In my quest to go postmetaphysical a few of my several concerns follow: 1) How to interpret states and stages of consciousness; 2) How to practice secular meditation free from metaphysical baggage; and 3) How to share the former in a contemporary, western community with a focus on some form of liberation, or at least alleviation, of human suffering. Stephen Batchelor has been invaluable in this quest. (See our prior discussion of him here.) One of his essays is instructive along these lines, “The agnostic Buddhist: a secular vision of dharma practice.” Here are a few select excerpts:

It is important to distinguish between those questions that are addressed by the core teachings of the Buddha, and those which are not really of central concern. I was listening on the radio not long ago in England to a discussion about religious belief. All of the participants were engaged in a heated discussion about the possibility of miracles. It is generally assumed that being a religious person entails believing certain things about the nature of oneself and reality in general that are beyond the reach of reason and empirical verification. What happened before birth, what will happen after death, the nature of the soul and its relation to the body: these are first and foremost religious questions. And the Buddha was not interested in them. But if we look at Buddhism historically, we’ll see that it has continuously tended to lose this agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalised as a religion, with all of the usual dogmatic belief systems that religions tend to have. So, ironically, if you were to go to many Asian countries today, you would find that the monks and priests who control the institutional bodies of Buddhism would have quite clear views on whether the world is eternal or not, what happens to the Buddha after death, the status of the mind in relation to the body, and so on.

So, what would an agnostic Buddhist be like today? How would we even start to think about such a stance? Firstly, I would suggest that an agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma or the teachings of the Buddha as a source which would provide answers to questions of where we are going, where we are coming from, what is the nature of the universe, and so on. In this sense, an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena and in this sense would not be religious. I’ve recently started saying to myself: “I’m not a religious person,” and finding that to be strangely liberating. You don’t have to be a religious [or spiritual] person in order to practice the Dharma.

Secondly, an agnostic Buddhist would not look to the Dharma for metaphors of consolation. This is another great trait of religions: they provide consolation in the face of birth and death; they offer images of a better afterlife; they offer the kind of security that can be achieved through an act of faith. I’m not interested in that. The Buddha’s teachings are confrontative; they’re about truth-telling, not about painting some pretty picture of life elsewhere. They’re saying: “Look, existence is painful.” This is what is distinctive about the Buddhist attitude: it starts not from the promise of salvation, but from valuing that sense of existential anguish we tend either to ignore, deny or avoid through distractions.

“Emptiness” is a singularly unappetising term. I don’t think it was ever meant to be attractive. Herbert Guenther once translated it as “the open dimension of being,” which sounds a lot more appealing than “emptiness.” “Transparency” was a term I played with for a while, which also makes emptiness sound more palatable. Yet we have to remember that even two thousand years ago Nagarjuna was having to defend himself against the nihilistic implications of emptiness. Many of the chapters in his philosophical works start with someone objecting: “This emptiness is a terrible idea. It undermines all grounds for morality. It undermines everything the Buddha was speaking about.” Clearly the word did not have a positive ring back then either. I suspect that it might have been used quite consciously as an unappealing term, which cuts through the whole fantasy of consolation that one might expect a religion to provide. Perhaps we need to recover this cutting-edge of emptiness, its unappealing aspect.

I like to think of the Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree not as some kind of transcendental absorption, but as a moment of total shock. Neils Bohr once said about quantum mechanics: “If you’re not shocked by quantum theory, then you don’t understand it.” I think we could say the same about emptiness: If you’re not shocked by emptiness, then you haven’t understood it.

Now, whether we follow the Indo-Tibetan analytical approach or the Zen approach of asking a koan like “What is this?,” such meditative inquiry leads to a mind that becomes more still and clear. But paradoxically this does not mean that things then become more clear-cut, that you reach some final understanding of who you are or of what makes the universe tick. Because, at the same time as such things become more vivid and clear, they also become more baffling. One encounters, as it were, the sheer mystery of things. A deep agnosticism would be one founded on this kind of unknowing: the acknowledgement that, in terms of what life really is, I really do not know. And in that unknowing there is already a quality of questioning, of perplexity. And as that perplexity becomes stabilised through meditation, one enters increasingly into a world that is mysterious, magical in a sense, and not containable by narrow ideas and concepts.

