Nagarjuna's Middle Way

I mentioned a month ago that I thought plowing through Nagarjuna's seminal Mulamadhyamakakarika was going to take a while.  So I'm pleased and surprised to report that the reading sped up considerably after the first few chapters.  Initially, I worried that following Nagarjuna's analysis might require dipping into some secondary literature that outlined the various issues at stake in second century Indian philosophy.  The first chapter in particular seemed to be a highly technical analysis of the concept of causality that presumes the reader is familiar with the positions adopted by a number of different schools of Buddhism from that time period.  Or at least, that was the impression given by the combination of Nagarjuna's terse style and the academic commentary that accompanies the verses in the translation I used.  And of course, treating it as a piece of logical philosophical analysis that responds to various sectarian debates of the time would be one legitimate way to read the book.  But as I read further, I began to see that this wasn't the only way to read Nagarjuna.  

Gradually, I started to notice that the text was pretty repetitive from a philosophical perspective.  The same strategies of argumentation led to the same types of conclusions again and again.  I also started to notice that while Siderits' and Katsura's commentary was very helpful, it always tried to map the poetry directly into analytical prose, as if the form were just an external constraint.  They continually cite a number of other commentators and try to triangulate just who Nagarjuna might have been arguing with and exactly what his argument was.  Basically, they try to convert him into an analytic and scholastic philosopher.  Meanwhile, the literal translation they provide of the verses slowly makes clear that a lot of what Nagarjuna is doing here relies on the way language can quickly frame a seemingly insoluble paradox that on closer inspection turns out to reveal basic flaws in our assumptions.  In short, you can also read Nagarjuna as a sort of proto-zen poet whose goal is not to prove anything but simply to get your conceptual mind to unclench and surrender its dualistic categories.  I suspect that Stephen Batchelor's translation may lend itself to this koan-ic type of reading, and I plan to revisit Nagarjuna in the future from this angle.  

What I'm left with is something between these two readings.  I do understand Nagarjuna as having written a logical, analytical text that attempts to make philosophical arguments.  But the important thing is not the many details of the arguments, but their unvarying form -- effectively there's just one argument in the text.  Whether we're talking about the self, or about agency, or arising and dissolution, or even about nirvana and the buddha himself, the point is ultimately always the same.  Whatever it is we're talking about does not have an essential intrinsic nature.  It does not stand alone, in itself, naturally distinct from all other things in the universe.  Whatever we're talking about is not ultimately real, but is constructed, fabricated.  It is just a conceptual fiction that is more or less useful ... for liberating ourselves from our conceptual fictions.  In short, the only argument is that everything is empty.

One way to see Nagarjuna's concept of emptiness is as a total critique of Plato's notion of the Forms.  The Forms are quasi-divine bits of pure essence.  Each exists entirely in-itself, distinct from all the others and especially from every possible empirical exemplar of that Form.  At the same time each Form is pure in the sense that it is nothing but itself.  The Form of Beauty alone is truly beautiful.  Actually beautiful things derive from it through a process of getting mixed up with other stuff.  In the long history of Western philosophy, this essentialism will change shape many times.  Instead of the Forms, the essential thing will be the atoms, or our ideas, or God.  But each update of this essentialist philosophy will maintain the same form.  Ultimate Reality is made up of something that is absolutely identical to itself and utterly distinct from everything else.  The core building block of true reality will always remain simple, pure, unchanging, and essentially in-itself.  And as a corollary, everything that is composite, mixed, impermanent, and tied up with other things will be cast out of the realm of essence.  These things are ultimately not real at all, but just shadows on the wall, semblances, appearances, illusions that cannot properly be said to truly exist.  If there are essences, there must be accidents.  If there is reality, there must be mere appearance.  Every essentialist philosophy (every realist philosophy?) is dualistic.

Emptiness is the antidote to essentialism.  Over and over again, Nagarujuna will point out the problems that arise when we take something to exist essentially and in-itself.  No matter what thing we're talking about, he will extract logical paradoxes from its hypothesized 'ultimate reality'.  His goal is not to replace one set of proposed essences with another, truer or more accurate, set.  His goal is to treat our addiction to essentialism itself.  When properly understood, emptiness is exactly the concept for this job.  Because emptiness ≠ non-existence.  It's not the same thing as mere appearance or illusion.  The contention is not that most things are empty, but some special class of things are nonempty.  That is the old Theravadan statement of the problem -- sure, the self is empty, but the dharmas (the ayatanas, skandas, and dhatus of Abidharma orthodoxy) are underlying real elements that compose the unreal self.  In the Mahayana tradition Nagarjuna argues for here, the contention is that everything, not just the self, is empty.  So empty, in fact, that there aren't even things to be individually empty.  So empty that even emptiness itself is empty.  As Nagarjuna makes clear many times over, the concept of emptiness goes beyond the dualistic opposition between existence and non-existence, reality and appearance.  An anti-essentialist philosophy must be inherently non-dual.  

If an anti-essentialist philosophy is inherently non-dual, then it is also inherently paradoxical.  You can see this immediately in Nagarjuna's repeated negation of the four possibilities of the tetralemma -- the Buddha neither exists, nor does not exist, nor both exists and does not exist, nor, finally, does he neither exist nor not exist.  Strange as it sounds, these logical categories simply don't apply -- not to the Buddha, and not to anything else either, because there simply isn't any real thing for them to apply to.  But you can also see the essential paradox of this line of thinking when we reach the question of whether things are "truly" empty.  How can Nagarjuna even coherently write down his philosophy of emptiness?  Isn't the very concept of emptiness yet another empty conceptual fiction?  After expounding emptiness, how could you ever hope to claim this view is more accurate than any other?  Nagarjuna does not treat this question head on aside from a few passages that make clear he understands the problem, and would apply the same deconstruction to his own philosophical notions that he has applied to everyone else's.  At first I found this light treatment was insufficient to the gravity of the problem.  But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that there simply is no way to tackle the problem head on via philosophical content.  No matter how many caveats you explicitly add to your metaphysical concepts, someone can still ask whether, for example, it's "really true" that emptiness itself is empty or whether that statement too is empty, etc ...  There's no escape from the paradox of taking relativism as a truth, no end to the proliferation of metas within the realm of content.  However, the realm of content is not the only one available to us.  We should not forget that Nagarjuna is a poet.  While Siderits and Katsura mainly treat the text as a philosophical opus that was accidentally squeezed into verse form simply to accommodate the demands of tradition and pedagogy, we've already observed that their own translation suggests that this content focused reading is not the only one.  Nagarjuna (just like Plato, incidentally) has real style as well.  And when we reach this outermost layer of emptiness with its reflexive self-application, style becomes essential.  The language Nagarjuna uses is constantly sharpened to a striking point.  The paradoxes he so consistently creates keeping halting us in our tracks as we read, trying to force us to experience this philosophy for ourselves.  Style is actually the only way to cope with the fractal vertigo of anti-essentialism.  How could you be satisfied with the usual discursive style of philosophy when your point is that there is no real world waiting out there to be described or theorized?  When you abandon this presumption of metaphysical objectivity, the medium becomes part of the message, the style becomes essential in its own right, rather than serving merely as an accidental and irrelevant casing for the content.  In fact, the very distinctions between these two sides collapses.

