Approaching and Enunciating Dōgen: The Lingering Thorns of Dualism
I have been thinking a lot about how we are approaching Dōgen through our conversations, specifically the terms we deploy in order to try and grasp the kind of experience, state of mind, mode of being etc. he is gesturing toward. I have to admit that I am still utterly perplexed, but want to try and sort out some of the potential issues we might face.
The first stop we have to make is in what I assume is one of Dōgen’s most important concepts. If I am wrong, and non-dualism is not actively operative in his work, then the rest of this will be moot. But on the assumption that it is, there are a few things that seem important. First, the concept of non-dualism does not appear to be homogenous, so we have to be careful to pay attention to which specific version Dōgen might have in mind. The first way that we might think of non-dualism is through Advita Vedanta. There, non-dualism seems to mean that there is only one substance or essence, that is, Brahman or Atman, and everything that appears as if it is not is only that, an appearance, that is, an illusion. So we are dealing with monism here. However, because Dōgen also deploys the concept of emptiness, the idea of monism seems to be off the table, as emptiness is the emptiness of the very essence or substance that the Vedic monism postulates. So non-dualism for him does not mean substance or essence monism.
Another form of non-dualism might be to say that we are dealing with pluralism, that is, that there are not two distinct substances or essences (e.g. God and ‘his’ creation, Cartesian mind and body, or the more general material and immaterial), but rather a number of, perhaps infinite, substances and essences, hence it is non-dual in the rejection that there are onlytwo essences or substances. Here again, though, this seems to be off the table, as emptiness steps in and denies the existence of independent essences or substances, and especially an infinite number of them. So this form of non-dualism can’t be it either.
Finally, the last way I can see it being thought of is the non-dualism of thinking or perception. Now, at first glance, this might seem to move us out of the metaphysical realm down to a psychological, phenomenological or linguistic domain. I think this might be right to some degree, but this does not mean that we have completely left the domain of metaphysics, we have just repositioned our perspective on it. For Dōgen is not just making statements about how ‘we’ perceive and experience or talk about ‘the world’, but he is also saying something about ‘the world’ too in attempting to dissolve the distinction between ‘me’ and ‘the world’, or at least emphasize the inability to actually make clean distinctions between ‘me’ and ‘the world’. Here the clean distinctions between differing approaches seem to be troubled, and this is, to my mind, part of the point: his claims and ideas are not merely phenomenological or metaphysical, empirical or psychological, but rather cut across and through all of the various distinctions, uncovering the hidden nefarious dualisms in the very way those distinctions manifest. This is why I think a non-dualism of thinking works nicely, as I take one of his fundamental goals to try and draw our attention to the way we commonly think and perceive in dualistic terms, and further, show us why this is a problem, and urge us to be diligent in our use of language.
Here, then, we have to be very careful in our attempts to talk about Dōgen and the ideas he proposes, as the fear is that we might unconsciously smuggle in dualistic thoughts or concepts in order to understand his critique or position on non-dualistic thoughts or concepts. In other words, the concern is that we will try and bring non-dualism back within the prevue of dualism, and therefore not actually even begin to approach non-dualism.
I am thinking of beauty, and the idea that once we ‘realize’ or ‘actualize’ the fundamental point, everything becomes beautiful. But I have to first admit that I am not at all sure what beauty ‘is’. In fact, it is a concept or idea that I have long neglected, and can hardly even begin to enunciate an idiosyncratic formulation of it, let alone a reliable theoretical one. To be sure, I have been around the term my whole life, we all have: it has and continues to structure all of our perceptions of the world just as much as the ideas of goodness and truth. It is ubiquitous, scattered across the social, cultural, economic and political domain. We use the term to refer to any number of disparate things: e.g. we talk about beauty as it relates to animate things, e.g. human beings, horses, and flowers, as well as the inanimate, such as cars, houses and buildings. We also use it to refer not just to nouns, that is ‘things’, but also to events or happenings, as when we say that a song is beautiful, or that a particular dance routine or musical are beautiful. However, although it is ubiquitous, it is not always apparent. It hides and sneaks, concealing itself under mud and dust, poverty, illness, and death. It also shrouds itself in the mundane, though, the common and familiar, the things that rarely rise to the level of conscious attention; the domain of indifference, the background. Is your front door beautiful? What about your floor, or your thermostat? Well, no, probably not, unless you have a rather peculiar aesthetic proclivity. (If you do, we should talk.) But they aren't necessarily ugly either, or grotesque and macabre. One might even suggest that those things are not amenable to being judged in terms of beauty; they are just average, ordinary, commonplace things. The curious thing is that we seem to find beauty hiding under ugliness or the mundane, almost as if we simply flip over a rock to find that beauty was there all along, we were just looking at the wrong side. But the question at hand is whether we can flip over all the rocks so as to show only beauty with no ugliness or ordinariness. In other words, does beauty require a shadow, or can beauty be universalized and made absolute in our perceptions?
To my mind, we have to notice that conceptually, beauty is a relational term, which is to say that it depends on something else for its meaning to manifest. Interestingly enough, it is not just its contrary (i.e. ugly) that furnishes its meaning and import, but also the domain of indifference or simply the background. In order that we might conceive, or perhaps rather perceive beauty, it is necessary that we also have some understanding and experience ugliness, and also the mundane or ordinary. Indeed, beauty is not the ‘common experience’ or perception of the world, but arises out of the mundane and ordinary as something decidedly different, something more enjoyable or pleasant than our common mode of being. It seems to me that this is at least one reason why people pay so much money to enter art museums, go to concerts or symphonies etc.: they are looking for an experience that differs from their ordinary one, and those are the places that are more often than not thought to be the houses or sites of beauty. (to be sure, there is also beauty in ‘nature’, which might not require the same monetary investment, but the motivation for seeking out ‘natural beauty’ is the same.)