But this is not where the practice ends. This is only half the project. What we also discover in this open space, in this mysterious experience of non-self, are the wellsprings of creativity and imagination…. The process of articulating the Dharma goes on and on according to the needs of the different historical situations that it encounters. We could read the whole history of Buddhism, from the moment of the Buddha’s awakening until now, as a process of seeking to imagine a way to respond both wisely and compassionately to the situation at hand.

All of us have experiences of what it means to imagine and create something. It struck me very forcibly one day…that preparing myself to put into words what had not yet been put into words was to enter a very similar frame of mind to that of sitting on a cushion in a zendo, asking: “What is this?” The creative process seemed very comparable to the meditative process. Awakening is only complete — in the same way that a work of art is only complete — when it finds an expression, a form, that translates that experience in a way that makes it accessible to others. That again is the balance between wisdom and compassion. The creative process of expressing the Dharma is not just a question of duplicating in words something etched somewhere in the privacy of my soul. The living process of understanding is formed through the encounter with another person, with the world. You’ve probably all had the experience of someone coming to you in a state of distress and blurting out their problems, and you suddenly find yourself saying things that you were quite unaware you knew. The process of awakening is one of valuing and connecting with that capacity to respond in authentic ways to the suffering of others. The imagination is the bridge between contemplative experience and the anguish of the world. By valuing imagination, we value the capacity of each person, each community, to imagine and create themselves anew.

In the contemporary world Buddhism encounters a culture that places a positive value on the power of each individual’s creativity and imagination. It’s interesting that in most Buddhist traditions these things are not strongly encouraged, or, if they are, it’s usually only within highly formalised settings. I like to think of Dharma practice today as venturing into a world of imagination, one in which each individual, each community, seeks to express and to articulate their vision in terms of the particular needs of their own situation. Buddhism would then become less and less the preserve of an institution, and more and more an experience that is owned by ordinary people in ordinary communities.

Of course, there are dangers here. But these are hardly new. Historically, Buddhism has always had to find ways of responding effectively to the danger of becoming too acculturated, of becoming too absorbed into the assumptions of the host culture. Certainly such a danger exists here in the West: Buddhism might, for example, tend to become a kind of souped-up psychotherapy. But there’s the equal danger of Buddhism holding on too fiercely to its Asian identity and remaining a marginal interest amongst a few eccentrics. Somehow we have to find a middle way between these two poles, and this is a challenge which is not going to be worked out by academics or Buddhist scholars; it’s a challenge that each of us is asked to meet in our own practice from day to day.

[As usual much more in comments.]

Gregory Desilet Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 9:08 pm

In the posts of Bonnie, Edward, and myself I get a sense that we are circling or converging around the problematic of how to discuss or put into words (or refine in words) what Derrida (and Heidegger) refer to as “the being of Being.” Getting a handle on this, as Wilber and many others have intuited, is crucial to the formation of viable spirituality. I sense that we all find important clues or guides in the work of particular Buddhist theorists such as Nagarjuna and Western philosophers such as Derrida. I would like to add thoughts from a commentator on Deleuze, Todd May. I’ve been reading him recently and I think much of what Deleuze says (via May) adds to and may help to clarify some of the similarities in what each of us has been saying. I think it also helps to clarify the position of language in all of this. I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I think it will be worth the time.

Here is May in a discussion of Deleuze on “difference”:

Quote:
We might say that difference is the overflowing character of things themselves, their inability to be wrestled into categories of representation. If we say this, however, we must again be careful. There is no strategy of resistance among things. Being is not bothered when it is represented. Rather, being is always more and therefore other than what representation posits for it. The world (or what there is) is in its very character a transgression of the categories of any representational thought; it is an offense to both good sense and common sense . . . Behind the identities the dogmatic image of thought presents to us, difference is what there is. This difference may be virtual, but it is not transcendent. It is there, coiled in the heart of things. It is of their very nature. When Deleuze says that difference is behind everything, we should not take him to mean that it is beyond everything. It is behind things, but still within them (p. 82).

