Beyond the Platonic Shadow: From Justified Knowledge to the Flow of Ordinary Mind

This paper explores the limits of Western epistemology by tracing its enduring reliance on a Platonic framework, in which knowledge is grounded in stable, often transcendent structures. From Plato through Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, even critical revisions remained tied to the question of how cognition is justified. The first decisive rupture appears in Schopenhauer’s relocation of the world’s ground from reason to will, a move further radicalized by Nietzsche’s claim that metaphysics itself is a fiction born of human weakness. Yet the paper argues that Western philosophy, even after Nietzsche, largely failed to think beyond epistemology itself. Turning to Buddhist epistemological insight, it proposes a shift from “what knowledge is” to “how discrimination arises.” Drawing on dependent origination and a practice-based integration of śamatha and vipaśyanā, articulated here as “ordinary mind,” the paper outlines a non-egoic horizon in which responsibility and political engagement persist without metaphysical foundations or absolute ideals.