From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2005 - 16:35:40 GMT
Ant,
(I sent this yesterday, but it hasn't posted, so here it is again, but with
the original message removed. Apologies if the first shows up in the
meantime.)
Rather than reply to your replies individually, let me give an overview of
where I am coming from. Most of your comments can be addressed with this
overview,though I respond to some specifically below.
Most of my criticisms of the MOQ derive from two sources. One comes from my
thinking about consciousness and language, and the other comes from the
Buddhist doctrine that form is formlessness, formlessness is form. It is my
opinion that the MOQ has not grasped this latter, and that in its thinking
about consciousness and language it is stuck in materialist beliefs.
Nishitani Keiji's "Religion and Nothingness" identifies three stages:
- the field of reason and the senses
- the field of nihility
- the field of emptiness
SOM is a case of the first. The second results from rejecting SOM, and finds
that everything and the self are non-substantial, that all "thingness"
arises as Kant observed, from the self's organization. Add that the idea of
substantial self is also a construction and you get nihilism. This is where
I see the MOQ as sitting, in the field of nihility.
But the Middle Way is intended to avoid both extremes, substantialism (as in
SOM) and nihilism (as in MOQ). The rheomode is a nihilist philosophy, as is
non-substantialist materialism (such as Dennett's -- when I mentioned
Dennett I should have said that his philosophy is compatible with a
rheomode, not that he advocated a rheomode.)
Nishitani argues that the nothingness of the field of nihility is still,
very subtly, an object. It is nothingness on the "far side", as he puts it,
something that exists prior to the self's putting it into somethingness
(this last is my phrasing, not Nishitani's). This means it is a relative
nothingness. To move to the field of emptiness, or Absolute Nothingness as
he also calls it, one needs to empty out the concept of nothingness. Then
things and the self come back into existence, but in the field of emptiness,
instead of in the field of SOM. They now have what he calls "non-substantial
substantiality", or they exist because they do not exist. And all things are
seen as selves (no more SOM, or absolute division into mind and nature). In
other words, one needs the logic of contradictory identity to say anything
about the field of emptiness to avoid falling into a substantialist or a
nihilist error. To speak of reality as the rheomode is to fall into nihilist
error.
But this can be seen without resorting to "formlessness if form, form is
formlessness" as revelation, but only if one purges one's thinking of the
SOM materialist prejudice that ordinary awareness or consciousness (I use
the words interchangeably) could have arisen out of a world without it. That
belief that there was a world without consciousness arose from the SOM split
into mind and nature, where nature is seen as non-conscious and
non-thinking. Materialism then tries to explain mind as developing out of
mindless nature. *So does the MOQ*. (Actually, neither the MOQ nor
materialism has an "explanation". They simply assume it.) I have tried to
argue that this can't be done, but it is a difficult argument to get across.
Here is one attempt (from a post to Platt on Merrell-Wolff's referring to a
"kind of thinking" where the law of contradiction doesn't apply -- i.e.,
contradictory identity):
"The closest I have been able to come to what I think M-W is referring to is
when I think about consciousness, in particular to its durational and
changing aspects. To be aware of a change (say one note to another in a
melody), something had to endure across the change. But to be aware of the
enduring (both notes as one melody, or even one continuous note), something
had to change. So conscious is not changing because it is changing, and it
is changing because it is not changing. One can't get out of this
contradictoriness with the idea that a part is staying the same while a part
is changing, since that just pushes the problem back to the part that is
staying the same: how can it be aware of change without changing, and if it
is enduring through the change, how can it be changing?"
In the rheomode, change is taken as fundamental, which means that continuity
could never come into existence, and so there could be no awareness. In a
substantialist philosophy, continuity is taken as fundamental, which means
change is seen as "accidental". What is fundamental can only be thought of
in terms of contradictory identity, as in "form is formlessness,
formlessness is form" or in this case "consciousness is not-changing because
it is changing, and changing because it is not-changing".
A couple of other remarks.
Actually, I like Bohm's distinction into the implicate and explicate
order -- just his rheomode underwhelms me. And the implicate and explicate
need to be treated as a contradictory identity.
Ant McWatt states:
This doesn't follow. Buddhist philosophy and modern physicists point
towards reality being primarily in the rheomode.
Scott:
Physicists ignore consciousness. On Buddhist philosophy, we are clearly
seeing it differently.
Ant McWatt states:
So awareness (which is an experience) requires intellectual constructions to
operate? That's a bit like saying a motorcyclist needs to be able to
explain the workings of an internal combustion engine in order to ride a
bike or an apple falls downwards because of the theory of gravity. A rider
rides, an apple falls irrespective of the theories concerning why and how
these events happen.
Scott:
I argue that awareness is an act of intellect which is a manifestation of
value. An apple falls because it is manifesting a SPOV, a universal. You are
making a materialist assumption that nature has no intellect.
Ant McWatt states:
Well, I think this is the crux of the matter. Pirsig is assuming that all
there has been and all there ever will be are values. If awareness is
defined as self-consciousness it has only developed relatively recently and
will possibly disappear at some point in the future.
To deny that values are self-contained is to re-introduce SOM via having a
"senser" and "something sensed".
Scott:
"only developed recently" is a materialist assumption. I argue that
consciousness, value, and intellect are ultimately the same (non-)thing: the
field of emptiness in which there *are* selves, though they exist by
negating themselves.
Ant McWatt adds:
Why I think this is happening is because Scott still hasn't got his head
around the fundamental tenet of the MOQ i.e. that (ontologically) values
come before subjects and objects, not simultaneously with them and certainly
not before them. Without taking this tenet fully on board, confusion
regarding Pirsig's work will follow.
Scott:
I understand the tenet, but I reject it. Pirsig assumes that values come
before subjects and objects, but why should I accept that assumption? To
place undifferentiated value before thingness and selfness is to remain in
the field of nihility. It is a subtle dualism, because it has reified (and
perhaps deified) Nothingness. Until value/nothingness and selfness/thingness
are identified in contradictory identity, one has not moved to the field of
emptiness.
- Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ant McWatt" <antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 8:18 AM
Subject: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic
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