Having tried to think difference in relation to being (to ontology) and the nature of nature or the nature of things, Deleuze (as May understands him) then reflects on language:

Quote:
But what about language itself? If we are to reject the conception of the world offered to us by the dogmatic image of thought, are we also to reject the image of language as seeking to represent that world? The world, being, overflows representational categories. Does language itself also overflow those categories? (p. 96)

Having asked these questions, Deleuze believes the problem must be approached in a particular way:

Quote:
The challenge Deleuze confronts is to substitute for the representational view of language a view that allows it to overflow the categories of representation. He needs to construct, alongside his ontology, a view of language adequate to that ontology. Just as he finds a difference in being that resists capture by the stable categories of the dogmatic image of thought, so he must find in the language in which he tells us about this difference something that, equally, resists those stable categories. He must make the language of his ontology resonate with the same irrecuperable energy that he has discovered in the ontology itself. In short, he must offer us what he calls a logic of sense (p. 97).

To use Heidegger’s phrase, language as “the house of being,” as it is brought to reflect being, can (ultimately) do nothing other than reflect the core of being, however problematic or paradoxical that core may be. In this sense language, life, and world are of a piece and theorists such as Wilber, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. are right to believe that what we may believe about one necessarily involves us in a web that structures what we come to believe about the others. A theory of being is a theory of language; a theory of language is a theory of being. And a theory of language is also a theory of life.

May then moves on to discuss the relationship between Deleuze’s notions of sense and nonsense:

Quote:
It is because there is nonsense, because something can bring together the series that is being (or the world) and the series that is language and circulate between and among them, that there can be sense. Sense is an effect of nonsense: it is caused by this bringing together and it arises on its surface. It is like a sound effect or an optical effect because it is not produced by nonsense in any traditional causal sense. It is not like the sound that is produced when a bat hits a ball. Sense is incorporeal; it is not inserted into the causal order of material things. Optical effects and sound effects happen when a certain way of being seen or being heard emerges from an optical or sonic arrangement. What are called optical illusions are like this. Draw a certain pattern on paper and the eyes see something more than is drawn. This doesn’t just have to do with the lines on the paper, nor with the eyes, but with what happens between them, with what Deleuze might call a certain nonsense that circulates in their interaction. So it is with sense. Nonsense circulates between and among the differences of language and the world. In that circulation, language and the world offer certain ways of being “proposed.” A “proposition,” which is what has a sense, is a way of their being proposed. It is both an effect of that circulation and a proposal within language for the world (pp. 108-109).

Deleuze’s “nonsense” is probably another notion that parallels Derrida’s understanding of khora and Buddhist uses of the notion of “emptiness.”

With Deleuze’s explanation it becomes possible to understand why language ought not to be regarded as inadequate or deficient any more so than we ought to regard being or the world as inadequate or deficient. It is part of the nature of “what is.” And if “what is” is essentially lacking in something–that would be compared to what? This suggests approaching language as a joy and an opportunity for creation/discovery–much like music. So while we may all wrestle with language in the effort to see and communicate the world, I believe the more we understand and appreciate how it works (or seems to fail to work) the closer we get to understanding being as well as our own human nature.

theurj Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 10:06 pm
Post subject: whatchamacallit

Greg’s last post reflects back on Richard’s in that we struggle to “name” the unnamable, and with Bonnie’s term “process” as a way to describe that which cannot be fixed. Because yes, language is also part of the codependent orgination, within and of it, and like a direct experience of nondual awaress the proper words can and must enact the same experience. It is not as though we have a pure experience free of thought or language, as if the latter were profane or apart from it. I think David Loy[1] sums it up well in this interview:

