In Defense of Philosophy and Reason- Chapin

 

(This picture has nothing to do with the post, at least not directly. I just thought it was funny...)

The following serves two functions: first, it is a response to Mr. Anderson’s last post, which I had already written but was unable to post, and also, stemming from this, a kind of defense of what I am loosely and crudely calling philosophy and reason, although not for the reasons you might initially think.  

 

First, the abridged response to Mr. Anderson: 

 

First and foremost, I couldn’t agree more with drawing the parallel between the Vedic imagery to what we find in Dōgen.  I also share the sentiment about not wanting to draw too close of a comparison between Vedanta and what we have read so far with Dōgen (and perhaps Nagarjuna too), specifically on the topic of non-duality.   

 

I have to ask, though, what it actually means to say that each thing is also every other thing? Certain texts we have read in Vedanta might be perfectly happy to agree with this statement, depending of course on what it means when we say, ‘each thing is also every other thing’. How I understand this statement from the perspective of certain manifestations of Vedanta (specifically Advita Vedanta) is that what it means for each thing to also be every other thing is that each particular thing shares a common essence: at the deepest level, what we ‘really’ are, what everything ‘really’ is, is Atman or Brahman, and any perceived or inferred plurality is merely an illusion (think here of the chapter in the Gaudapāda Kārikā on illusion). So we would read the statement, each thing (Atman) is also every other thing (Atman). For Mahayana Buddhism, though, this cannot be what is meant when we say that each thing is also every other thing. For whatever else emptiness might mean, as far as I can tell, it at least entails the rejection of any postulation or reification of essence or substance. So what then does it mean when we say it for Dōgen? If metaphysical monism is off the table, what sense can we make of Dōgen suggesting that we are all the ‘same’? Maybe we sorted this out in class on Thursday, but I have to admit that it is still rather puzzling to me, even if we were to say that we are talking about an amalgamation of conditions and not essences, so a term like ‘cheese’ or ‘milk’ is nothing more than nominal. Perhaps I am being too demanding of the text, and of us, to push this question in such a way that I get a clear and concise explanation of what such a phrase means, but if this is the case, I would love to know why.  

 

I think the suggestion that we focus on connection instead is a promising path, where instead of paying attention to ‘things’ (substance or essence view), we focus on their connection (i.e. the connection itself rather than what is connected). But then we have to think about what kind of word ‘connection’ is. The suffix is what I am looking at, ‘tion’, which typically transforms verbs (actions) into some kind of noun (things), so we seem to be right back where we started, as the language used is already making the implicit assumption that there are ‘things’ with essences or substances, either one or many, it doesn't matter. In other words, I worry that the term, ‘connection’, focusing on the suffix, inevitably doubles down on the idea of essence or substance in making connection an essential feature of ‘reality’, and therefore emptiness has been ‘filled’ so to speak. Maybe it is an easy fix to simply shift from the noun form, connection, to the verb form, connect, where we say we focus on how things are connected rather then their connection. In any case, my point here is that the language we use in trying to make sense of the language he uses matters quite a lot, as there is lots of baggage attached to terms that we might not immediately see if we aren’t careful, heck, even if we are careful. 

 

Now, I want to shift to poetry and philosophy, and the supposed difference between them. I am reminded of a cartoon that said something like, “all philosophers will easily agree that philosophy is the superior discipline, but they will kill each other trying to decide what philosophy actually is.” I realize that asking ‘what is philosophy and how is it different from poetry’ is a question that cannot be sorted out in this kind of format and space, if at all, so it is a bit unfair in that regard. But my concern is that if we only think that philosophy is primarily (if not exclusively) interested in the ideas of clean distinctions, specificity, clarity, neatness, and some kind of system building, and these are its paradigmatic characteristics, we are met with some rather ticklish problems. In fact, from what I can tell, this seems to be the general sentiment in our discussions, and the reason the poetic interpretation is favored over and above philosophy. But I will suggest that this is only one understanding of philosophy, one that is emblematic of contemporary (20^thand 21^stcentury) Analytic philosophy, but that it is not at all the only way we can think about philosophy and what it might have to offer us in our discussions on Dōgen.   

