Open Integral

8 Responses to “Postformal dialectics 2”

1. Edward Berge says:

   November 6, 2007 at 8:48 am

   theurj Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2007 3:41 pm
   Post subject: Sunyata & Differance

   Lara Braitstein* relates Nagarjuna and Derrida via this excerpt:

   Something else that Nagarjuna and Derrida share, is the desire, the intent, of putting forward no view. Both are grappling with the slippery issue of trying to put into words the end of discursive thought, and both take as their method not only the destruction of the views of their opponents, but also the rereading of those thinkers who may be said to be on the ‘same side’ (other Buddhists trying to understand emptiness, for Nagarjuna; and thinkers like Heidegger and Freud for Derrida). By demonstrating how all views, just by virtue of their being views, necessarily contradict the ‘truth’ of sunyata /différance, both Nagarjuna and Derrida understand that a reader taking their work as a solid view will have made a grave error in understanding.

   To hold emptiness as a view – to reify it or think of it as the essence of things – is to misunderstand it entirely. As the goal of the MMK is to show how absurd it is to hold any view whatsoever, one may with confidence conflate sunyata with Nagarjuna’s position. Therefore, whoever takes Nagarjuna’s work as proposing a view has done something wrong. Derrida writes with more words and less drama:

   “What differs? Who differs? What is différance? If we answered these questions before examining them as questions, before turning them back on themselves, and before suspecting their very form, including what seems most natural and necessary about them, we would immediately fall back into what we just disengaged ourselves from. In effect, if we accepted the form of the question, in its meaning and its syntax (’what is?’ ‘who is?’ ‘who is it that?’), we would have to conclude that différance has been derived, has happened, is to be mastered and governed on the basis of the point a present being…a what, or a present being as a subject, a who.” (Derrida 14-15)

   In other words, asking questions of différance as though it were a concept or view like any other, immediately situates the query in precisely the conceptual context différance is meant to undermine. Put simply, “différance,” writes Derrida, “is not” (Derrida 21); “It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority” (Derrida 22) [v] .

   *Braitstein, Lara. “No views is good views: A comparative study of Nagarjuna’s Sunyata and Derrida’s Différance.” Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, 5:2, August 2004
   _________________
   Edward
2. Edward Berge says:

   November 6, 2007 at 11:34 am

   theurj Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2007 6:32 pm
   Post subject: Do the math

   Since Greg used algebraic expressions to describe postformal dialectics, for those so inclined I will include G&P’s math as it relates to Nagarjuna’s “twisted” logic. The following expands on an earlier G&P except above:

   Central to Nagarjuna’s understanding of emptiness as immanent in the conventional world is his doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness. That, we have seen, is what prevents the two truths from collapsing into an appearance/reality or phenomenon/noumenon distinction. But it is also what generates the contradictions characteristic of philosophy at the limits. We have encountered two of these, and have seen that they are intimately connected. The first is a paradox of expressibility: Linguistic expression and conceptualization can express only conventional truth; the ultimate truth is that which is inexpressible and that which transcends these limits. So it cannot be expressed or characterized. But we have just done so. The second is a paradox of ontology: All phenomena, Nagarjuna argues, are empty, and so ultimately have no nature. But emptiness is, therefore, the ultimate nature of things. So they both have and lack an ultimate nature.

   That these paradoxes involve Transcendence should be clear. In the first case, there is an explicit claim that the ultimate truth transcends the limits of language and of thought. In the second case, Nagarjuna claims that the character of ultimate reality transcends all natures. That they also involve Closure is also evident. In the first case, the truths are expressed and hence are within the limits of expressibility; and in the second case, the nature is given and hence is within the totality of all natures.

   Now consider the Inclosure Schema, introduced earlier, in a bit more detail. It concerns properties, j and y, and a function, d, satisfying the following conditions:

   (1) W={x: j(x)} exists, and y(W).
   (2) For all XÍW such that y(X):
   (i) Ød(X)eX (Transcendence)
   (ii) d(X)eW (Closure)

   Applying d to W then gives: d(W)eW and Ød(W)eW. In a picture, we may represent the situation thus:

   In Nagarjuna’s ontological contradiction, an inclosure is formed by taking:

   j(x) as ‘x is empty’
   y(X) as ‘X is a set of things with some common nature’
   d(X) as ‘the nature of things in X’

   To establish that this is an inclosure, we first note that y(W). For W is the set of things which have the nature of being empty. Now assume that XÍW and y(X), that is, that X is a set of things with some common nature. d(X) is that nature, and d(X)eW since all things are empty (Closure). It follows from this that d(X) has no nature. Hence, Ød(X)eX, since X is a set of things with some nature (Transcendence). The limit contradiction is that the nature of all things d (W)-viz. emptiness-both is and is not empty. Or to quote Nagarjuna, quoting the Prajñparamit, “All things have one nature, that is, no nature.”