“Well, this relates to the way we understand spirituality and meditation. For example, we often tend to understand meditation—in Zen especially—as getting rid of thoughts. We think that if we can just get rid of thought, then we can see the world as it is, clearly, without any interference from conceptuality. We view thinking as something negative that has to be eliminated in order to realize the emptiness of the mind. But this reflects the delusion of duality, rather than the solution to duality. As Dogen put it, the point isn’t to get rid of thought, but to liberate thought. Form is emptiness, yet emptiness is also form, and our emptiness always takes form. We don’t realize our emptiness apart from form, we realize it in form, as non-attached form. One of the very powerful and creative ways that our emptiness takes form is as thought. The point isn’t to have some pure mind, untainted by thought, like a blue, completely empty sky with no clouds. After a while that gets a little boring! Rather, one should be able to engage or play with the thought processes that arise in a creative, non-attached, nondualistic way. To put it in another way, the idea isn’t to get rid of all language, it’s to be free within language, so that one is non-attached to any particular kind of conceptual system, realizing that there are many possible ways of thinking and expressing oneself. The freedom from conceptualizing that we seek does not happen when we wipe away all thoughts; instead, it happens when we’re not clinging to, or stuck in, any particular thought system. The kind of transformation we seek in our spiritual practices is a mind that’s flexible, supple. Not a mind that clings to the empty blue sky. It’s a mind that’s able to dance with thoughts, to adapt itself according to the situation, the needs of the situation. It’s not an empty mind which can’t think. It’s an ability to talk with the kind of vocabulary or engage in the way that’s going to be most helpful in that situation.”

One of the better ways to “name” this nondual singularity for Derrida, as Greg points out, is via the khora. John Caputo[2] says:

“Khora is neither present nor absent, active nor passive, the Good nor evil, living nor nonliving….Khora has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon….Khora is not even a third kind, because it is not a kind, a genos, at all but is radically singular, as if she/it were a singular individual with a proper name (35-6).”

[1] “Lack and Liberation is Self and Society: An interview with David Loy.” Holos: Forum for a New Worldview, 1:1 2005
[2] Caputo, John (1997), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Gregory Desilet Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 5:47 pm

Edward raises a couple of points via Andy Smith relating to basic issues in deconstructive and post-formal thinking. A question arises regarding Gary’s citation of Grof (page 145 in Gary’s essay) which I in turn cited:

Quote:
“… the distinction between pre- and trans- has a paradoxical nature; they are neither identical, nor are they completely different from each other”

Andy comments:

Quote:
“I agree that pre and trans are neither identical nor completely different. I don’t agree that this relationship constitutes a paradox. There are, obviously, many phenomena about which such a relationship can be said, without their being considered paradoxical. Indeed, almost any two things are neither identical nor completely different.”

I believe Grof’s point (and Gary’s) concerns the identity/difference between two “classes” of things rather than between “any two things.” The idea being that in formal thinking something is either a duck or a rabbit or a wave or a particle or pre- or trans- but not both. In the next paragraph, citing Jenny Wade, Gary explains, “A framing that Wade uses in relation to either/or (pre-postformal) thinking is constituted by the metaphor of Newtonian physics: ‘Regression and transcendence are neither opposite nor the same, though they may appear to be in a Newtonian conceptualization.’”

The pre-postformal approach relies on concepts regarded as discrete and mutually exclusive. The post-formal approach also relies on concepts regarded as discrete but with the added complexity that these are not mutually exclusive. In post-formal logic something can both be x and not-x with seemingly contradictory qualities at the same time (as in particle/wave). Which identity appears or dominates depends on context. And this situation is a bit of a paradox and would seem nonrational if there were not the evidence of observation to support it.

Moving to another question Andy says,

Quote:
What I don’t understand is how one can denote terms like “polarization” and “scapegoating” or even “less destructive violence”, without privileging one aspect of a dialectic over another. In other words, how does one accept Derrida’s argument without falling into a fatalistic, everything-is-as-it-is view? It seems to me that any attempt to define where we want to go or how we want society to be is just more privileging of one pair over the other—a form of polarizing or rigidifying.

