Impressive and striking as ever, Sam. I love studying this alongside you. I do believe this is the crux where I remain aloof where you appear convinced: "All I want to suggest is that both traditions are deeply rich, imperfect (as are all traditions) gravitations toward the same ineffable Reality, which manifests or reveals itself in the form of real distinctions."
I have yet to find the reasons to assume that most, if not all depending on how ya put it, religions point to the same reality. And the ineffable part plays its vital role here. I'm reading Negating Negation by Timothy D. Knepper. He talks about how anti-ontotheology, postmodern bizness, and religous pluralistic ideas have led to exegetically foolish interpretations of Pseduo-Dionysius. (For example, the position that PD abandons the importance of liturgy and ritual practice. When in reality, apophatic methods are meant to purify and PREPARE one for those methods.) Interpretations that assume that PD's God is ineffable in all respects are thoroughly disbarred in the book.
He goes a bit further and says that something that is absolutely ineffable (totally removed from us and our purposes) could not be for us. I've been thinking about the point of a world outside of us--unmoored from the Kantian copernican turn, our centered cognition. Many projects, especially in animal ethics--im thinking Nagel and Ralph. A. Acampora, and certain Heidegger folks--try to defend this "world without us." I see the stakes. But I've yet to find a handle on it.
I'm aware of how the waters of this topic ferment and boil. I've had debates reaching back to me and Karla Perez many years ago about how epistemology ought to relate to metaphysical assertions and vice versa. But putting those live and rife battles aside, I'm just not sure if there's an ultimate reality, or if there is, of what quality it is, or how one ought to act toward it.
I'm undecided on the issues. But I enjoy how you put it here. And I'm in full agreement with the need to emphasize the Buddha's self-designated middle-way, and it's cultural-ethical value. And I respect the careful and textually rich way you foreground Hinduism and Buddhism when talking about this stuff. Many people ignore the Vedic literature entirely when discussing Buddhism, even though it leads to a famished rendering. You have an eye for the richness.
Hi Nicholas. Thank you for the comment: the scepticism is warranted and healthy. And yes, there can be some questionable interpretations of mystics like PD, which do away with the importance of the conventional (I would say 'cataphatic') means by which one is supposed to begin to move toward the Ineffable. We must talk more about it though.
Sam! Really good post. I am always impressed with the way you can communicate dense, complicated subjects like these to people (me) who have absolutely no prior knowledge of what you are talking about. Due to the aforementioned lack of prior knowledge on this subject, I fear I have nothing substantial to say about the philosophy you articulate here; I mostly just agree.
I do have one thing to mention specifically: you wrote, "Because consciousness itself, or Brahman, or the Buddha-nature, or whatever name we use, is still something we talk and think about, its concept contains the latent possibility—its concept, to be clear, rather than it in itself—of being objectified and idolised, and so becoming an impediment to its own realisation." This is wonderful. You are a very good writer, as I'd imagine you are already aware. But also, I think the idea of CONCEPTS rather than the True Actual Thing being idolized is relevant to a whole lot of different avenues.
Namely I think we do this often with things people see as Universal Human Experiences, a category with which I have many a bone to pick: love, happiness, peace, et cetera. I wrote a paper this past semester concerning the idolization of love, specifically as displayed by Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens's Great Expectation, and I came to a very similar conclusion. I think it is almost, if not completely impossible to communicate any universal thing at all due to the subjectivity of the human condition-- the way one person experiences love is a far cry from the way another does, just like how people label what temperature is comfortable differently, or how we argue about whether teal is blue or green.
So when we sculpt social standards and expectations around subjective concepts like love or happiness, we idolize them in a way that prevents us from reaching The Thing Actually-- if my experience of Happiness Actually does not look like how I expect it to based on the sociolinguistic standards of everyone around me, then I become alienated, and without introspection on this very topic, my Happiness Actually is drained from me in attempting to squish it into the conceptual box I'm expected to place it in.
