjective) consciousness. Here we see that Fichte’s notion of the ‘non-ego’ is quite different from the East Asian Buddhist one;
Fichte’s non-ego is the world taken as objective by the subjective ego. The Buddhist non-ego is neither subjective nor objective.
Fichte’s ‘pure ego’ notion is a further development in dealing with dualism, and certainly an advance from Descartes's problem. It would be quite comparable to the Vedantic notion of Atman/Brahman, at least in a crude form.
But for the East Asian Buddhist philosophy, Fichte’s pure-ego universal of consciousness is still an abstraction and hence can not be the absolute.
The non-ego of Sunyata as the ultimate identity of everything, either selves or things, of every apparent duality, includes the individual reality of the thing-in-itself, unlike the abstract universal of Fichte's pure ego.
Sunyata is absolute Emptiness, from which all appearances are abstractions. This does not mean void as in the absence of one or other particular thing, or the emptiness of an empty glass. Sunyata is the boundlessness of the wonderful flux of the phenomenal world. It is a creative ‘emptiness’, an emptiness of limitations and dualities which are simply the functioning of ordinary perception and discursive thinking.
ILLUSION!
(a meditation on Emptiness)
‘I am dependent on the existence of everything else in the universe.
I am myself because I am empty of independent existence.
Everything else in the universe is at the base of my consciousness of selfhood.
Perceiving and thinking dualistically are functions of consciousness.
Consciousness and it’s objects are not separate.
The reality is non-dual.
Therefore, the perceived, the objective, is illusion.
The perceiver, the subjective, is illusion.
Reality is consciousness-only and illusion.
‘The One is immanent as the many,
The many are immanent in the One’’