From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2003 - 11:01:34 BST
Hi Scott
I thought that your use of Nishida's logic of contradictory identity
deserved a post of its own!
> Scott:
> The logic of contradictory identity doesn't get rid of it either, but
> it recognizes it as another name for DQ/SQ. And in the subject/object
> form we experience it in action: Awareness produces the many, and in
> the same productive act, turns it back into one.
>
> Paul:
> This is where I don't get it. Are you saying that DQ=S and SQ=O? Or is
> it that DQ=O and SQ=S? What am I missing?
Scott:
On first approximation, S is DQ and O is SQ. Franklin Merrell-Wolff says
his first enlightenment experience was experiencing the "Pure Subject",
sounding very much like Pirsig saying that Zen satori was experiencing
pure DQ. The absence of all form. His second enlightenment experience
showed that his first had a lingering dualism: to be absent of all form
implies that there is form from which he had escaped. His second told
him that the formless and form are one.
Nirvana is samsara. So, S is O, and O is S, DQ is SQ, and SQ
is DQ, (and not) and we are neck deep in the logic of contradictory
identity.
Paul:
After giving this some thought, I propose that the logic of
contradictory identity is unnecessary. It seems like Nishida is trying
to solve paradoxes which aren't supposed to be solved so much as
dissolved. The paradoxes which Nagarjuna and Dogen set were supposed to
point the student away from intellectual patterns, such as logic, to
show its superimposition on an immediately apprehended non-intellectual
reality which does not follow our logic. They are not intended to spur
the practitioner on to invent a clever intellectual solution. By
attempting to resolve the paradoxes Nishida is inadvertently reinforcing
the notion that the abstractions which logic makes use of correspond to
something fundamental [and paradoxical in this case] in experience which
must be explained/resolved.
The intellectual construction of a contradictory dichotomy is, in MOQ
terms, no more than an intellectual pattern of values formulated from
complex symbolic abstractions. So to solve a "contradictory identity"
paradox one simply rejects the contradictory dichotomy in favour of
non-paradoxical experience. I believe this is the approach that
Nagarjuna and the Wisdom Sutras are advocating. The point is that "self"
and "not-self" are never given in experience, they are arrived at
through abstraction, so to say they are one and the same is just to say
that they are derived from a unified experience.
For example, "time as duration" and "time as discrete events" are just
abstracted descriptions of how one can conceive of "time", so the only
contradiction is in the hypothetical sense that an experience can be
described in terms of duration or in terms of events. The description
has no bearing on empirical experience.
In terms of "DQ" and "SQ", I would say they refer to complementary
aspects of experience which have been abstracted symbolically by Pirsig
to provide a metaphysical conception of a process of experience. They
are also static divisions of experience.
"Since in the MOQ all divisions of Quality are static it follows that
high and low are subdivisions of static quality. "Static" and "Dynamic"
are also subdivisions of static quality, since the MOQ is itself a
static intellectual pattern of Quality." [Lila's Child Note 86]
As such, all static divisions collapse into a non-intellectual monism
referred to by Pirsig as Quality, so whilst your "DQ is SQ, SQ is DQ" is
not an incorrect conclusion, I think it is an unnecessary overhead to a
simpler understanding, and is perhaps another symptom of "endless
thinking"...
"In the thinking realm there is a difference between oneness and
variety; but in actual experience, variety and unity are the same.
Because you create some idea of unity or variety, you are caught by the
idea. And you have to continue the endless thinking, although actually
there is no need to think." [Shunryu Suzuki, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind"
p.120]
Or is this Nishida's point?
Paul
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