Library document
Genuine Disagreements
Where the aspect model stops dissolving. Not every difference between traditions is a category error; some are real disagreements, the same question answered incompatibly. The four kinds (the afterlife, which aspect is fundamental, exclusive historical claims, the diagnosis of evil), the perennialist flattening that is refused, and why the seams are what keep the model falsifiable.
The essay Where the Traditions Really Disagree is the readable version. This is the tagged backing.
The aspect model dissolves contradictions that are category errors, two traditions describing different aspects. If it could dissolve every disagreement, it would be a universal solvent, explaining everything and predicting nothing. Its falsifiability lives in where it stops. These are the genuine disagreements it leaves standing. FRAMING
The four kinds
- The afterlife, same aspect and incompatible. Reincarnation (many karma-driven lives) and resurrection (one life, then bodily raising and judgment) are both answers about the return, and they clash as literal accounts of what happens. ESTABLISHED that the doctrines differ; the disagreement is real, not a category error.
- Which aspect is fundamental. Advaita (impersonal ground ultimate, personal God provisional) versus Dvaita (personal God ultimate, no impersonal ground). Both grant the aspects; they disagree about priority. A genuine metaphysical disagreement, not an emphasis the model can absorb. ESTABLISHED
- Exclusive, first-order historical claims. Salvation only through Christ; the finality of Muhammad; a specific resurrection on a specific day. Not aspect-descriptions; particular claims about events and exclusivity, which the model explicitly does not reach and which can genuinely conflict. ESTABLISHED as the traditions' claims; OPEN as to their truth.
- The diagnosis of evil. Zoroastrian dualism (evil an independent power) versus Abrahamic privation-or-permission versus Advaita's maya versus Buddhist craving. Different diagnoses that do not reduce to one. ESTABLISHED
The perennialist temptation, refused
Perennialism (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, 1948) reads even these as one shared truth in different dress, resurrection and rebirth as two symbols of ego-death. That reading is available, and it flattens a real difference. The aspect model declines it here: where the attributes of the claims genuinely conflict on the same aspect, the honest verdict is a seam, not a synonym. This is the same discipline the model uses everywhere, run in the other direction: attributes decide, and sometimes they decide "these disagree."
Why the seams matter FRAMING
The model earns the right to dissolve the category errors precisely by refusing to dissolve these. A framework that fit every possible pattern of agreement and disagreement would be unfalsifiable and empty. Marking where the traditions truly conflict is what makes the aspect model a claim about the world rather than a mood.
Sources
- Reincarnation and resurrection as afterlife doctrines: standard comparative religion. ESTABLISHED
- Advaita versus Dvaita on the priority of the personal and impersonal: Shankara versus Madhva. ESTABLISHED
- Perennialism: Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945); Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1948). FRAMING