In short, I think you've articulated in a few sentences a truth about how we see the world that resonates with me, in a way for which I haven't quite had the words in the past; I really appreciate this. My paragraphs of extrapolation here probably modify your point in a way you didn't intend-- I think I've got a different takeaway than you here. But then, language is mushy, experience is subjective, and so on and so on. I recognize I've gotten away from the point, or the point has gotten away from me. Thanks for this post, Sam, and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Thank you for your kind comments! And yes, I absolutely agree. What you're saying really goes to the heart of why I think a lot of religion (and everything else, for that matter, but especially religion) seems to fall short of what it could be: that is, people 'get stuck' trying to tie down life's essence in a graspable and intelligible concept or entity, and then harshly judge the rest of life for failing to imitate that one being. Most often this is an idea about what or who God is, or one's own interpretation of the Bible, Qur'an, etc., but it can happen just as easily with anything secular. Just as God can be seen in everything by those with eyes to see, on the other side of that coin, anything can become an idol which blinds us to the true vision of God. Forcing the whole cosmos into the Procrustean bed of a single idea about 'how it should be' is one of the most undignified treatments we can give it; and, more to the point, a surefire source of suffering when that cosmos simply disregards what we tell it to do, washing over our lines in the sand with the ebbing and flowing of its vast tides.
Look, cards on the table, the Bhagavad Gita is the only (Buddhist? I don't even know) text that I've ever read. It was for a class that I didn't like with a professor I resented. I'm probably never going to read another one until I'm 40something and experiencing yet another mid-life crisis. I guess we'll see then. Anyhow, I remember deciding--with uncharacteristic conviction--that the whole enlightenment thing was not really for me :D
So, when I first read this I thought: 'beautiful and, ultimately, above my pay grade/outside the scope of my interests'. The beauty, as always, is in your writing. But this time, of course, it is in the conclusion/point you're getting to too (see last paragraph of the post). Naturally, I proceeded to move on.
Right now, though, I am sitting getting a much-needed dose of 'touching grass'. I, as you probably know, only deal in the profane (new personal slogan and if I ever get an OF account, that'll be the bio). So, while all the Buddhist wisdom remains totally above my pay grade, I couldn't help but notice, sitting here, that the smell of the grass was something that defies full representation; in language--obviously--or even visually. It is an aspect of the grass that I can't experience or replicate observing the grass from behind my window glass or a landscape painting and photos, no matter how beautiful. Nor can I recreate it from the concept ‘smell of grass’, which is categorically different from the smell itself. The smell of things, then, seems to be an example of the experience of them (I’m never going to use big words like truth or being, I don’t even know what that is. ‘Experience’ is as good as it gets here) which, at least partially, defies representation and conceptualisation. At first, I rushed to the conclusions that ‘oh fuck, the guys I don’t like on Sam’s thing (Madhyamaka. I had to go find it in the article. Language–perhaps especially that which is profane, sorry :D–is the one thing in this whole philosophy thing that I don’t like people fucking with) might be winning? I am embarrassed to say that I even care about such things (com'on.. what?), but the thought really did make me sad. Language, conceptualisation, discernment and all that are all part of that thing I for some reason love called rationality.
Rationality is preserved though and I need not cry. Without discernment, without concepts and language, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the differences between parts of the experience of grass and the transcendence (solely cause I couldn’t find a better word, alright?) of some aspects of it to language. The concept, even if not a sufficient substitute for the experience, still is part of the experience. Over your probable (?) objection, I would say an inseparable part of it, an essential one. The people cited in the article seem to take all that as secondary. I forgive them :D. I remember saying something on the post about Junie about being repulsed by God being something completely unlike us, I think Nicholas put it better speaking of total ineffability. I think in terms more relevant to your topic, even if God or whatever is not fully ‘graspable’ in language (though I don’t see why that would be necessarily the case, I don't see the necessity in it), it does make sense that he’s at least approachable through it. I, of course, would say that approachability via language and thought is a necessary thing (otherwise take me off the agnostic list and sign me up as the first atheist!), but I don’t know what you’d think of where I place the necessity.
So, I guess what I am trying to say is that even outside the books, and in the ever so profane world of
common people's ‘conventional’ experiences, your overall point holds. Good work as always!