Deconstruction does not operate “without privileging one aspect of a dialectic over another.” In fact, the deconstructive examination of texts (and here I continue associating deconstruction with post-formal thinking) demonstrates that privileging of one sort or another is inescapable in any act of interpretation. Part of the deconstructive work consists of exposing subtle interests or values that may be privileged in a given dialectic or interpretation.

Here a confusion perhaps arises from the deconstructive critique of polarization whereby (in formal and pre-formal thinking) oppositional structure presents itself as consisting of discrete and mutually exclusive poles. One pole appears as “pure,” “whole,” and “good” while the other pole appears as an impurity or contamination of the whole. Furthermore, this built-in hierarchy of the pure over the impure presents itself as a fixed and absolute hierarchy immune to alteration or context. This kind of radically exclusive and permanently fixed privileging—not all privileging whatsoever—emerges as a primary target of deconstructive critique. With other less rigid, more context sensitive modes of privileging and evaluation remaining to it, deconstruction separates itself from fatalism or the resignation to vicious relativism that concerns Andy.

Consistent with this approach, even the radically exclusive privileging deconstruction targets is not thereby “radically excluded” (as an “impurity”). It remains a valuable developmental stage of reasoning and evaluation from which, to borrow Gary’s phrase, “the way out is through.” Consequently, deconstruction offers a complex but consistent “logic” and an inclusiveness that does not preclude choices based on evaluation and judgment. And this bodes well for the unique value and possibilities of what may be regarded as a brand of post-formal thinking.

Gregory Desilet Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:28 pm

Picking up here on something Bonnie says above:

Quote:
“My sense is that it is not the fault of language that we have divided our understanding into binary pairs – but that language merely reflects a deeper human condition, a more primordial arising in which that division occurs. The importance of the “postmodern project” is to de-couple the process in which language is a powerful feedback mechanism which reinforces the primordial boundaries continua-dually arising at a more fundamental level.”

I think you are correct to say the fault is not with language—that there is a deeper origin but I don’t agree that the postmodern project (specifically deconstruction) is not “sufficient to the task” of addressing or appreciating this point (as you say just before this). Edward’s post regarding Derrida’s commentary on Plato’s Khora offers a case in point. Also Derrida’s concept (or as he sometimes says “nonconcept”) of différance is another example. Différance as a generative operation penetrates deeper than language and, as Derrida argues in his famous essay “Différance”: “Older than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language” (Margins of Philosophy, p. 26).

But, to be clear, what you say in the quote above pertains to “binary pairs” which may perhaps be distinguished from operations of différance. If so, you may be questioning more the arising of oppositional pairs and the feedback mechanism language provides for this rather than the broader notion of the arising of differences. As a way of addressing this distinction while also addressing your initial post (under Wilberian theory vs. post-formal reasoning) regarding “clarification on what we are considering to be post-formal dialectics” I offer the following attempt at clarification (while also risking confusing the issue!—but, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained).

Post-formal dialectics vs. formal dialectics:

Post-formal says—see x as y; this is a metaphorical (or, if you will, an analogical) operation turning on what some call a “root metaphor.” To that extent it has also been thought of as a nondialectical alternative insofar as it exceeds definition (or identity) through opposition.

Formal says: see x as the opposite of y; this is a traditionally dialectical operation involving discrete separation between x and y and the securing of the identity of x through y as its opposite.

Formal dialectics invites the tendency to evaluate and hierarchize to the extreme that one side of the opposition functions as the corruption or pollution of the other. Here dialectics becomes an operation of sorting and evaluating difference by radical exclusion. On the other hand, the post-formal sorts differences (Gary has used the word “contrasts”) by way of judgments and evaluations that continue to include even as they appear to exclude (a move consistent with appreciating the economy/ecology of being, according an essential role to every aspect of being)

In the post-formal approach:

See x as y =

see y as x-differed, deferred

and also

= see x as x-differed, deferred

(For Derrida’s elaboration on this see Margins of Philosophy p. 17).