The final idea I will take away from reading Nagarjuna is the link between emptiness and dependent origination.  The most famous verse in the Mulamadhyamakakarika is 24.18.

Dependent origination we declare to be emptiness.
It [emptiness] is a dependent concept; just that is the middle path.

As we just discussed, the second line of this verse seems to be saying that emptiness itself is just another empty concept, meaning that Nagarjuna's critique of essence applies to his own favorite concept as well.  But the first line introduces the idea that emptiness = dependent origination.  The simplest way to understand this connection is to see that in a world without essences, everything comes into being and goes out of being, gets fabricated and falls apart.  Nothing stands apart, permanent and self sufficient.  Instead, everything depends on causes and conditions, and this explains why everything is empty.  Siderits and Katsura point out that this basically amounts to saying that emptiness is a consequence of dependent origination.  While I think that way of understanding it is useful as far as it goes, I think it misses a deeper aspect of the connection between emptiness and dependent origination.  As Leigh Brasington pointed out, dependent origination is not the same thing as causality.  He says that this is because dependent origination only concerns necessary conditions, and leaves entirely to the side the question of the sufficient conditions that go with those to complete our usual understanding of causality.  But we can cast the same observation in a slightly different light by noticing that in Nagarjuna's world, there is no thing to serve as cause, and no thing to serve as effect, simply because there is no-thing at all.  In other words, in this second understanding, we might reverse the earlier logic and claim that dependent origination is a consequence of emptiness.  The doctrine of dependent origination isn't talking about causality, it is simply telling us that if one thing does not arise, then another thing which depends on its arising will likewise not arise.  One example of this would be our usual understanding of the way that the arising of an effect depends on the arising of its cause, but there's nothing special about cause and effect here.  It's just that if we know thing B needs thing A in order to arise, then the realized emptiness of thing A prevents thing B from showing up.  

That last sentence deliberately introduced an ambiguity that I'm not sure I know how to resolve completely but that I feel lurking.  Are we talking about the arising of our concepts here, or of actual things?  Is this an epistemological or an ontological question?  After all, if thing A just is empty, then neither it nor thing B should arise, right?  Why is our realization of the emptiness important, and how can this realization alone prevent real things from arising?  Or does the pairing of the two lines in the verse indicate that we're only really talking about the dependent origination of concepts here?  If there aren't "really" any things in the world, then we must be inventing them.  In which case we could avoid the arising of thing B simply by not fabricating thing A.  I think this reading is on the right track but is still slightly missing the deepest point. In Nagarjuna's world there cannot be any real distinction between things and concepts.  It seems to me that the ubiquity of emptiness is clearly pointing us to the idea of a flat ontology.  We can either say that concepts are also things or that things too are concepts, but it makes no sense to choose one side of this duality as opposed to the other.  Perhaps this turns the middle path mentioned in the verse into a sort of Mobius strip where all our apparent dualities can be balanced by remembering that there's actually only one side?  Maybe Nagarjuna's middle way is more extreme than it sounds.

 

#reread  

A Manual For Cleaning Women

I'm not sure how this collection of Lucia Berlin short stories made it on to my list, but it made for fine bedtime reading.  Berlin's craft is both accomplished and understated; she really knows how to pack a lot into an allusive short story without making it seem dense or difficult reading.  Nevertheless, I found myself feeling only lukewarm towards these stories.  Perhaps I've been spoiled by the "big ideas" of sci-fi, but these sober little realist vignettes apparently drawn mostly from Berlin's own life seem kinda ... dull.  And a bit repetitive.  Given her many geographics, husbands, and bottles of bourbon, Berlin seems to have been a pretty hard liver who never really changed so much as just got older.  Despite the selection of stories spanning the whole sweep of her life, they all sound pretty similar not only in the tone of the writing but in the tone of the main autobiographical character.  Who knows though?  Maybe this is how we all are, trapped in brain freeze in our mid twenties, thawed only by the universal warmth of impending death.

No Bad Parts

A number of folks in my meditation group had mentioned Richard Schwartz's No Bad Parts, and since I've actually already done a little bit of IFS therapy, I figured an overview of the modality's methodology written by its inventor could be an interesting follow up on that experience.  Turns out, the book isn't aimed to give a full theoretical account of the IFS methodology, but instead to bring its basic ideas to a wider audience.  In other words, it falls into the pop-psychology, self-help genre.  As a result, I still feel like I don't completely understand IFS as a philosophy, and I still have lots of questions about how to apply it to my own psyche that I imagine only a professional therapist could answer.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.  It outlines a simple and relatively easy to follow method for investigating your inner constitution, and it lays out an easily graspable world-view that is eminently compatible with the non-dual interpretation of Buddhism I've been interested in lately.

The basic trope of IFS is pretty simple.  You dramatize your inner life by treating your various thoughts and emotional reactions as if they belonged to other characters living in your head -- your parts.  Schwartz of course believes that this is much more than a mere metaphor, that we all suffer from something like multiple personality disorder.  But I don't see why one would need to opine about the ontological status of these parts to use the method, and indeed, I think that the parts he described really only exist as useful metaphors.  Of course, I believe that "useful metaphor" may in fact be the sole category of existence, so this may not mark any substantial disagreement.  The only important thing is to allow these parts to have enough reality that you perceive them as independent characters who are not identical to "you".  