   In Nagarjuna’s expressibility contradiction, an inclosure is formed by taking:

   . j(x) as ‘x is an ultimate truth’
   . y(X) as ‘X is definable’
   . d(X) as the sentence ‘there is nothing which is in D’, where ‘D’ refers to X. (If X is definable, there is such a D.)

   To establish that this is an inclosure, we first note that y(W). For ‘{x: x is an ultimate truth}’ defines W.

   Now assume that XÍW and y(X), then d(X) is a sentence which says that nothing is in X. Call this s. It is an ultimate truth that there are no ultimate truths, i.e., that there is nothing in W; and, since XÍW, it is an ultimate truth that there is nothing in X. That is, s is ultimately true: seW (Closure). For Transcendence, suppose that seX. Then seW, that is, s is an ultimate truth, and so true, i.e., nothing is in X. Hence, it is not the case that seX. The limit contradiction is that d(W), the claim that there are no ultimate truths, both is and is not an ultimate truth.

   Thus, Nagarjuna’s paradoxes are both, precisely, inclosure contradictions. These contradictions are unavoidable once we see emptiness as Nagarjuna characterizes it-as the lack of any determinate character. But this does not entail that Nagarjuna is an irrationalist, a simple mystic, or crazy; on the contrary: he is prepared to go exactly where reason takes him: to the transconsistent.
   _________________
   Edward
3. Edward Berge says:

   November 6, 2007 at 2:21 pm

   theurj Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2007 9:20 pm
   Post subject: Yogacara response to sunyata

   I came across this fascinating article today and it has some similarities to, though not identical with, what Bonnie is saying. Here are a few excerpts from the following: Pensgrad, David. “Yogacara Buddhism: a sympathetic description and suggestion for use in Western theology and philosophy of religion.” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, No. 15, Winter 2006, pp. 94-103

   Yogacara is a reaction to the sunyata position, but while Yogacara is often seen as a complete break from the doctrine of emptiness substituting a new idealism in its place, this is not the way that they themselves described their relationship to their predecessor. Asanga believed that he was correctly interpreting Nagarjuna and Madhyamaka whereas his (Nagarjuna’s) followers had failed to do so.14 Asanga wanted to “revive” philosophy by creating a robust view of the structure of consciousness through an investigation into meditation and use it to rethink the notion of emptiness so that it did not stop with the destruction of all views.15 This was the goal of the first Yogacara philosophers, to move beyond the limits incorrectly believed to be set by Nagarjuna.16

   Vasubandhu gives his definitive explanation of emptiness in the very beginning of his seminal writing, the Madhyantavibhaga. In the emptiness or voidness itself, something exists and persists. This conclusion is not found explicitly in Madhyamaka. Nonetheless, Asanga and his brother claim it was implicit.17

   Accordingly, Yogacara departs from the common Buddhist understanding not only in its view of the problem, but also in its view of the solution. From a perspective known in the west as process metaphysics, Yogacara talks about “grasper/grasped” rather than “subject/object” respectively. Yogacara, with a unique and decisive move never made in the west, also introduces a causal relationship.

   Madhyamaka was taken to be completely destructive, offering no positive argument in place of what it rejected. Nagarjuna, through his understanding of emptiness, had rejected all views as invalid.21 Interestingly, Asanga did not assert that Nagarjuna was wrong. Instead, his basic position was that, “the emptiness of things is not their nonexistence but their perfect (or absolute) existence.” In other words, he claimed that Nagarjuna was not wrong, but had merely been misunderstood; he was never promoting metaphysical nihilism.22

   The Yogacara departure from Madhyamaka comes as a critical focus upon the nature of the mind, seeking to explicitly describe the structure of consciousness as a way to reveal the path toward enlightenment.23

   While Madhyamaka denied nihilism (nastivada), they also denied being. This caused an intolerable tension that many were beginning to resolve through monism, the belief that a reality exists in higher, non-defiled states leaving only the lower physical reality as void. While some followed this path away from strict Madhyamaka teachings, Asanga and Vasubandhu were attempting to stay true to the Prajnaparamita sutras of Nagarjuna. To resolve the problem of how to teach and even understand doctrine without participating in illusion they argued that consciousness itself is dependently co-arising and must exist in illusion before awakening. Thus, “insight and doctrinal formulation” are valid “conventionally,” but not ultimately.25 Because Yogacara rejects both the object that is known as an independent substance as well as the reality of the knower, it is not idealism. Instead, it is a “critical awareness of the other-dependent relationships that condition all human thinking.”26 In other words, it is a process metaphysical view of self and physical reality without reliance upon the notion of substance in either.