Drawing temporality and context into consideration, it also becomes possible to understand the sense in which x is not equal to x. This, of course, challenges the law of identity—the cornerstone of traditional Aristotelian logic.

The post-formal claim that x is not equal to itself would seem to preclude the suggestion offered by Bonnie “that post-formal thinking sees dialectical pairs as self-defining.” 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.

Given this analysis, I see overlap between deconstruction and excerpts Edward has posted from the interpretation of Nagarjuna and also Faber on Whitehead. Although difficult to put into words, something like the following from Faber seems like a good stab at it (as cited by Edward in a post above):

Quote:
“In the Category of the Ultimate, ultimate reality appears as a triangle of generalities in process: unification of multiplicities; multiplication of unities; and their rhythmic togetherness as creative advance into novelty. Every unity becomes a unique unification of its prehensive relations within a virtually infinite multitude, and in its perishing it generates the multiplication of this multitude. In fact, in this fluent Chaosmos nothing is ultimate—neither unity nor multiplicity—there is only unification and multiplication immersed in the rhythm of an endlessly cyclical process of relational transcendence or of self-transcending relativity.”

Gary Hampson: Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 6:07 am

There seems to be some heat gathering in the Wilberian Theory vs Post-formal Reasoning discussion thread regarding dialectics:

Daniel Gustav Anderson has foregrounded the importance of dialectics with regard to integral theory, whilst he, Bonnitta Roy and Edward Berge (theurj) introduce various Buddhist dialectical understandings.

Bonnitta also distinguishes between formal dialectics (as thesis-antithesis-synthesis) and postformal dialectics (as invovling self-defining pairs).

It seems pertinent to give this topic its own discussion thread: et voilà!

theurj: Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 5:26 pm

Let’s go back to what Bonnie said in the “Wilberian theory vs post-formal reasoning” thread:

“It is my feeling that dialectics in the above forms, is formal, not postformal, because it relies on the positing of opposite pairs, which it considers in some kind of tension. I believe that post-formal thinking sees dialectical pairs as self-defining, and therefore the tension is ‘resolved’ or ‘dissolved’ before the is any kind of movement toward synthesis.

“This open up into entirely new ways of thinking/ perceiving more in terms of ‘constellations’ (hunting for the right words here) and what the Buddhists call co-dependent origination.”

This will of course relate to the “Buddhist” nondual traditions and how they formulate the “two truths” and (co)dependent origination. So lets first take a look at how Ken formulates the two truths (absolute and relative) from footnote 7 to Excerpt C:

“Is there any perception that is not a perspective? Yes, I believe so, and it has to do with satori or nondual awareness (or pure Emptiness–consciousness without an object, which is therefore consciousness without a perspective), which I will explore in later excerpts. The conclusion of this integral reformulation of the wisdom traditions is that samsara (or the world of Form) is composed of perspectives, and nirvana (or Emptiness) is pure perception without an object or perspective. The union of Emptiness and Form is thus the union of perception and perspective, where in my pure perception I am one with everything that is arising (although as expressed through my own individual perspective, with which I am no longer exclusively identified). Finding Emptiness is a freedom from all perspectives (a nirvana free of samsara); a union with Form is finding the Fullness of perspectives that alone can express this Freedom (the nonduality of nirvana and samsara). Wisdom is transcending perspectives, compassion is embracing them all.”

We have aperspectival, nondual satori on the one hand and relative, perspectival consciousness on the other hand which requires a “union” or synthesis. This is the “dual” nonduality to which I refer, or as Bonnie describes it, the formal operational way of relating them.