The IFS methodology has you look for these parts in and around your body by examining various physical manifestations of the emotions associated with the part (eg. pain in your neck associated with a chronically tense inner critic).  Once you've identified a part, you enter into dialog with it.  What are its concerns and emotions?  How does it feel about your other parts? How does it feel about you?  This might at first sound pretty woo-woo, but like I say, I don't think it the methodology suffers from treating these "parts" as simple heuristic devices.  In fact, I find it easier to approach this work of identifying parts from the perspective of meditation.  For example, Shinzen Young encourages us to examine our mental images, our emotional bodily sensations, and our mental talk as a set of spaces with his See/Hear/Feel framework.  Practicing his techniques greatly improved my ability to notice all the various 'voices in my head' -- some of  which speak in images, some through emotion tied to a particular bodily region, and some of whom simply blah, blah, blah, end end quote.  Similarly, a number of traditions use the concept of spacious awareness to explore our ability to not identify with our thoughts.  You can instead imagine yourself as the space in which thoughts take place, just as the clouds 'take place' in the sky, or the waves in the ocean.  When you start paying attention to your inner life in these ways, you not only awaken to the fact that there's an awful lot going on in there, but you begin to be able to classify what's happening and locate it in a larger space as well.  The crucial thing is simply to create a separation between events in your inner space and 'you'.  With this distancing, it becomes much easier to see repeating patterns of thoughts, images, emotions, and voices when they occur.  I would submit that Schwartz's parts are none other than these repeating patterns.

Once you've found some parts, what do you with them?  On a practical level, you pull up a chair and invite them to talk.  But the initial goal of this conversation is to examine how the parts relate to form your inner system.  IFS has a pretty clear framework for classifying parts.  Basically, there are two possible roles for a part: exile or protector.  Exiles are parts you don't want to look at.  All the examples of these that Schwartz gives in the book are wounded or needy parts of you that resulted from some early childhood trauma.  Protectors are parts that keep your exiles hidden away so that you don't have to be re-traumatized by looking at them. Protectors come in two flavors.  Managers are, as it were, chronic protectors, that organize your world and your reactions so that you and your exiles never meet.  You might say that they scan the contents of experience looking for trigger warnings.  Firefighters, as the name implies, are acute protectors who show up to minimize the damage when some exile has already been triggered.  Most of our obvious problems result from the maladaptive behavior of our firefighters.  We get angry, we dissociate, we get drunk, etc ...  Firefighters cope with fires as best they can and don't worry about the consequences, because, well, they killed your fucking car!

Once you've gotten to know your parts and classified them, the ultimate goal of IFS therapy is to 1) separate yourself from your protectors, 2) get your protectors to relax enough to let you talk to your exiles, 3) get your exiles to trust you enough to tell you what trauma they suffered, 4) soothe these now unburdened exiles and credibly promise that your not going to let this sort of thing happen to them again, and finally, 5) live happily ever after, together with your parts as one big family -- naturally with 'you' as head of household.

While I'm no psychologist, this therapeutic trajectory doesn't seem all that novel.  Basically it seems like a version of the oldest psychotherapeutic playbook out there -- treat your problems as symptoms of an underlying disease, as psychological coping mechanisms that seek to protect you from some trauma (presumed to have occurred in early childhood).  Cure the disease by reenacting it, or at least laying it bare to conscious inspection.  Methodologically speaking, perhaps treating these coping mechanisms as independent parts, as little people in their own right, is a fairly new idea.  Though again, it seems to me that Freud's emphasis on myth and dramatization would represent a precedent for this line of thinking.  This is not to argue that the repetition of an idea makes it any less important; all the great spiritual truths are clichés because they've been around for so long.  The important thing is simply to ask what kind of life you will lead if you follow this methodology.

Schwartz makes it clear that he himself has explicitly spiritual aims for IFS.  He would like to see us follow this methodology so as to become "self-led systems".  In other words, he identifies the 'you' that I have been putting in scare quotes this whole time with our "true self".  He conceives this self as distinct from, and bigger than, what we usually refer to as our ego.  With this self as our leader, we can learn to love and value and harmonize all our parts (hence the title).  In other words, the self, in Schwartz's terminology, is not merely a part, but some sort of integration of parts, some sort of space in which parts can interact in a healthy way.  It is curios, calm, confident, compassionate, creative, clear, courageous, and connected (to list Schwartz's eight C's).  In the end, it is a bigger, better, more open and more caring version of our everyday self.  

As I mentioned before, this conception of who we are (or can become) is very close to the Buddhist idea of non-self.  Strangely, while Schwartz is generally positively inclined towards meditation he either doesn't see or doesn't want to draw our attention to this very strong anti-parallel.  After reading David Loy though, we know enough not to be fooled by this self vs. not-self debate; he convincingly explains how these opposed terms represent different descriptions of one and the same non-dual experience.  Schwartz describes the self in almost exactly the same glowing terms that non-dualists like Michael Taft use to describe vast spacious awareness.  Or perhaps the better comparison would be to a contemporary advaitist like Maharshi who explicitly used the term Self.  

These comparisons also highlight the final spiritual aims that Schwartz has for IFS.  When non-dualists talk about Self or Non-Self, they are talking about a field of awareness larger than the individual.  Whatever they call it, they are talking about some absolute and unlimited fabric in which our individual selves are enfolded.  Which is to say that this individuality we cling to is ultimately illusory, and that the point of these meditations is to bring us to a sense of boundless connectedness.  While Schwartz may not go quite this far (he is a therapist, not a guru, after all) he does devote the end of the book to the ways in which the IFS methodology can help us to more compassionately connect with the world and open up to what he calls the SELF.  Once we have embraced the complexity of our microcosm, we become more aware of and compassionate towards our own parts, we can begin to recognize these parts in others.  We can even begin to look at society as a whole as a sort of self that we, in turn, are parts of.  