   According to Vasubandhu, things are not the creation of consciousness and they are not illusory. However, things are only known as they affect consciousness. The concept of substance is the illusion.29 This distinctive perspective on what is happening in our minds allows for the resolution of many otherwise intractable problems. It indicates that untainted thought, free from all error, is attainable.

   Despite the analyses of D. T. Suzuki, Edward Conze, and others, Yogacara is not idealism. Classifying Yogacara as a form of idealism ignores the fact that it focuses upon a methodology and not a metaphysical view.

   Theodor Stcherbatsky (1866-1942), a Russian student of Eastern philosophy, was the first to notice a similarity between Yogacara philosophy and the metaphysical system of Kant. Both systems recognized the way in which the mind somehow constructs the phenomena of the sensible world.35 However, Yogacara does not make the same mistake that Kant made (along with the tradition he inspired). Yogacara claims that the thing-in-itself, the ding-an-sich, is not permanently unknowable. In fact, not only is it completely knowable, but this is the goal of Yogacara, to pierce through the erroneous conceptions that keep us from seeing things as they really are.

   The Yogacara concept of consciousness, alayavijnana (storehouse of consciousness), alaya for short, possesses a persistence through time that makes it real for all practical purposes despite its lack of eternal substance. This is the solution that overcomes the nihilism and skepticism created by various misunderstandings of Nagarjuna’s voidism.

   Yogacara has made progress in finding a way beyond our basic limitations in accessing the thing-in-itself, that is, to the Yathabhutam whose nature is voidness. It is an emptiness in the sense that it is not a substance to which we are forbidden access. Instead, Yogacara makes the claim that emptiness has reality in itself. Yogacara avoids the nihilism of its predecessor but does so by realizing that each element of reality gains its essence only from its relationship with the rest of reality, that is, context.40 As part of the context ourselves, we have access to it. In this way, Yogacara does not just mirror phenomenology in its grasp of the nature of human consciousness, it also mirrors deconstruction with its metaphysical claim that there is nothing apart from the play of differences between concepts.

   Central to Yogacara goals is an idea of deconstruction that seeks to conquer the conditions of cognition that lead to the delusion of the self. This is the very same “narcissistic self-referentiality” that has been correctly identified by Western philosophers since Kant. But this closing off of the world that makes our minds a prison is the trap that Yogacara has avoided by making the mind itself the problem rather than the means of recognizing and solving the problem. The doctrine of Vijnapti-matra is not intended to proclaim what is and is not available; it is merely an epistemological caution. The mind must recognize its own delusions in order to proceed.42 In this, we see a move similar to the one made by Derrida, but with more optimism.

   For Derrida, the Khora is that which is and is not, but which allows for the possibility of everything else. In some sense it is the basis for more complex things in the same way that paper and ink are essential for the written word and the way that dimensionality is required for the distinction between positions (as with coordinate systems).43 Yogacara philosophy sees this as the absolute of universal reason. The subject does not create the object, as in idealism, rather both the subject and the objects are created by the absolute.44 This absolute is the sunya (void). It is the matrix in which the dual opposites in tension, like subject-object, can exist.45 Derrida has formulated a nearly identical concept with respect to the text, but he does so by throwing reason into question when he identifies it with the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy. Ironically, a fully independent philosophical tradition has arrived at the same concept, indicating that it may not be logocentric (arbitrarily closed-minded with delusions of full objectivity) after all. It seems that the Yogacara teaching that the absolute is actually absolute, and therefore universal, is likely to be the better teaching.