So let’s bring in Madhyamika, Nagarjuna’s dialectical method for handling the two truths. And here I must provide the disclaimer that there are numerous interpretations of this, all claiming to have the “true” interpretation handed down in a direct lineage from Nagarjuna. I will of course present my own biased preference in trying to show how this form of nonduality does not see the two truths as opposites in tension but as a self-defining pair and dissolved without synthesis, or “postformally” by the working definition above. And then I will show how Derrida does the same thing, in his own fashion.

I have a bias for Stephen Batchelor’s and Garfield & Priest’s interpretations of Madhyamikan nonduality. Batchelor says on the two truths:

“’Very often,’ says Maurice Walshe in the introduction to his translation of the Long Discourses of the Buddha (Digha Nikaya), ‘the Buddha talks in the Suttas in terms of conventional or relative truth (sammuti-sacca), according to which people and things exist just as they appear to the naïve understanding. Elsewhere, however, when addressing and audience capable of appreciating his meaning, he speaks in terms of ultimate truth (paramattha-sacca).’

‘This passage confirms a view familiar to all Buddhists, no matter what school to which they belong. It is technically known as the doctrine of the Two Truths, according to which reality is divided into two “levels”: the conventional and the ultimate, the relative and the absolute – or, as I translated it somewhere – the partial and the sublime.

“It might come as a surprise, therefore – particularly after having just read the words of an eminent translator of the Buddha’s word – to learn that nowhere among the discourses (sutta) in the Pali canon does the Buddha use such terms. This famous distinction between “relative” and “absolute” truth is entirely alien to these early texts. One can certainly interpret his teaching through the lens of such an idea (which, if you read the passage carefully, is what Maurice Walshe does) but bear in mind that the distinction itself is one the Buddha never employed.

“The notion of Two Truths goes entirely against the grain of what the Buddha taught. Siddhattha Gotama’s teaching is not founded on absolutes of any kind. He avoids the deeply ingrained assumption of much religious thought that reality is somehow split down the middle (God and Creation / Brahman and Maya / Nirvana and Samsara / Emptiness and Form). Ironically, of course, such divisions are blatantly dualistic – a position most Buddhists are supposed to be at pains to avoid.

“In one of the most succinct accounts of his enlightenment, the Buddha speaks of awakening to “dependent origination,” a truth that is “hard to see” since it “goes against the worldly stream.” (Ariyapariyesana Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 26, section 19). In modern parlance, his insight was counterintuitive. Why? because it went against two “streams”: our instinctive mental habit to split reality into two, and the outward expression of that habit in religious doctrines such as the Two Truths. The Buddha awakened to a glittering plurality of endlessly arising and vanishing phenomena. No God created it; no Mind underpins it; no Unconditioned lies somewhere outside it. Ethics, meditation and wisdom are not founded on some absolute truth, but grow out of a careful examination of what causes suffering and what brings it to an end. Enlightenment, for the Buddha, entailed simply paying attention to the phenomenal flux of your own empirical experience.

“The doctrine of the Two Truths seems to have emerged fairly soon after the Buddha’s death. It is not a later Mahayana idea; for it was already taken for granted in the early Abhidhamma. I suspect that it was the first step in the progressive brahminization of Buddhism in India. The Two Truth doctrine is strikingly reminiscent of the Upanishadic teaching that the world of appearances is an illusion (maya) that separates us from the transcendent, absolute reality of God (brahman). But that, of course, was the worldview the Buddha sought to abandon. He wanted to replace it with another way of seeing things altogether: the radical contingency of all existence, devoid of any intrinsic self-essence or God.”

Granted this form of “dissolution” claims the Buddha never made any such claim for two truths to begin with, which is pre-Madhyamika. So let’s look at how Garfield & Priest[1] dissolve it from the Madhyamikan aperspective:

“With arguments such as the preceding one, Nagarjuna establishes that everything is empty, contingently dependent on other things—dependently co-arisen, as it is often put. We must take the ‘everything’ here very seriously, though. When Nagarjuna claims that everything is empty, ‘everything’ includes emptiness itself. The emptiness of something is itself a dependently co-arisen property of that thing. The emptiness of emptiness is perhaps one of the most central claims of the MMK.6 Nagarjuna devotes much of chapter 7 to this topic. In that chapter, using some of the more difficult arguments of the MMK, he reduces to absurdity the assumption that dependent co-arising is itself an (ultimately) existing property of things.

