“It is not that the self is empty, but that emptiness is self; not that things are empty, but that emptiness is things…
On the field of sunyata, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself.”---Nishitani
Existentialism And Mysticism concluded
Jan. '78
“All things that are in the world,” according to Nishitani,
“are linked together, one way or the other. Not a
single thing comes into being without some relationship
to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of
natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination
perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason
contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system
of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the
field of sunyata, all things are in a process of becoming master and
servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not
being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion
in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the
first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time
to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered
together and brought into relationship with one another, a force
which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of "nature" (physis).
“To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be
itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively
speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things
and help to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a
constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are,
and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself
means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in
the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its
own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every
other thing spread across into its home-ground. This way that
everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without
ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each
thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of
the being of all other things: or, put the other way around, that each
thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and
makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things ‘are’ in the
‘world.’” (Religion and Nothingness p.149)
To be sure, the sunyata reality referred to here by
Nishitani is not your typical fair. No wonder the very idea of
mysticism generates so much controversy, especially among academics!
But, this nothingness of the mystics, on some level at least, found its way into the
existentialism of European philosophy. And, as far as the "reality of Mysticism" goes, I
would only defer to what Dr. Folkart said on the very first day of class:
"The claim to that other reality cannot be merely stated; its credibility
must come through a direct experience of it."
Postscript to the above post (a bit different from yesterday): As Douglas Hofstadter would say, I’m jumping out of the system here—errr jumping out of my story. In the next few sentences I’m going to structure the philosophies of Sartre and Nishitani in terms of symbolic structure — a symbolism for reality, life, and reason. I’m jumping out of my story because I believe that this post (on Nishitani) and yesterday’s post (on Nishitani and Sartre) are embedded in a vocabulary rich enough for me to suggest that we live in a universe that can be symbolized thusly: Let ~~b, or being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is represent reality. Reality grows in complexity until it becomes alive, or, in other words, ~~b reality liberates ~bb, i.e., life. Increasing complexity continues to move life forward until, once again, at a sufficient level of complexity, life liberates reason, which, in turn, liberates “civilization.” Bottom line here is that when Nishitani talks about sunyata he is talking about the reality of being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is; and when Sartre says, “the human project, suspended in nothingness, projects the self ceaselessly outside of itself,” he is also talking about sunyata,-- the sunyata of a higher dimension, i.e., a higher dimension of being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is. In this new dimension, ~bb represents Sartre’s for-itself consciousness, which, in turn, is discovered embedded in b~b, i.e., aesthetic continuum/nature. In the aesthetic continuum/nature one discovers emotions, beauty and truth—the medium where confirmation of scientific hypotheses occur (physical events).In other words, Nishitani’s sunyata is not inconsistent with Sartre’s for-itself consciousness, or the ego/nothingness that condemns man/woman to freedom; it’s just that in Sartre’s being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is “the human project, suspended in nothingness, projects the self ceaselessly outside of itself,” while in Nishitani’s being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is “the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things: or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is.”
In a word, it means that “all things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other.”
Zen Effects The Life Of Alan Watts,” by Monica Furlong
ReplyDelete“What is found when man no longer resists life from behind the barrier of his person? Because the Buddha denied the existence of any ‘self-nature’ in the person, the Hinayana takes this to mean that there is no Self at all. The Mahayana, on the other hand, considers that a true Self is found when the false one is renounced. When man neither identifies himself with his person nor uses it as a means of resisting life, he finds that the Self is more than his own being; it includes the whole universe. The Hinayana, realizing that no single thing as such is the Self, is content with the realization…But the Mahayana couples this denial with an affirmation; while denying the existence of Self in any particular thing, it finds it in the total interrelatedness of all things . Thus Enlightenment is to deny the self in the castle, to realize that Self is not this person called “I” as distinct from that person called “You,” but that it is both “I” and “You” and everything else included. (p. 56)
While re-reading “Zen Effects The Life Of Alan Watts,” by Monica Furlong (2001)—the above passage jumped out at me as helpful in explaining the b~b~bb symbolism. In Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism the question of self is treated differently. In terms of the symbolism of b~b~bb, in Hinayana Buddhism, the self may be understood as ~b of ~bb in b~b~bb, while in Mahayana Buddhism, the self may be understood as ~~b—the Affirmative Ideal of everything– including the “I” and “You.”