   The key insight that Yogacara added to Buddhism was the “deconstruction of identity into alterity.”46 Alterity is the Western postmodern term for the otherness of the other, i.e. self-alienation.47 Since its beginnings, Buddhism has taught impermanence, discontinuity, and difference. The problem was that the experience of every-day life did not bear this out. Alterity resolves this problem of the apparent continuity of the self and
   the immutability of identities in general by providing a way for the self to exist (i.e. persist) without being. Like the process metaphysics of the West, the self is defined by processes instead of substances. But, going beyond the west, in both process metaphysics and phenomenology, Yogacara conceived of alterity in causal terms. Alterity is not inherent; it is caused by misconceptions. Therefore, it can be fixed!48 While noting many similarities and parallels between Yogacara and phenomenology in the West (along with the Continental tradition beginning with Husserl and running through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Lyotard, and Derrida), and while noticing that Yogacara has apparently overcome the obstacles that have stalled the progress of the Western tradition, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Yogacara is far superior, far more advanced, as Lusthaus confirms.49
4. Andy Smith says:

   November 6, 2007 at 6:35 pm

   I haven’t had time to go through all the additions to this thread, but wrt what Greg said in response to my earlier post, regardless, I don’t see that the pre/trans distinction fits this neither same nor different standard. They are quite easily discernible. That said, I do like Greg’s statement, “Which identity appears or dominates depends on context.” I would just add to context, perspective, which might be the same thing (depending on context!).

   Wrt the pre/trans distinction, pre is in fact trans in a certain context. Thus the pre aspect of a newborn human is trans relative to, or from the perspective of, an individual cell, from which it originated, though it is pre from the perspective of an ordinary human. As I have written about extensively, one can, by taking into account perspective, reduce the multitude of terms that Wilber and Mark Edwards use to describe holons to just a few. All the other prove to be the same phenomenon, just viewed from another perspective.

   Perspective in this sense–dependent on the stage or level in the holarchy– is particularly critical for humans, because we can exist at several different stages, from a very primal one close to that of the newborn to highly social ones where we in effect adopt the perspective of the entire society. However, the wave/particle dynamic, which is often used by integral thinkers as a sort of model for the neither same nor different notion, seems to be something different entirely. That is, I don’t believe that a particle is what is seen from one perspective, and a wave from another, at least not in the sense of perspective as applies to the pre/trans discussion. We can have a very good understanding of how pre and trans are different in a way that we simply can’t have with wave/particle. As I said before, the pre/trans distinction is not paradoxical. I think the wave/particle duality, at our present level of understanding, definitely is.
5. Edward Berge says:

   November 7, 2007 at 10:37 am

   bonnittaroy Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 10:44 am
   Post subject: note on emptiness

   Yes, Edward. This is a close representation of my own sense of things– and, in my opinion, a more accurate reading of Nagarjuna. When Wilber creates this notion of “emptiness” as a space or place where phenomenon arise, he is definitely not interpreting Nagarjuna or Dzogchen. Nargarjuna showed that if you pursue any phenomenon undrer rigorous logical investigation, you cannot find/establish its self-existence. Hence you find “emptiness” in the phenomena themsleves– empty, that is, of self-existence or noumenal substance. There is no place of “self-existing emptiness”!!!! That is Wilber’s extreme reification of interiority. You can however establish the inferential or relational nature of phenomenon — the favored term being co-dependent origination.

   Therefore there is no space of place that is like a completely empty view. Phenomena that constitute one’s view are in relation. The more that relation is transparent, the less restricted is our view– the greater degree of freedom. It’s like the difference between looking through a peephole and mistaking that for everything under the sun. When you widen the view, you see that the trees are in relation to the larger forest, etc…

   To say “be mindful of your view” means, for me, to be mindful of the boundary conditions that are your limitations, and also of the processes that create the relations and inferential aspects of your reality at any given moment. To be mindful that all these co-dependent aspects are shaping and shifting your view, and to be able to see/feel into those aspects as they originate.

   Thereafter, we cultivate the capacity to creatively engage the processes of relation .. (theoretic inferences, aesthetic ideals, structural patterns and the like) through our cognitive apparatus, and actively change the way we be/do in the world such that it has beneficial results — what the Dalai Lama called “genuine happiness”.

   Hmmm. Now that would be nice.

   thanks for the link. it was a good read on a late day at work.

   Bonnie

   theurj Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 3:33 pm
   Post subject: question

   So I have a question then Bonnie. To relate this to our topic of postformal dialectics, if I understand you correctly the polar pairs are “dissolved” or “resolved” in the experience of the ontological dimension via “nondual” awareness. It seems this OD is what you refer to in Dzogchen as the “unbounded wholeness,” or what above is referred to as “Yathabhutam,” that voidness that has existence, i.e., the “thing-in-itself.” And further, we know that it exists because we has the capacity to experience it firsthand, “untainted…free from all error.”