While there are are some good ideas here -- like compassionately exploring our own inner racists rather than exiling them -- I feel like Schwartz's writing begins to get a little mushy and nebulous at this point.  It's too tempting to just repeatedly apply the same logic of Self and Parts at higher and higher levels, as if the whole world were a neatly nesting series of Russian dolls.  The problem with this way of thinking is not its dalliance with the mystical interconnectedness of all things.  The problem is that, like Ken Wilber, it tends to picture this connectedness as a strictly hierarchical great chain of being.  But the unfolding of awareness is surely much more like a tangled web than a series of concentric circles.  There's little doubt that local hierarchies (or holarchies) are an important principle in nature's self-organization.  But as the example of racism illustrates, my parts do not belong to or impact me alone.  They are formed in the context of a larger society alongside the sense of self that they become parts of.  Various local hierarchies become entangled in a global rhizome.  I distrust any totalizing spiritual system that suggests there is a 'largest' or 'most important' level we should focus on to the exclusion of all else.  This shortcut to 'the highest' seems like a simulacrum of enlightenment designed to trap the unwary.  It's unfair to accuse Schwartz of taking this route, especially seeing as how he takes care to end the book with a chapter on embodiment.  However, are there points where he perhaps teeters?

Pale Fire

Despite the fact that it's one of the greatest 'novels' ever, it's actually pretty hard to know what to say about Nabokov's masterpiece.  In fact, since it's not really a novel in any conventional sense, it's hard to even summarize what the plot is.  Nevertheless, it's a brilliant, funny, moving, puzzling, and always dazzlingly written sort of wild goose chase through Nabokov's imagination.  As with Infinite Jest, part of the fun of Reading Pale Fire is figuring out what the fuck is going on.  So if you follow my advice and really plan to read it, you might want to stop here with the ...

SPOILER ALERT

I started Pale Fire about 5 times before I really got into it.  This is only partially due to the fact that the poetic density of the language doesn't make for good bedtime reading.  For example, early on we get The Best Sentence in English®:

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant
morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.

The novel at first repulses any attempt to enter its world, paradoxically because there seem to be too many points of entrance.  Of course, you start at the beginning, with a genre you think you understand -- Professor Charles Kinbote writing a foreword for a critical edition of his late friend John Shade's final poem.  Right away though you are put off by strange interruptions in the text that turn what appears to be a standard, overly literate academic foreword into something more bizarre and auto-biographical.  Professor Kinbote seems to have a strange agenda connected with the poem, but at first you can't really piece together what's going on.  Nevermind though, the foreword is relatively short, so you plough on into the poem and the copious accompanying footnotes ... only to get more confused.  Is the good Herr Doktor reading the same poem that you are?  The notes seem only dimly related to what's happening in the clever, but seemingly fairly light, lines of iambic pentameter.  The foreword actually suggested reading the notes first, which seems odd, but okay, so you try that for a while, perhaps flipping back and forth to the poem, until it's clear that the notes are gradually veering off into some other story about a place called Zembla that has nothing to do with the lines these notes refer to in the poem.  Hmmmm ... So you go back and just read the 999 line poem itself one time through.  It's actually quite a lovely and moving meditation on untimely mortality.  The language and images are beautiful and surprising and not infrequently funny, and the rhymed couplets in strict meter set up an interesting rhythmic game that reminds you of the creative power of constraints.  However, by the end, it's clear the this poem has nothing to do with Professor Kinbote's homeland of Zembla, nor with the story he has begun to unfold through the notes of its recently deposed and exiled king -- Charles Xavier the Beloved.  So, you just go all the way back to the beginning again and start over.  And this time you notice a conspicuous reference to the very last footnote right in the foreword.

I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head.

Of course, that's not really what it said.  But it reminded me of exactly the way DFW hid the secret of Infinite Jest in plain sight, but so early in the novel that you don't know how to make use of it.  It turns out that Kinbote's final footnote gives away the ending, where the attempted regicide of Gradus (aka Jack Grey) results in the accidental death of John Shade, author of his then nearly complete final masterpiece Pale Fire.  Suddenly you have learned that the disconnected strands of the poem Pale Fire and the exiled  Zemblan king are destined to intersect at this fateful climax.  With this structure in mind, the trajectory of the whole book begins to make sense.  

Though now as you begin again from the beginning, there are a whole new set of questions.  Is Zembla a real place?  Is Professor Charles Kinbote himself the exiled king?  And if so, why was he so convinced that Pale Fire would be a poem about his dramatic escape from the revolution?  Is the murderer really from Zembla?  Or just some deranged lunatic from a local asylum?  And, wait, is Prof. Kinbote himself a reliable narrator of events?  Is he sane?  Is he even real?  In fact, are John Shade and his poem even real then?  Hold on, what sense does a question like that even make in the context of a work of fiction that pretends not to be?  Perhaps we are only left with the miracle of fireflies and bats.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students).  Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

#reread 

Dependent Origination and Emptiness

I recently started reading Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.  After only a few chapters it became clear that there was going to be some heavy philosophical lifting involved.  In other words, the forthcoming review of the Root Verses of the Middle Way may be a while in coming forth.  Meanwhile, I discovered that Leigh Brasington had written a new book on dependent origination that devoted some space to Nagarjuna's philosophy (you can download it here).  Since I enjoyed Brasington's practical treatment of the jhanas, I figured his latest effort would serve as a good warm up for understanding Nagarjuna.  I was not disappointed.  Brasington's book is straightforward to the point of being almost conversational, so I read through the electronic version quite quickly.  I plan to get a paperback copy and go through it again more thoroughly once I've finished with Nargarjuna.  As a result, this review is going to be pretty summary.  I just want to jot down some of the more eye-opening points that I think might be immediately useful.

The first part of the book gives some background on the importance of dependent origination in the Buddha's teachings.  Indeed, Brasington produces a lot of textual evidence to the effect that dependent origination is the Buddha's teaching, full stop.  That is, if you really understand dependent origination, you'll understand the four noble truths and can end dukkha (which Brasington proposes to translate "a bummer").  Brasington's biggest claim here is that the practical power of dependent origination lies in the fact that it talks only about necessary conditions, and not about causes (which would be necessary and sufficient conditions).  We cannot know the full cause of every bit of suffering in the world.  However, we can learn to see what conditions have to be present for dukkha to arise.  If we can take away any of those necessary conditions, suffering will cease to arise.  I've always wondered why people call it the doctrine of "dependent origination" rather than just saying that the Buddha taught about cause and effect.  Brasington's distinction between conditionality and causality answers this question precisely, and highlights how the Buddha was not a metaphysician but a pragmatic healer.  While we could endlessly debate the true cause of any event, and at the limit always discover that the true cause of anything is everything, what we want to do in practical terms is see a necessary condition of our suffering and prevent that condition from arising.  As the book goes on, Brasington delves into exactly which conditions we might prevent from arising.