 

First of all, if this is what philosophy is, or what it does or requires, then how is philosophy different from science? Indeed, science shares these same values, and maybe to an even higher degree than ‘philosophy’. Personally, I am very cautious to collapse philosophy and science together, or to even suggest that they are always or even most of the time interested in the same issues and problems (although they often are), and in thinking about philosophy in this way, I worry that is an inevitable place we might find ourselves. To be sure, there was a time that the two were seemingly indistinguishable (e.g. the pre-Socratics, and ‘the Philosopher’ himself, Aristotle), but with the rise of modern science, it seems they have departed in ways that does not allow them to be easily reducible to one another without losing something quite substantial in the process.  

 

Here, I want to provide a different conception of looking at philosophy that seems to lack those features of clean distinctions, clarity, neatness and precision, and also work rather well in thinking about what Dōgen might be up to. First, there is the Ancient Western idea (although it is certainly not just Western, that is simply where I was first introduced to it) that philosophy is a way of life. In this, we are not saying that it is one discipline among many that one may practice or refrain from practicing, depending on their proclivities. It is not one subject of study among others, with a set of clear methods and procedures, but rather refers to the very way in which we live: how we are oriented towards certain objects and ideas, how our bodies move through the world, how we act, what we think about, how we think about it, so on and so on. I don't think this is a foreign idea to us, but it is one that I feel has to be restated as a competing and compelling understanding of philosophy for us to utilize. In this regard, I think about Diogenes the Cynic, who, from what I can tell, was far more interested in criticizing the philosophy of the ‘Academy’, showing them where their social conventions and intellectual distinctions fall apart and become rather silly. (For example, there is a story of Diogenes, who, in the presence of Alexander the Great, was sifting through some human bones. Alexander asked him what he was doing, and Diogenes said, “I am trying to find your fathers bones, but I cannot distinguish them from those of slaves.”) Indeed, he too, like Socrates, seems to have visited the Oracle at Delphi, but the divination he received was much different than that of Socrates. The Oracle told Diogenes, ‘deface the currency’, which I understand to mean something like ‘shake things up’, or ‘disrupt the standard way people are living,’ not literally deface the coins, although it is thought that he and his dad did this too. His criticisms, however, often were unstated, not even enunciated at all, but rather acted out: his entire way of living was a protest and critique of the civic life he saw those around him preoccupied with. In this sense, he was not at all concerned with making clear distinctions, focusing on neatness and precision; his criticism and commentary hardly ever reached such a level to allow it to be amenable to this kind of analysis.  

 

(This is not to say, however, that we could not say the same about poetry, that is, that poetry is a way of life or living as well. I am not entirely sure what that would mean or look like, and if someone has a better idea about this, I would love to hear the opinions on what that might mean. If it is true, though, that poetry too can be thought about as a way of life, then it seems here that philosophy and poetry are not at all as far away from each other as we might initially suspect.) 

 

From what I understood in our reading on the Tenzo (which, to be sure, is rather tentative), this conception of philosophy works rather well. The Tenzo is as such because of the attention given to every single instant of their life, completely absorbed with living, not debating or bickering about the logical coherence of a given argument (although we would be mistaken to make such a hard and fast distinction between ‘actually living’ and ‘bickering’). Zen, more generally, if we are forced to say anything at all about it, can at least be described as a way of life, not necessarily a set of doctrines or logical arguments proving the necessary truth of some metaphysical ideal or principle.  

 