I'm just curious as to what you think it means for language to be essential in this respect. I assume you mean that fundamental conceptual distinctions like 'A is not ~A' hold unconditionally, in eternity. If so, that to me seems like a tautology of sorts, or a truism. To the extent that conceptuality/language holds, then the distinctions that conceptuality/language contain will persist. That seems like a repetition to me, and an undeniably true one.
But then we get into the issue of whether these distinctions can be 'ultimate' in a metaphysical sense - which I think is your real gripe. To that I'd answer your other point about why I think it necessary that God is not graspable in language. I believe it's derived from the nature of language itself. Any time you can enfold something in language or a concept, you are drawing a boundary around it. In drawing that boundary, you have necessarily created an 'inside' and an 'outside' of that boundary. The 'inside' is what you're referring to: the smell of grass, which you say bears a soft, agrestal, freshly-cut weightlessness, like summer itself wafting over the lush pastures. The 'outside' is what escapes that definition: I come along (with a very pompous look on my face) and sit down next to you, and I say 'Ebtsam, that's absurd, this grass doesn't have an agrestal softness: rather, it's far more earthen, almost loam, its verdurous tones heavied by foreboding intimations of a hastening autumn.'
You get up and walk away because I am annoying and pretentious, but the point is made: insofar as you have employed language, you have set a limit. The setting of a limit creates a duality of 'inner' and 'outer'. To say 'A' is necessarily to establish '~A'. What this leaves us with is two entities that are both defined by limit (or at least two: in more open-ended definitions like the smell of grass there might be yet another, even more supercilious fellow to come along and tell me my assessment was incorrect...). The crucial premise here is that limit implies contingency. Because any concept can only be coherent by merit of its dependence on its negation - A only has meaning by the definition of what is ~A - conceptuality by its nature depends on something other than itself: which is to say it is contingent.
In language/conceptuality, therefore, even if we have an 'infinite' succession of concepts and representation, we are still talking about a network that is categorically contingent. And at that point we are simply following the undeniable modal logic that contingency depends ultimately on necessity. If all conceptuality is contingent, its Necessary Being must be transcendent of concepts.
In a previous post I talked a great deal about 'affirmation' and 'negation', and insisted on religious practice as an attempt to abide 'beyond' either. In the terms of language and conceptuality alone, this seems absurd: how could you fail to say either A or ~A? Where would the tertium quid be? But if you accept (as I think is fairly obvious) that the whole world of linguistic representation is defined by contingent relations, you see that the Necessary Being through which it subsists must reside beyond linguistic representation. Which - at long last - is why I bang on so much about how God 'is not a being, but Being itself'. To be 'a being' is to be an entity or unit or node within a contingent, conditioned network. To be Being itself is literally to be 'no-thing' in the former sense, but the essence, ground, or 'Logos' in which that network is able to exist.
So whenever you have said something, you have always already gestured to something beyond it, an excess, an ultimately infinite 'horizon' (to use the fancy word) within which that finite event exists. To say that everything can be 'said' with no remainder is absurd: to 'say' at all is to create limits, draw boundaries, demarcate, and so to establish a duality that in turn modally establishes immanence and transcendence.
It's like having an infinitely large piece of paper, and then drawing a circle on it. You can make that circle enormous, and fill it with millions and millions of smaller circles, creating a rich and coherent tapestry that doesn't logically contradict itself at all internally (that is, no circles overlap), but no matter how full, enormous, or complex it is, the fact that you have drawn a circle at all means that you have established something outside of that circle. So still we have an inescapable contingency: the big circle is A, and the space outside the circle is ~A. So what would be the Necessary Being? In this example, the paper itself. Not a circle, not something that could ever contradict or overlap with one of the circles, but that without which no circle could possibly exist. Indeed, it is the paper's very infinitude that allows ever more circles to be drawn, even beyond the enormous one we just drew: as I say in the last paragraph of this post, it is God's transcendent 'silence' which inspires ever more immanent speech.
I hope that's at least a little clear. Thank you for giving the opportunity to think it through and clarify my thought to myself.