It is essential that you keep in mind that these links are not about causes; rather they are about necessary conditions. If you start trying to figure out how some link causes the next one, you will miss the actual teaching because that is not what is being taught. Dependent origination is about dependencies – it's right there in the name; it is not about causes. Keep the basic meaning of idappaccayatā in mind: this arises dependent on that; if that doesn't happen, this doesn't arise.

The second part of the book has an interesting historical and textual analysis of the links of conditions that form the orthodox teaching of dependent origination.  It turns out that the full list of 12 links is a rather late-breaking idea within Buddhism.  Other versions of this list (with fewer links) existed before, and yet others were developed later.  I won't go into the details of this section, even though they're interesting, because they are in a sense beside the point for me (and to some extent for Brasington as well).  I've seen the list of the 12 links numerous times before, and some of them make reasonable sense from a practical psychological perspective (eg. Contact → Vedanā → Craving → Clinging → Dukkha).  But if you look at this list as a theory, you can't help but wonder why there are exactly 12 links.  Are all of these really necessary?  How do we know there aren't any other intermediate ones hiding in there that we haven't listed?  Brasington's discussion of the history of this list makes it clear that 12 is not really a magic number.  In fact, in his reading of it, there are really only 3 important links -- ignorance → craving → dukkha -- because it's really only at the ignorance or the craving links in the chain that we can do anything practical about our conditioning.  Essentially, the road to the end of suffering lies either in: 1) seeing how the valence of your experience usually leads you to crave the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant (which can be combated by cultivating equanimity) or 2) removing our ignorance by realizing that there's no one there to suffer to begin with.   The latter is of course the realization of not-self, or emptiness.  One of Brasington's main points in examining all these different lists is to suggest that the Buddha had something more general in mind with the theory of dependent origination.  It's not the specific links that matter so much as understanding the general idea that if X depends on Y, then if Y doesn't show up, neither will X.  In which case, the theory of dependent origination could be shortened to read: a suffering self necessarily depends on having a self to suffer.  No self, no dukkha.  

The third part of the book examines the consequences of this "general theory of dependent origination", which was essentially elaborated by Nagarjuna.  Since suffering depends on a self arising and a self is a type of thing, then suffering depends on things arising.  That is, without a (reciprocal) distinction between subject and object, suffering would be deprived of one of its necessary conditions.  So Brasington argues that the deepest understanding of dependent origination leads us towards emptiness and the non-dual.  Suffering ultimately depends on the way reification carves up the world into essentially distinct parts that differ in kind, the most important example of which is the cleft between subject and object.  If there were no-thing to suffer, suffering would not arise.  While Brasington grounds this vision of emptiness in the arguments Nagarjuna presents, he also coins his own term for this worldview: SODAPI.  Streams Of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting.  This is a world where there are no objects, but only processes, no nouns, but only verbs.  And while this world can unfold in a law-like manner, it's not appropriate to say that its evolution is governed by our typical idea of cause and effect because each of these would be a thing.  Here at last you can see the metaphysical importance of the distinction between dependent origination and causality.  There can still be necessary conditions in a world without any objects to serve as causes.  And in fact, it turns out that the first chapter in the Root Verses of the Middle Way will be devoted to demolishing the idea that causality is a category that could apply to real (non-empty) entities.  I told you this would come in handy in reading Nagarjuna!  

Brasington sums up this idea in a way that any mystic or Deleuzian could appreciate:

Any piece of the universe that you pick up is not a separate thing. John Muir stated this brilliantly: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."  It's all very much interconnected/interrelated.†. There are no separate entities anywhere in the entire universe. We concoct separate entities; we thingify our experience, because that's the only way we can manage to deal with it. But it's all just SODAPI, and all those streams are entangled enough so it's impossible to divide up the universe into separate entities and have an accurate picture of what's actually happening. I said earlier that it's all verbs, but truth be told, there is only one verb: "Unfolding." We could say "the universe is unfolding" but actually "the universe is" is superfluous; there's just Unfolding.

 

The footnote in that third sentence is especially interesting since it points precisely to what you might call a transcendental empiricism.

"Interconnected" would imply that everything is connected to everything else. "Interrelated" means that everything is connected to enough other things so that all the connections yield chains of connections from any one thing to all other things. Given these
definitions, "interrelated" more closely matches the way the world is constructed.

Everything is indeed connected to everything else, but not in any order.  To unfold the order of connections between processes that lie beyond or before the subject-object distinction would entail a special type of empiricism.

Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting

Francios Cheng's wonderful study of Chinese painting marks the final book in my Taoist phase.  While Cheng doesn't explicitly argue that all Chinese painting is necessarily Taoist, it's clear that his conception of the art form is dominated by the interchangeability of opposites we already associate with that school of thought.  Hence the title.  He argues that Emptiness is not different than Fullness.  While this may suggest that they are "two sides of the same coin", that way of putting it misses the crucial point that the two are asymmetrical.  In fact, a fractal multilevel emptiness is the necessary precursor to the appearance of fullness.  In a sense then, this makes emptiness the deeper of the two concepts, or at least the one that applies to itself as an ongoing process rather than a product.  I think this may be the crucial insight into the paradoxes of non-duality -- it's not that supposed opposites are really identical, it's that they are not dual, not negations of one another, not balanced or equilibrated as conflicting poles, but yoked together in a productive symbiosis.  What I mean by this asymmetry may seem a little obscure now, but the beauty of this book is that it develops these highly abstract ideas by reference to the concrete techniques of Chinese landscape painting.  At the end of the book, Cheng even carries the analysis down to the level of the particularity of a single painter, Shih T'ao, a Qing dynasty master famous not only for his art but his theoretical writings as well.  Since I really enjoyed this book for the way it deepened my understanding of emptiness (perhaps analogously to the way Deleuze's cinema books deepened my understanding of time) I'll try to go through it in some detail.  