Now we will move to reason. However, it doesn't seem like we have even begun to leave the abode of convincing and justifiable conceptions of philosophy, but are rather looking at a different part of it. For when we are talking about or discussing philosophy (or philosophically), we cannot escape talking about reason, or at least presupposing its efficacy. From what I could make out from our discussions, philosophy and reason have become interchangeable, and maybe for good reason, but it also seems like we have thrown in ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ too, having now four terms that we are using to refer to the same general idea. I want to focus on reason, though, and channel all of those other terms through it, justifiably or not. What I take reason to mean in our discussions is the ability, faculty or method of self-reflectively conceptualizing ideas or concepts, organizing and or arranging them (in one way or another), and casting some kind of truth-functional judgment as to what is true and what is not (hence, utterly dualistic from start to finish). Perhaps it is the first condition that is the most troublesome for Dōgen, as I was persuaded by what Mr. Allen and Mr. Venkatesh said in response to one of my questions, but I worry we are running the risk of turning Dōgen into some kind of misologist, that is, one who hates reason, or thinks that it is utterly useless, and worse, obfuscating and blinding. To be even more explicit, it seems like the idea in class is that philosophy and reason are only useful in making distinctions, building systems, clarifying things and so on, and that poetics, as Mr. Anderson said, is deeply suspicious of these things.  

 

However, I want to defend the deployment of reason in thinking about and through Dōgen, and even suggest this might also be something he would endorse, or at least not scoff at. However, what I have in mind here is not the standard function in deploying reason, where it is typically done in order that we might come to ‘know’ things, and then go on to act in the world based on what we supposedly know. No, my thought is that reason is deployed precisely to show its own limits, its own presuppositions, and its own blind spots. By turning reason back upon itself, it becomes abundantly clear that it is not equipped to do what we are led to believe it can and should do if wielded properly.  

 

Here my example is Derrida. When he was nominated to receive an honorary degree from Cambridge, a large group of distinguished (mostly Analytic) philosophers wrote a letter condemning the decision, criticizing him for not being clear, not being concise, not being neat, precise or anything of the sort. In fact, they say explicitly, “In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.” By their estimation, he was not at all a philosopher, and therefore should not be getting an honorary degree in philosophy from the university. Part of this, if not most of it, was due to this precise move: turning reason back upon itself, and showing just how unbelievably strange things get when we do so. Indeed, I take this to be the exact aim of deconstruction: to turn reason back upon itself, showing the very way in which distinctions are made, systems are built, clarity achieved, neatness preserved and so on, and that when we do so, we become deeply suspicious of all the games reason has us playing. In this sense, deconstruction sounds to me a lot like what Nagarjuna was up to, and I would even go so far as to suggest that this might also be on Dōgen’s mind, although much less explicitly or obviously. Derrida too, then, was equally as suspicious of precision and neatness in the same way Mr. Anderson suggests Dōgen was (which I think he is right about). One could also think of the tradition in French Feminism, specifically Luce Irigaray, who, like Derrida, is far from neat, concise, clear or anything of the sort. In fact, my sense of both of their work is that they are aiming to complicate things more than they are trying to clarify them, or rather to show that things are always and already complicated, and neatness and clarity are illusions of a sort. Both are, as Mr. Anderson says about poetry, more concerned with the abundance of meaning, even how meaning manifests to begin with, and more importantly, its ceaseless proliferation, pulling and pulling in an attempt to bring all of them to the surface of our conscious awareness. Neatness, clarity, rigor, precision etc., then, are actually the real site (or symptoms) of mere language games and sophistry, the sheer inability or unwillingness to actually follow reason wherever it leads, even if it is back in and through itself.  

 

The big takeaway is this: I am of the opinion that philosophy and reason (understood in a specific way) can be used against themselves, that is, we can use both philosophy and reason to critique philosophy and reason. By using reason against itself, it will inevitably show the limits of reason as it is thought about in a given society and culture (indeed, we should be hesitant to think that reason and philosophy, as we think of them today, are self same concepts, formulated and deployed univocally throughout time and space). Doing so shows how reason’s opposite, irrationality or madness, is always and already present within the very idea of reason itself, and therefore not at all a solid base to begin from and proceed through. Furthermore, it seems to me, although it is only a hunch, that Dōgen also saw reason as a viable method by which to ‘actualize the fundamental point’, because in setting up logical contradictions and an abundance of meaning, and the tensions therein, he can be thought of as reading reason or logic against themselves, showing where they break down and fizzles out. If we simply discard reason and logic in favor of poetry (as if poetry is devoid of some kind of reason or logic), this avenue is not available to us. I want to be clear: I am not saying that this method is better than the poetic path, only that it should not be discarded prima facie as a way of working through Dōgen’s work.