From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 15:40:22 BST
Scott,
Thanks for explaining what you mean by "contingent."
> Yes. I see contingency -- or maybe radical contingency -- as what is meant
> by the Buddhist phrase 'pratitya-samutpada', usually translated as
> "dependent co-origination". This means that nothing is what it is except in
> terms of how it relates to everything else. It lacks "self-existence". The
> hard "thing" to understand in this way, of course, is "myself".
As I understand it, when you speak of the lack of "self-existence" you are
speaking within the conceptual, symbol-dependent world of language,
mathematics, art, etc.-- the world of intellectual level static Quality.
By contrast, the world of Dynamic Quality, pure experience prior to
concepts, the intuitive world of "One without a second," lacks all
dualism or division, thus precluding "relationships" and "contingency" or
concepts of any kind.
> > I ask because Rorty and other pomos appear to hang their entire
> > metaphysics on that one word (while denying they have a metaphysics of
> > course).
> My "metaphsyics" also pretty much hangs on this one word, with the real
> difference between Rorty and me, as I see it, being that I consider the
> statement "everything is contingent" to be a metaphysical Truth, that it
> can be realized (mystically). {Note: that statement also uses a particular
> meaning of "everything": as "every thing (or event, or whatever that can be
> observed, thought about, etc.), so the escape-that-can-be-another-trap is
> the word "emptiness" or "nothingness": sunyata.}
What I realized mystically (after guidance by Pirsig) is that at least a
part of reality, although clearly understood, cannot be spoken of at all.
Pirsig says:
"Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of
reality metaphysics is too "scientific." Metaphysics is not reality.
Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they
give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food." (5)
The MoQ allows both worlds, non-contingent mystic and contingent symbolic,
to complement one another simultaneously. If a metaphysics hangs just on
words like "contingency" and slights or ignores the Tao which cannot be
conveyed either by words or by silence but is understood by direct
experience, then that metaphysics is incomplete.
But, I could be wrong.
Platt
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