1 -- Emptiness in Chinese Philosophy

After a short introduction to the history of Chinese painting, Cheng's first task is to clear away the notion that emptiness refers to something vague or non-existent.  Emptiness is not lack.  Non-being is not the being of the negative.  Instead, emptiness is an animating principle that allows things to flow, transform, and act.  Cheng sketches out this theory of active emptiness by quoting extensively from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Huai-nan-tzu.  While I'm still glad I read the originals, his short gloss on these texts probably taught me more about Taoism than all of them combined.  As I'm discovering, many of these older texts were really designed as compressed mnemonic devices for the student.  Philosophically, they depend on a teacher or commentator to flesh out the context and expand on their poetry.

One of Cheng's main contentions is that in Taoism, emptiness is both before and between things.  It serves not just as a point of ultimate origin, but also as a wellspring or reservoir of potential that constantly intervenes in the functioning of the world by allowing opposites to circulate.  Crucially, this gives it a kind of fractal quality.  The 'big' emptiness of the origin is reiterated at multiple levels by the 'little' emptinesses present throughout each level.  Later Cheng will elaborate this idea by reference to the way that emptiness is present at every level of a great painting -- from the brustroke, to the composition, to the meditative intention behind it.  For now, he's content to take this paradoxical self-similar structure on its most philosophical level.  Because emptiness itself is empty, or there's emptiness within emptiness itself, or something else of the sort, emptiness turns out to be within all things as the animating principle that allows them to achieve fullness.  In other words, emptiness and fullness are non-dual.  

In more concrete terms, he shows how the Taoists represent emptiness as the valley or ravine.  This gap in the mountains is the fertile ground from which the fullness of the "ten thousand things" spring up.  Though he doesn't mention the buddhist connection, the idea fits perfectly with the etymology of the Sanskrit term śūnyatā, which links emptiness to the hollowness of a pregnant belly.  I don't know if mahayana (or perhaps vajrayana) buddhists have a parallel framework that links emptiness to phenomenon via some process of mediation, but Cheng outlines a theory of this sort of Taoism.  For the Taoists, the primordial 0 of emptiness gives rise to the 1 breath, which divides into the 2 vital breaths of yin and yang, active and passive (presumably these are modeled on inhaling and exhaling).  In a final step, a "median emptiness" (the "little" emptiness between things) relates yin and yang and prevents them from becoming static and unproductive opposites.  Thus, the ten thousand things are modeled on, and produced by, the 3 part relationship of yin, yang, and median emptiness.  Cheng summarize this mediating scheme as:

A binary system that can be ternary and a ternary system that can be unitary: two equals three; three equals one.  This is the seemingly paradoxical but constant mainspring of Chinese thought. (pg. 51)

[And here I can't resist quoting the footnote (from Granet: La Pensée chinoise) that accompanies this passage because it is so close to Deleuze's description of Lacan's object a or the empty square of structuralism.

One is never anything other than the whole, and two is nothing but the pair.  Two is the pair characterized by the alternation of yin and yang.  The one, the whole, is the pivot that is neither the yin nor the yang but by which the alternation between yin and yang is coordinated.  It is the central square that does not count (like the hub, which the Taoist authors say is able to make the wheel turn because of its emptiness) ... Both together, unity and pair, the whole, if we want to give it numerical expression, is found in odd numbers, and first of all in the three (the one plus the two).  Three, as we shall see, amounts to a hardly attenuated expression of unanimity.       

The Western translation of the concept of emptiness would go in this direction I think.  It is the "paradoxical object" that is always missing from its place, always circulating through a series of transformations.  This ceaseless movement though, this constituent lack, is what allows it to stand in for the whole and create a symbolic order.]

The final theme Cheng tackles in his philosophical exposition of emptiness is also the most difficult  to understand.   What is the role of emptiness in human life?  The idea is that it's only through our own emptiness that we can become the model or mirror for the world.  It's only by a long process of emptying our self that we become capable of painting the emptiness/fullness of the natural world.  Though Cheng chooses terms like "mirror", "model", and "microcosm" here, it seems to me that this could easily convey the impression that the goal is an accurate representation of the world in the form of some sort of miniature recreation of it.  In fact, the goal of cultivating our internal emptiness is to stop representing the world, and start becoming it.  Since the universe is already empty, re-creating it in painted form is less a matter of capturing a particular scene than it is of continuing the process of unfolding emptiness that gave rise to it.  Human creation "mirrors' this process only by being swept up in it so that our little or median emptiness resonates with and develops the larger emptiness.  If, despite Rorty's objection, we want to stick with the mirror metaphor, we need to emphasize the surface of the mirror itself rather than the images that appear in it.  The mirror really adds nothing to the world.  Similarly, the surface of the mirror remains unchanged no matter what contents it happens to reflect.  So in a sense the mirror is nothing in itself but the simple passive act of reflection.  The mirror metaphor changes if you focus on the emptiness and superficiality of the 'act' of mirroring instead of the objects pictured in the depths.

Cheng adds a final twist to this now familiar mystical breeze-blowing-right-through-you moment by linking it to a transformation of time into space.  He observes that humans, after all, are finite, mortal, creatures.  How could we possibly expect to re-create the whole with our limited means?  Our only chance is to re-create a sort of infinite fractal depth within ourselves, to make each of our finite moments communicate with the whole.  Citing Lao-Tzu -- "... it flows on pushing ever further, and having gone far in its going, it ends up effecting the return" (25) -- Cheng interprets the concept of the return as something that doesn't happen at the end of time, but between any moment and its successor.  It's as if the whole universal sweep of the tao is reinserted into every gap within it.  But making each instant recapitulate the whole (which is composed of instants recapitulating the whole ...) has the effect of converting time into space.  An endless process of temporal unfolding is converted into a single space that can be apprehended at once.  Obviously, this idea is crucial if you want to capture the universe in a painting.  Later Cheng will analyze various concrete techniques for adding a temporal depth to the painted surface, all of which will depend on a lived emptiness on the part of the painter.