Impressive and striking as ever, Sam. I love studying this alongside you. I do believe this is the crux where I remain aloof where you appear convinced: "All I want to suggest is that both traditions are deeply rich, imperfect (as are all traditions) gravitations toward the same ineffable Reality, which manifests or reveals itself in the form of real distinctions."
I have yet to find the reasons to assume that most, if not all depending on how ya put it, religions point to the same reality. And the ineffable part plays its vital role here. I'm reading Negating Negation by Timothy D. Knepper. He talks about how anti-ontotheology, postmodern bizness, and religous pluralistic ideas have led to exegetically foolish interpretations of Pseduo-Dionysius. (For example, the position that PD abandons the importance of liturgy and ritual practice. When in reality, apophatic methods are meant to purify and PREPARE one for those methods.) Interpretations that assume that PD's God is ineffable in all respects are thoroughly disbarred in the book.
He goes a bit further and says that something that is absolutely ineffable (totally removed from us and our purposes) could not be for us. I've been thinking about the point of a world outside of us--unmoored from the Kantian copernican turn, our centered cognition. Many projects, especially in animal ethics--im thinking Nagel and Ralph. A. Acampora, and certain Heidegger folks--try to defend this "world without us." I see the stakes. But I've yet to find a handle on it.
I'm aware of how the waters of this topic ferment and boil. I've had debates reaching back to me and Karla Perez many years ago about how epistemology ought to relate to metaphysical assertions and vice versa. But putting those live and rife battles aside, I'm just not sure if there's an ultimate reality, or if there is, of what quality it is, or how one ought to act toward it.
I'm undecided on the issues. But I enjoy how you put it here. And I'm in full agreement with the need to emphasize the Buddha's self-designated middle-way, and it's cultural-ethical value. And I respect the careful and textually rich way you foreground Hinduism and Buddhism when talking about this stuff. Many people ignore the Vedic literature entirely when discussing Buddhism, even though it leads to a famished rendering. You have an eye for the richness.
Hi Nicholas. Thank you for the comment: the scepticism is warranted and healthy. And yes, there can be some questionable interpretations of mystics like PD, which do away with the importance of the conventional (I would say 'cataphatic') means by which one is supposed to begin to move toward the Ineffable. We must talk more about it though.
Sam! Really good post. I am always impressed with the way you can communicate dense, complicated subjects like these to people (me) who have absolutely no prior knowledge of what you are talking about. Due to the aforementioned lack of prior knowledge on this subject, I fear I have nothing substantial to say about the philosophy you articulate here; I mostly just agree.
I do have one thing to mention specifically: you wrote, "Because consciousness itself, or Brahman, or the Buddha-nature, or whatever name we use, is still something we talk and think about, its concept contains the latent possibility—its concept, to be clear, rather than it in itself—of being objectified and idolised, and so becoming an impediment to its own realisation." This is wonderful. You are a very good writer, as I'd imagine you are already aware. But also, I think the idea of CONCEPTS rather than the True Actual Thing being idolized is relevant to a whole lot of different avenues.
Namely I think we do this often with things people see as Universal Human Experiences, a category with which I have many a bone to pick: love, happiness, peace, et cetera. I wrote a paper this past semester concerning the idolization of love, specifically as displayed by Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens's Great Expectation, and I came to a very similar conclusion. I think it is almost, if not completely impossible to communicate any universal thing at all due to the subjectivity of the human condition-- the way one person experiences love is a far cry from the way another does, just like how people label what temperature is comfortable differently, or how we argue about whether teal is blue or green.
So when we sculpt social standards and expectations around subjective concepts like love or happiness, we idolize them in a way that prevents us from reaching The Thing Actually-- if my experience of Happiness Actually does not look like how I expect it to based on the sociolinguistic standards of everyone around me, then I become alienated, and without introspection on this very topic, my Happiness Actually is drained from me in attempting to squish it into the conceptual box I'm expected to place it in.