It might appear that we are not dealing with dualism, as I have suggested both beauty’s opposite, i.e. ugliness, as well as the mundane and ordinary as interdependent concepts in order to recognize and conceptualize beauty. But it is, to my mind, still a concept that relies on dualism, only not in the form of contrariety, but rather in contradiction. That is to say, what allows beauty to manifest as it does for us is more fundamentally the juxtaposition of beauty and not beauty. The ‘not beauty’ could be ugliness or the mundane, but in either case, it is not beauty. This is the fundamental dualism that we have to pay attention to. What this seems to suggest is that if we make everything beauty or beautiful, there is no longer a not beauty, and therefore, beauty cannot manifest as we usually mean it. The term only seems to work through a bifurcation between it and its negation. So if we universalize the experience of beauty, making it absolute, beauty will cease to actually be beauty as we know it, indeed, in doing so, we will lose that by which it actually manifests as beauty (i.e. its negation), as an experience unlike our ordinary experience. Therefore, it seems to me that beauty needs its shadow.
Now, one might retort: ‘okay, I see your point, but what if I only talk about it as a simile, that is to say, the experience or mode of being Dōgen is gesturing towards is likebeauty?” Here too I think we run into insurmountable problems. For it seems to me that a simile works precisely because it shares something substantial with that which it is being compared to. Here, though, I would suggest that whatever Dōgen is pointing towards is not at all similar to beauty, the reason being that beauty, as I mentioned, arises within a dualistic framework, and if emptiness or non-dualism are operative ideas for Dōgen, then the comparison is not a good one. If it were an analogy, we would call it a false analogy, as it does not share relevant (if not the most relevant) features in common. To try and draw the comparison would be to try and bring whatever Dōgen is talking about back within a dualistic (or pluralistic) framework, attempting to use it as a means by which we can grasp it, where it seems to me that Dōgen is attempting to ‘leap over’ all such frameworks. At which point, any simile we try to use would fail at the moment we are most in need of its service. The same could be said for any metaphor, as a simile is a specific kind of metaphor, and we might, after all, call the entire enterprise of metaphor into question as a viable method of enunciating what Dōgen is pointing toward, although he does seem to use them a lot… I don't know what to do with this problem…
This leads us to a more foundational point, though, as it does not seem to me that beauty is actually what we desire, but rather the pleasure that comes from beauty. (I suppose one could make the argument that this is all we mean by beauty, that is, a specific kind of pleasurable experience, but then we might run into a different set of problems and objections, e.g. differentiating this kind of pleasure from others.) At which point, the idea that everything becomes beautiful is read as everything becomes pleasurable. Again, though, using the same reasoning above, conceptually this does not work, as pleasure and pain are intimately linked, and even more foundationally, pleasure and not pleasure, where in both instances, each necessitate one another for their meaning and existence. In universalizing and making pleasure absolute, we cannot, in principle, be talking about pleasure anymore. Indeed, the very concept vanishes when we try and deploy it in such a manner, but its disappearance may be hard to see if we aren’t careful.
These objections extend far and wide, as the precise reasoning used implicates not just beauty and pleasure, but also goodness, truth, justice, and a whole host of other concepts that are intimately woven into a dualistic (often times stratified) system of symbolic meaning. In the same way we cannot universalize and make absolute beauty and pleasure, we cannot do so with goodness, truth, justice and the like, as they all vanish in the very process of trying to render them as such. In other words, I am suggesting that these kinds of concepts only work for us within a dualistic frame of thinking and enunciation, and if we are trying to get at a non-dual experience, mode of being, state of mind, etc., these kinds of concepts will obfuscate things far more than they could ever clarify. Maybe clarity is not what we are looking for, but it does seem, more often than not, like it is what we are driving at in our conversations.
Where does this leave us? I am not sure. I am not convinced there is no way around this, specifically Mr. Allen’s development of metaphor (here and elsewhere), but at present I see no way out. Does this mean we have to be mute? Not necessarily, but only that we have to pay very close attention to the terms we are deploying, what they imply, and how they are shaping the way we are trying to come to understand or feel what Dōgen is getting at. Perhaps we need an entirely new vocabulary to do so, as Heidegger tries to provide, but even there, this avenue might not be open to us depending on what our general stance to language is. Maybe silence is our best option, especially in Zen, but then again are we not running the risk of falling into yet another dualism, namely that between speech or sound and silence? These are treacherous waters, and my only point is that we must proceed carefully, and be as astute and deliberate with our language as Dōgen seems to suggest we should be in our daily living. We cannot use language haphazardly and think it is doing what we want it to; we are not, as far as I can tell, the sole authority of what words mean or might mean, but must work within an already established economy of language and symbolism for words to mean anything at all. This doesn't mean we cannot tweak here and there, but that the ability of any one subject (or the collective of subjects get) to have sole control over meaning does not seem tenable to me. We might even ask what meaning means, or put another way, what is the meaning of meaning, but this would take us down an entirely different road. In any case, we cannot glide over this problem of language, and must rather focus closely on it in order that we do not perpetuate the very thing he seems to be trying to guide us out of.
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