Thus, with regard to the manner in which man should live space-time, Confucius and Lao-Tzu both proposed emptiness of heart, which makes humans capable of interiorizing the entire process of qualitative change that I have been discussing.  Emptiness implies interiorization and totalization. (pg. 58)

2 -- Emptiness in Chinese Painting

After outlining his philosophical theory of emptiness, Cheng proceeds to apply all the concepts described above to Chinese painting.  By quoting extensively from various painters he shows us how they conceive of their discipline as the fruit of a long meditation, the flowering of a spiritual process that makes painting into a sort of "philosophy in action" designed to mirror the creative process of the cosmos.  In fact, many of them describe the ultimate goal of painting as the ability to create an image as real as the nature that inspired it.  Of course, this doesn't mean they want to produce a perfect objective representation of nature, but to capture its li, its inner pattern or principle. Our Western temptation to call this the essence of things is misplaced but instructive -- the whole point is that there aren't any essential things to begin with, but that everything is wrapped up in a process of becoming and creation that only reaches totalization with the (empty) act of painting itself.

Cheng outlines four nested levels that structure Chinese painting, each of which is composed of a duality whose terms are held together by emptiness.  Brush-Ink refers to the way the properly executed brustroke can create form, texture, and even dimension in painted objects.  Emptiness holds brush and ink together both through the way many specific types of stroke introduce un-inked areas within the stroke, but also in the rhythmic separation of one stroke from another can be made to produce the sense of volume.  Manipulation of the Brightness-Darkness (Yin-Yang) duality is responsible for the creation of color in both the literal and atmospheric sense.  The relationship to emptiness becomes clearer here when you know that most of Chinese painting has only black ink on a white page.  Any coloring is an illusion created by a variety of washes and other brush techniques.  Since most of these are landscape paintings, Mountain-Water is the most obvious dualistic pair.  When we observe mountains which pile up like waves and a roiling sea that has its peaks and valleys, it becomes clear that these opposites are often painted so as to unite them.  In between, holding them together, we find the emptiness of the clouds.  Finally, at the level of the overall composition, we immediately notice the heavy use of negative space.  Cheng identifies the opposition of painted and unpainted space with the Heaven-Earth duality.  These two are united by the emptiness in the painter himself as he tries to include the very process of making the painting within it.  It reminds me of Cezanne's description: "man absent from but entirely within the landscape".  The painter appears in his landscape in the way it expresses a mood, in its a-realistic use of perspective, and, in many later paintings, in the form of an original poem inscribed in the black space.  All of these techniques serve to transform a lived process of painting into a living space, one that reflects a spiritual journey that inherently involves time.  The end result is another non-dual paradox: a visual music.

3 -- The painting of Shih T'ao

The final section of the book doesn't really offer any new ideas, but simply particularizes what has been said to the case of Shih T'ao.  Cheng quotes extensively from his Enlightening Remarks on Painting and reproduces several of his paintings in the glossy plates section to bring all the abstractions down to concrete images.  Here is a nature that lives and breathes as we do, an emptiness mirroring emptiness.

 

 

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

I have no idea how this collection of short stories by Sara Pinsker ended up on my list, but it is easily some of the best sci-fi I've read and the best short fiction since discovering Ted Chiang a while back.  In my experience female authors seem to more frequently escape the boys-with-toys trap implicit in the genre and instead manage to write genuinely speculative fiction.  In this sense, Pinsker follows in the footsteps of Le Guin and Jeminsin in creating possible universes that address genuine human problems to characters we care about.  Of course, this is not meant to typecast her, and in other respects her writing is completely different from these other women.  In this collection at least, most of the stories eschew any of the world-building I associate with the other two, and instead just drop you without explanation into a twisted future that insightfully illuminates some emotional situation.  

So, for example, we find a woman who has lost her dream-child discovering a whole community of folks suffering from the same problem.  Or a soldier and mother whose memory of a horrific war has been neurologically blocked except during the annual "Remembery Day" parade.  And when we get to the inevitable dystopian stories about societal breakdown driving the wealthy to take a neverending cruise, or the utter hollowing out of rural America and the death of live music, the focus isn't on what happened or how it will all end, but on how people are coping, and what regular folks are like after the apocalypse.  Even in the brilliant finale And Then There Were (N-One) the focus is not on the dizzying metaphysics of the multiverse but on the clever crime story plot the setting generates, and the deep questions it asks about all the counterfactual divergence points that create our identity.

A highly recommended collection.

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

Someone in one of my meditation groups recently recommended this The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.  Seems meditation kindles an interest in brain science for other folks as well.  This pop science book doesn't have anything to say about the science of meditation (though it seems that mentioning the subject is now necessary when discussing the brain -- Koch also felt the need).  Instead, it focuses on the various ways the body is represented in the brain.  While the idea that the brain represents anything at all is, I think, a philosophically bankrupt one, no one can deny that there are a number of cortical maps that appear to us, as third party investigators, to represent sensation or movement in various parts of the body.  That is to say that there are cortical areas that have a constant 1-to-1 correspondence between their activity and a stimulus.  Moreover, if a stimulus applied to, say, my left big toe, causes activity in a particular region of the brain, then a stimulus applied to my left index toe causes activity in a neighboring cortical region.  In other words, what we mean by "a map" in the brain is a topology preserving correspondence (I think this is a homeomorphism, but I ain't no mathematician) between a set of stimuli ordered according to some metric (often just regular cartesian space) and cortical activity (ordered, again, according to regular cartesian space, though perhaps accounting for the way the brain is basically a folded up surface.  Nearby stuff, as measured by one metric, maps to nearby stuff, as measured by the other metric.