In short, I think you've articulated in a few sentences a truth about how we see the world that resonates with me, in a way for which I haven't quite had the words in the past; I really appreciate this. My paragraphs of extrapolation here probably modify your point in a way you didn't intend-- I think I've got a different takeaway than you here. But then, language is mushy, experience is subjective, and so on and so on. I recognize I've gotten away from the point, or the point has gotten away from me. Thanks for this post, Sam, and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Hi Cara,
Thank you for your kind comments! And yes, I absolutely agree. What you're saying really goes to the heart of why I think a lot of religion (and everything else, for that matter, but especially religion) seems to fall short of what it could be: that is, people 'get stuck' trying to tie down life's essence in a graspable and intelligible concept or entity, and then harshly judge the rest of life for failing to imitate that one being. Most often this is an idea about what or who God is, or one's own interpretation of the Bible, Qur'an, etc., but it can happen just as easily with anything secular. Just as God can be seen in everything by those with eyes to see, on the other side of that coin, anything can become an idol which blinds us to the true vision of God. Forcing the whole cosmos into the Procrustean bed of a single idea about 'how it should be' is one of the most undignified treatments we can give it; and, more to the point, a surefire source of suffering when that cosmos simply disregards what we tell it to do, washing over our lines in the sand with the ebbing and flowing of its vast tides.
Lovely to speak (in writing!) as always.
Hey Sam. Hope all is well.
Look, cards on the table, the Bhagavad Gita is the only (Buddhist? I don't even know) text that I've ever read. It was for a class that I didn't like with a professor I resented. I'm probably never going to read another one until I'm 40something and experiencing yet another mid-life crisis. I guess we'll see then. Anyhow, I remember deciding--with uncharacteristic conviction--that the whole enlightenment thing was not really for me :D
So, when I first read this I thought: 'beautiful and, ultimately, above my pay grade/outside the scope of my interests'. The beauty, as always, is in your writing. But this time, of course, it is in the conclusion/point you're getting to too (see last paragraph of the post). Naturally, I proceeded to move on.
Right now, though, I am sitting getting a much-needed dose of 'touching grass'. I, as you probably know, only deal in the profane (new personal slogan and if I ever get an OF account, that'll be the bio). So, while all the Buddhist wisdom remains totally above my pay grade, I couldn't help but notice, sitting here, that the smell of the grass was something that defies full representation; in language--obviously--or even visually. It is an aspect of the grass that I can't experience or replicate observing the grass from behind my window glass or a landscape painting and photos, no matter how beautiful. Nor can I recreate it from the concept ‘smell of grass’, which is categorically different from the smell itself. The smell of things, then, seems to be an example of the experience of them (I’m never going to use big words like truth or being, I don’t even know what that is. ‘Experience’ is as good as it gets here) which, at least partially, defies representation and conceptualisation. At first, I rushed to the conclusions that ‘oh fuck, the guys I don’t like on Sam’s thing (Madhyamaka. I had to go find it in the article. Language–perhaps especially that which is profane, sorry :D–is the one thing in this whole philosophy thing that I don’t like people fucking with) might be winning? I am embarrassed to say that I even care about such things (com'on.. what?), but the thought really did make me sad. Language, conceptualisation, discernment and all that are all part of that thing I for some reason love called rationality.
Rationality is preserved though and I need not cry. Without discernment, without concepts and language, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the differences between parts of the experience of grass and the transcendence (solely cause I couldn’t find a better word, alright?) of some aspects of it to language. The concept, even if not a sufficient substitute for the experience, still is part of the experience. Over your probable (?) objection, I would say an inseparable part of it, an essential one. The people cited in the article seem to take all that as secondary. I forgive them :D. I remember saying something on the post about Junie about being repulsed by God being something completely unlike us, I think Nicholas put it better speaking of total ineffability. I think in terms more relevant to your topic, even if God or whatever is not fully ‘graspable’ in language (though I don’t see why that would be necessarily the case, I don't see the necessity in it), it does make sense that he’s at least approachable through it. I, of course, would say that approachability via language and thought is a necessary thing (otherwise take me off the agnostic list and sign me up as the first atheist!), but I don’t know what you’d think of where I place the necessity.
So, I guess what I am trying to say is that even outside the books, and in the ever so profane world of
common people's ‘conventional’ experiences, your overall point holds. Good work as always!