“For Western philosophers it is very tempting to adopt a Kantian understanding of Nagarjuna (as is offered, e.g., in Murti 1955). Identify conventional reality with the phenomenal realm, and ultimate reality with the noumenal, and there you have it. But this is not Nagarjuna’s view. The emptiness of emptiness means that ultimate reality cannot be thought of as a Kantian noumenal realm. For ultimate reality is just as empty as conventional reality. Ultimate reality is hence only conventionally real! The distinct realities are therefore identical.”[2]

The article then goes into the complex dialectic of how this is so, given that it is indeed a “contradiction” from a formal operational perspective. I contend that Ken seems to view the two truths more as phenomenal and noumenal realms in union or synthesis rather than G&P’s interpretation of Nagarjuna’s dissolution.

As to how this relates to Derrida’s notions will have to wait, as my time has run out for this session and other duties call. To be continued…

1. “Nagarjuna and the limits of thought” by Garfield and Priest, Philosophy East & West Volume 53, Number 1, January 2003, 1–21 at this link.
2. Note that there is a difference between this interpretation of “emptiness” and the one Bonnie uses in her IR article. This is highlighted by the differences between G&P’s view and the Dzogchen, even though the latter is also technically “Madhyamikan.” Food for another conversation if there is interest.

Integral Re-Views Postmodernism by Gary Hampton, in the current issue of Integral Review

Abstract: In this article I re-evaluate the potential contribution of postmodernism to integral theory via integrally-derived perspectives. I identify a premature foreclosure: the underappreciation of postformal modes of thinking (cognitive development beyond Piaget’s formal operations). I then enact certain forms of postformal reasoning in relation to integral theory. This includes an engagement with such perspectives as complexity theory, conceptual ecology, vision-logic, dialectics, genealogy, critical theory, and construct-awareness. A major theme concerns the dialectical relationship between reconstruction and deconstruction-partly explored through a developmental assessment of contra-indicative discourse by both Wilber and Derrida. Although the territory is complex, the relationship between current Wilberian theory and postmodernism is clearly problematised. I posit that a deeper engagement with postmodernism can lead to an autopoietic deepening of integral theory.

In so doing, particular texts from Wilber and Derrida-chosen for their contra-indicative properties-are developmentally assessed to problematise the premise that Wilber’s (re)constructive approach is necessarily operating at a more mature developmental level than Derrida’s deconstructive approach.

Derrida’s comments here are therefore not coming from a relativist perspective. He is making value judgments in favour of a discussion of Spirit and against Heidegger’s inappropriate silence on the issue. Furthermore, deconstruction itself is clearly articulated as being beyond the relativism of unbridled equivocity: Derrida sees relativism as self-limiting, confusing, unintelligible.

Here, in addition to Derrida’s vividness of language regarding concerns and insights into matters spiritual-with a sense of appropriate wordplay-we can also see Cook-Greuter’s identification of the construct-aware Magician where “concerns, questions, insights and commentary cleverly united into one complex sentence structure.” A plausible hypothesis, then, would be to consider that these comments from Derrida centre around the perspective of The Magician-a level beyond Wilber’s Teal / Integral / “post-postmodern” / Yellow vMeme. In short, this evidence supports the hypothesis that the above text from Derrida is operating from the construct-aware stage.

Derrida rationally differentiates deconstruction from destruction and indicates that deconstruction is a constructive activity. He also explicitly reflexes upon its subtle dialectical quality. His writing demonstrates a high level of developmental maturity, in which deconstruction is recognised and reflexively enacted in a post-relativist, dialectical, construct-aware mode. Derrida and deconstruction are clearly something Other than that signified by Wilber in his use of the term, deconstructive postmodernism.