Like in my comment above, where I interpreted the Hinayana (Theravada) and Mahayana Buddhist concepts of “self nature” in terms of the symbolism of b~b~bb, in like manner, I believe, this same symbolism speaks to very important scientific and mathematical discoveries of the last century.
ReplyDeleteHere’s a quick summary of how b~b~bb identifies our human experience. Let ~~b, or being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is represent reality. Reality grows in complexity until it becomes alive, or, in other words, ~~b reality liberates ~bb, i.e., life. Increasing complexity continues to move life forward until, once again, at a sufficient level of complexity, life liberates reason, which, in turn, liberates the “the negative space of ~bb, i.e., the space of the human experience of the aesthetic continuum.
Einstein discovered the objective limit of the aesthetic continuum, the space/time context of the aesthetic continuum, with the confirmation of his General Theory Of Relativity. Bottom line here is that when Nishitani talks about sunyata he is talking about the reality of being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is, which in turn, after it has evolved into what Sartre calls, “the human project, suspended in nothingness, (which) projects the self ceaselessly outside of itself,” is able to use human reason to imagine, experiment and confirm the existence of the objective limits of our space-time existence.
(It is hoped that the below quotes from the book, “Incompleteness, The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel,” by Rebecca Goldstein, 2005, are expected to elucidate this idea).
But, there is another limit, the limit put on reason itself, i.e., the limit identified by Kurt Gödel’s mathematical theorems. Sartre’s for-itself consciousness, or the ego/nothingness that condemns man/woman to freedom, the freedom that projects the self ceaselessly outside of itself, is captured mathematically in Gödel’s limitative theorems. In this higher dimension of sunyata, the dimension of ~bb, the dimension represented by Sartre’s for-itself consciousness, when pushed to its objective limit, takes the form of mathematical truths that address themselves in terms of consistency and incompleteness.
Below, think of ~~b, the synchronic boundary that supports “all that is” and “all that can we can know” as the “out yonder” that motivated both Einstein and Gödel to achieve their magnificent accomplishments.
In the Theory of General Relativity time does not flow, rather it is depicted as a fourth dimension, as static space. In vivid contrast, our more personal experience of time, the ceaseless, unidirectional motion of time--the time that permits our ability to imagine, experiment and confirm the existence of the objective limits of our space-time existence--is the source of our real spiritual nature.
“Gödel was even receptive to the suggestion that his incompleteness theorems had consequences in the mystical, or at least religious, sphere. In a letter to his mother on 20 October 1963 he remarked with regard to an article that she had sent him, and which he had not yet read, concerning the implications of his work: ‘It was something to be expected that sooner or later my proof will be made useful for religion, since that is doubtless also justified in a certain sense.’ At the very least, Gödel believed his first incompleteness theorem supported Platonism’s insistence on the existence of a suprasensible domain of eternal verities. Platonism isn’t of course tantamount to religion or mysticism, but there are affinities……..Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem tells us that any consistent formal system adequate for the expression of arithmetic must leave out much of mathematical reality, and his second theorem tells us that no such formal system can even prove itself to be self-consistent. Of course, Gödel believes that these systems are consistent, since
ReplyDeletethey have a model in the truly existent abstract realm.”
(Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness, The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, 2005, p. 192.)
“The formalists had tried to certify mathematical certitude by eliminating intuitions. Gödel had shown that mathematics cannot proceed without them. Restricting ourselves to formal syntactic considerations will not even secure consistency. But these mathematical intuitions that cannot be eliminated and cannot be formalized: what are they? How do they come to be available to the likes of us? We are once again thrown up against the mysterious nature of mathematical knowledge, against the mysterious nature of ourselves as knowers of mathematics. How do we come to have the knowledge that we do? How can we? Plato himself had argued that the very fact
that our reasoning mind can come into contact with the eternal realm of abstraction suggests that there is something of the eternal in us:
that the part of ourselves that can know mathematics is the part that will survive our bodily death.
Spinoza was to argue along similar lines. (Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness, The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, 2005, p. 198-199.)