Hello Ebtsam-
Yes, I see it creeping in...
I'm just curious as to what you think it means for language to be essential in this respect. I assume you mean that fundamental conceptual distinctions like 'A is not ~A' hold unconditionally, in eternity. If so, that to me seems like a tautology of sorts, or a truism. To the extent that conceptuality/language holds, then the distinctions that conceptuality/language contain will persist. That seems like a repetition to me, and an undeniably true one.
But then we get into the issue of whether these distinctions can be 'ultimate' in a metaphysical sense - which I think is your real gripe. To that I'd answer your other point about why I think it necessary that God is not graspable in language. I believe it's derived from the nature of language itself. Any time you can enfold something in language or a concept, you are drawing a boundary around it. In drawing that boundary, you have necessarily created an 'inside' and an 'outside' of that boundary. The 'inside' is what you're referring to: the smell of grass, which you say bears a soft, agrestal, freshly-cut weightlessness, like summer itself wafting over the lush pastures. The 'outside' is what escapes that definition: I come along (with a very pompous look on my face) and sit down next to you, and I say 'Ebtsam, that's absurd, this grass doesn't have an agrestal softness: rather, it's far more earthen, almost loam, its verdurous tones heavied by foreboding intimations of a hastening autumn.'
You get up and walk away because I am annoying and pretentious, but the point is made: insofar as you have employed language, you have set a limit. The setting of a limit creates a duality of 'inner' and 'outer'. To say 'A' is necessarily to establish '~A'. What this leaves us with is two entities that are both defined by limit (or at least two: in more open-ended definitions like the smell of grass there might be yet another, even more supercilious fellow to come along and tell me my assessment was incorrect...). The crucial premise here is that limit implies contingency. Because any concept can only be coherent by merit of its dependence on its negation - A only has meaning by the definition of what is ~A - conceptuality by its nature depends on something other than itself: which is to say it is contingent.
In language/conceptuality, therefore, even if we have an 'infinite' succession of concepts and representation, we are still talking about a network that is categorically contingent. And at that point we are simply following the undeniable modal logic that contingency depends ultimately on necessity. If all conceptuality is contingent, its Necessary Being must be transcendent of concepts.
In a previous post I talked a great deal about 'affirmation' and 'negation', and insisted on religious practice as an attempt to abide 'beyond' either. In the terms of language and conceptuality alone, this seems absurd: how could you fail to say either A or ~A? Where would the tertium quid be? But if you accept (as I think is fairly obvious) that the whole world of linguistic representation is defined by contingent relations, you see that the Necessary Being through which it subsists must reside beyond linguistic representation. Which - at long last - is why I bang on so much about how God 'is not a being, but Being itself'. To be 'a being' is to be an entity or unit or node within a contingent, conditioned network. To be Being itself is literally to be 'no-thing' in the former sense, but the essence, ground, or 'Logos' in which that network is able to exist.
So whenever you have said something, you have always already gestured to something beyond it, an excess, an ultimately infinite 'horizon' (to use the fancy word) within which that finite event exists. To say that everything can be 'said' with no remainder is absurd: to 'say' at all is to create limits, draw boundaries, demarcate, and so to establish a duality that in turn modally establishes immanence and transcendence.
It's like having an infinitely large piece of paper, and then drawing a circle on it. You can make that circle enormous, and fill it with millions and millions of smaller circles, creating a rich and coherent tapestry that doesn't logically contradict itself at all internally (that is, no circles overlap), but no matter how full, enormous, or complex it is, the fact that you have drawn a circle at all means that you have established something outside of that circle. So still we have an inescapable contingency: the big circle is A, and the space outside the circle is ~A. So what would be the Necessary Being? In this example, the paper itself. Not a circle, not something that could ever contradict or overlap with one of the circles, but that without which no circle could possibly exist. Indeed, it is the paper's very infinitude that allows ever more circles to be drawn, even beyond the enormous one we just drew: as I say in the last paragraph of this post, it is God's transcendent 'silence' which inspires ever more immanent speech.
I hope that's at least a little clear. Thank you for giving the opportunity to think it through and clarify my thought to myself.
S