   Now I can see that this might be so in the context of codependent origination, as the article notes that we and our awareness, as part of that origination, have a built-in “access to it.” So in that sense this isn’t a “metaphysical” position of a subject experiencing a transcendent or noumenal object but a dynamical, contextual relationship between the two. Where I’m still a bit confused is as Greg notes above:

   Quote:
   The possibility of self-definition would seem to imply the possibility of a core identity that could be self-evidently grasped in a revelatory intuition apart from all intrusions and destabilizations of difference and relation. This self-definition, to the extent it implies a kind of self-presence, appears to fall within the metaphysical claims Derrida thoroughly targets in deconstruction. But if I am misunderstanding your sense her, Bonnie, please let me know.
   ________________
   Edward

   bonnittaroy Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 5:25 pm
   Post subject: self-definition

   Greg, Edward,

   I realize that my terminology vis-a-vis binaries that “self-define” leads to a misunderstanding. With respect to what you are talking about, by self-define, I mean mutually define. “Unity” and “multiplicity” co-define — they don’t have a separate definition from their binary partner.

   In another respect, I prefer the term self-define, because I see them as arising in a kind of epistemological field, call it the “unity-multiplicity field”, where they are not oppositional binaries, but appositional complements (or conceptual boundaries, as it were) that self-define the completeness of that field.

   The field itself, I consider a kind of generative process.

   Sorry…

   That’s the best I can do in “definition mode”>

   Bonnie
6. Edward Berge says:

   November 7, 2007 at 7:43 pm

   bonnittaroy Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 5:55 pm
   Post subject: process mode

   If I get out of “define mode” and move onto “process mode”, I would answer something like this:

   As concepts “unity” and “multiplicity” are binaries that co-define and usually considered as oppositional “structures”. But what if I avoid the step of reifying the concepts in the first place? In this case I relax into a kind of fuzzy distribution field, a cognitive field and phenomena arise as variants within this field — with relative degrees (or felt intensities) of “unity-multplicity”. Its like hot-cold. Those are two concepts, which actually measure one “thing”, that is a kind of energy. Given one range of energy, we say “cold”, another range, we say “hot”. There is a kind of subjective threshold that turns the “switch” over to the one or the other concept.

   B.
7. Edward Berge says:

   November 7, 2007 at 7:45 pm

   theurj Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 6:28 pm
   Post subject: Play it again Jacques

   And here are some excerpts from Richard Carlson, a former participant in IR dialogs. Here he comes at the relation of Derrida and Dzogchen (and Keller) from another angle. From “On the alliance of Being in a single word (Dzogs-chen, Derrida, and Helen Keller).” Science, Culture and Integral Yoga, 5/6/07

   Such [Dzogchen] concepts seem in tune with how Jacques Derrida describes “differance” – the play of trace and erasure – as unnamable. Derrida, it seems has been doing more than playing clever Sophist tricks with spelling, he writes: “This unnamable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, re-inscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is skill part of the game, a function of the system. “(Derrida 1982)

   But the unnameable it seems is beyond Being entirely for Derrida does not just assert that the play of Differance is identical to Being, rather he boldly claims that Differance precedes Being. That is, if Being is to be seen as always and every where speaking throughout language, its speech is ordered by Differance. That is, Being is not authored by a thing but rather by an absence. By ordering the relationship within the system of signification Differance disrupts the alliance of Being in any one word (das einzige Wort) After Differance there is only the trace; a trace that is always under erasure.

   As Derrida describes it differance appears to express something similar to what is experienced in the dynamic meditative praxis of Dzogs-chen which engages similar phenomenal transformations that do not result in static end states but rather are the continuous processes of unfolding mental morphologies. These phenomenal transformations are not simply speech acts but rather are the outcome of the process of creative imagination and spontaneous “play”.

   Derrida takes his notion of play from the Greeks, who named this type of play: “Pharmakon”. The pharmakon acts not only as a bridge between two supposedly opposite elements, but also as a subversive device which erases the difference between the elements it bridges and assumes both their identities in a singular instance. Guenther’s references play by instancing the medieval Tibetan Dzogs-chen monk “Klong-chen-rab-byams-pa” who considers it in terms of evolution. He writes: “the principles of evolution “seeing” to it that structures that evolve do so in the manner of free play that determines its own rules of the play goes on. The play itself maybe likened to a giant fluctuation preparing the meaning, a process of tuning in to dynamics of the whole, to its movement toward its next structure. What is in a static world view the end is in a dynamic, evolutionary world view is always a new beginning” (Guenther 1989)

   The real work of moving toward post-conventional consciousness seems to also involve play and a “tuning into” the unfolding resonance of Being. The play of “tuning in” enables one to cross over the binary oppositions of representational thought and eventually experience non-dual states of consciousness. The universalizing of consciousness toward non-duality may in fact travel along a spectrum of identification with the world through Being, in a play of consciousness seeking out its hidden essence. However, if play is the process of post-conventional consciousness can it both “tune into” Being and disclose “the sign” which expresses the epochal moment in which thought is poised to become enfolded in Being?

   If the co-dependent arising of phenomena from Dzogs-chen meditation practice converges in a certain way with “differance” it returns us to the problem of “the sign” and the alignment of language with thought and thought with Being. After considering the dynamic nature of mind which Dzogs-chen presents and the overturning of the metaphysics of presence which Derrida’s accomplishes by positing Differance as preceding Being, is there a way to reconsider Being in which we also may experience its presencing through the one word?

   theurj Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 2:41 am
   Post subject: All for one and one for all

   Debashish sums up Richard’s essay nicely (Thu 10 May 2007 11:59 AM PDT at the article link):

   Differance in Derrida asserts the irreducible infinity of the spatial and temporal language-world (world of language and world as language) birthed through the irreducible duality of absence-presence of Being in Becoming. It is this irreducible singularity of the Each which makes it also the Only in its non-dual co-dependent Existence.
8. Edward Berge says:

   November 8, 2007 at 6:31 pm

   Gregory Desilet Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 7:42 pm

   Thanks for your clarification in the post above Bonnie:

   Quote:
   I realize that my terminology vis-a-vis binaries that “self-define” leads to a misunderstanding. With respect to what you are talking about, by self-define, I mean mutually define. “Unity” and “multiplicity” co-define — they don’t have a separate definition from their binary partner.

   For me it’s a little easier to understand the notion of “co-define.” I see this as also complementary to the notion of “co-origination.” Neither unity nor multiplicity is prior to the other; both originate simultaneously (or to get away from the concept of origins–both always were and always will be). I also now see the relevance of “self-define” if we emphasize the unity rather than the multiplicity. This seems like another aspect of the problem we have been encountering in thinking about postformal thinking. How to talk about that which is both one and two. But more about this and the ontology of difference in a separate post.

   Regarding Andy Smith’s comment:

   Quote:
   We can have a very good understanding of how pre and trans are different in a way that we simply can’t have with wave/particle. As I said before, the pre/trans distinction is not paradoxical. I think the wave/particle duality, at our present level of understanding, definitely is.

   For Derrida the distinction between, say, two sides in an oppositional structure is not in itself paradoxical. The difference between pre and trans may be clear, as in the case of wave and particle, but the fact that two different (and what to a large extent appear to be mutually exclusive) predicates both apply to the “same” entity is what produces the paradox. For Derrida all texts are paradoxical in this sense insofar as you agree that texts present themselves in ways analogous to the famous “duck/rabbit” gestalt. Two different senses (and perhaps more) can be made that are both supported by the factual elements depending on how one may frame or contextualize. The senses alternate and shift one to the other but do not appear simultaneously (though, in a sense, they are both there simultaneously). Such circumstances, however, do not preclude the possibility of forming a judgment about which interpretation might be better for given purposes at a given time. Such judgments involve a recontextualization that will draw out or expose the superiority of a particular interpretation for those purposes (this gets us into the art of rhetoric and the giving of reasons for judgments as opposed to judgment by fiat).

   The Pre/Trans Fallacy Wilber discusses would never emerge as a problem or confusion were it not the case that certain situations or behaviors to which they are applied can support both interpretations. Reframing the general situation within a more encompassing recontextualization allows Wilber to expose certain applications of Pre or Trans as fallacies. To the extent you are persuaded he is correct, you buy his recontextualization and he emerges as a good rhetorician or philosopher. Some physicists have tried to do something similar with the wave/particle situation by showing that the applicability of both predicates to the same entity is a confusion or the result of illusion. We have yet to see a recontextualization that convincingly sorts this out–but one may come along (which will then only open up new lines of difference).

   The contrast Andy sees between the Pre/Trans difference and the wave/particle difference may result from not finding the former as compelling an instance of the “duck/rabbit” phenomenon as the latter. Yet he has supplied instances in which both the Pre and Trans descriptors may be seen to apply to the same “entity” through a shift in contextualization. And yes, I do think that for the purposes of this discussion context and perspective may be regarded as interchangeable.