Because this is a pop science book that trusts no reader as capable of looking at a footnote or understanding an analogy that does not involve either NASCAR or their family pet, their definition of "map" is limited to one sentence.  After all, everyone already knows what a map is.  At this point, everyone probably even already knows about the most salient maps in the brain, the sensory and motor homunculi.  These are indeed fascinating maps, and the first part of the book explores many of their interesting functions and dysfunctions (like perhaps surprisingly in anorexia).  Unfortunately, after the first couple of chapters that deal with genuine cortical maps, the authors then begin to serially abuse the concept.  The basic goal is to use the intuitive notion of maps to hold together an only loosely related collection of anecdotes about the latest in brain science.  So we get "maps" for higher order motor programs, and emotions, and all sorts of things with no obvious metric and no discussion of how this metric would be preserved in the cortex.  This all culminates in a discussion of the infamous mirror neurons, "the most hyped concept in neuroscience", in which each of these neurons is presented as in itself a "map" of various observed movements.  In other words, they push the word map to the point of meaninglessness, and then beyond.  Without a metric you simply can't talk about a "map".  At best you are describing a "circuit".  At worst you are saying things like, "this is the neuron for recognizing that a lefthanded jewish lesbian from Latin America is scratching the right side of their face with their toe".  

So while there are plenty of nice anecdotes about scientists and their research (and the research subjects and the serendipitous whatever that inspired the research and its feel good implications and blah blah blah) ultimately the book is just too light to get much out of either scientifically or philosophically.  However, the overarching point they make is a good one -- many of our "higher" cognitive functions are clearly related to our brain's relationship to our own body. 

The Bhagavad Gita

In my continuing effort to read more of the source material covered in David Loy's Nondualism book, I picked up the copy of the Bhagavad-Gita that I still had from freshman year.  It's amazing what a difference 25 years can make in one's thinking.  All the marginalia indicate that I was obsessed with comparing the Gita to Plato's Republic (which I'd just read for the first time as well).  Certainly, there are some comparable elements.  You can find support in both books for a division of society based on the varying "nature" of  individuals -- ie. support for a form of caste system.  In addition, both books definitely describe a sort of hero's journey where the philosopher begins in confusion and gradually journeys towards the true source of reality.  Plato narrates this journey in the cave allegory.  The Gita builds it directly into the structure of the dialog between Krishna and Arjuna.  The story begins with the great hero Arjuna's doubt on the eve of a momentous battle.  He's not sure he even wants to fight, given the senseless violence he sees in it.  Krishna gradually convinces him that he must fight by gradually unfolding a series of teachings which climax halfway through when Krishna's directly reveals the totality of his divine form.  The denouement fleshes out the intellectual understanding of this form and ultimately Arjuna decides to return to the field of battle (and presumably slaughter all his enemies, but, you know, now killing them with kindness, so to speak).  In other words, the similarities between The Republic and The Gita are pretty superficial.  If there's any book of philosophy that doesn't imply that society should be organized and that philosophy should reveal the truth, it was written pretty recently.  These are not very distinctive points of resonance.  

In fact, if you read the Gita with the concepts of nondual philosophy in mind, the books bear almost no resemblance to one another.  Yes, the Gita does have a few passages that could be read as supporting the Indian caste system.  But actually, these parts cut against the much larger theme that individual action should be looked at through a nondual lens.  Every action should be undertaken as a sacrifice to Krishna, and should not concern itself with its possible fruits for the actor.  This viewpoint substantially changes the interpretation of the idea that, "everyone in society does what they must, or what they are naturally suited for".  A nondual concept of action that divorces the individual's intention from their action, and emphasizes that emptiness of the actor, might be compatible with a caste system, but, properly understood, it's a long way from justifying that system.  And yes, our hero Arjuna moves from confusion to certainty, from doubt to the apodictic.  But in true nondual fashion, the knowledge he receives is not knowledge of the universe, but that he is the universe, that he and everything else arise inseparably within Krishna.  So in both cases, the proposed correspondence between the two books is actually closer to a contrast.  Makes you wonder how professors can stand to read the drivel that freshmen must invariably write.  R.I.P. Mark Mancall. I'm sorry for what I put you through.

In any event, The Gita is the most interesting follow up to Loy's book that I've read so far.  It's a much clearer work than any of the Taoist texts.  While there are some confusions and crosscurrents, you don't need to strain to see a nondual philosophy at its core.  It asks the fundamental question of why act at all in a particularly stark way.  And it answers it equally clearly -- "you" don't act at all, only Krishna acts, or better yet, simply is.  When you realize you aren't separate from the universe, the apparent individual choice involved in acting falls away.  The whole point of the dialog is clearly to bring Arjuna to this nondual realization rather than "convince" him to act in a conventional sense.  

In addition, unlike the Taoist fragments, The Gita is a fully constructed piece of literature.  And it's great.  It's short, dramatic, poetic, and climaxes in a really powerful scene where Krishna reveals the mind-boggling chaos of his totality.  I gave it 5 stars.  Or maybe that was Krishna's own review?

The Feeling of Life Itself

When I saw that Christof Koch, once my possible graduate advisor at CalTech and now the head of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, had written a new book about consciousness, I was pretty excited.  Not only has Koch done a lot of great work on the visual system over the years, but he also struck me as more broadminded than your average research scientist.  Indeed it seems that since the days when he worked on very specific neural systems, he has gone on to become a leading proponent of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness -- a big picture mathematical theory that purports to calculate whether it feels like anything to be a given chunk of matter.  

Unfortunately, the book was pretty disappointing.  Koch does a good job of posing the question of consciousness by distinguishing it from intelligence, attention, linguistic ability, and information processing in the conventional sense.  All he's concerned with is the most vexing problem of what it means to have an experience at all, for a particular state to feel like something.  He also does a reasonable job of outlining what evidence there is that this particular theory (IIT) is the right one.  This isn't something one can prove of course, especially when we're talking about a phenomenon as slippery as consciousness.  But he at least does a good job of talking about what testable predictions have so far been made, and extrapolating what other surprising predictions the theory implies.  However, what he does not do is give you a decent explanation of the damn theory itself.  

Koch tries to pack his entire description of IIT into a single 12 page chapter.  After reading it 3 times and trying to work through the simple example system he shows (but does not explain) I still have only the vaguest notion of how the theory works.  As far as I can tell, the basic idea is that some parts of the universe are so densely and reciprocally connected by causal interactions that cutting them into pieces would produce some sort of qualitative change in how they behave.  Since the states of these parts of the universe "matter to themselves", in the sense that they form a sort of self-causing feedback loop, and since we look for loops that can't be made any smaller without breaking them in this sense, then these are the parts that are conscious.  This is an appealing idea to me, very reminiscent of Spinoza's conatus, but like I say, Koch's description of even the basic notion is so poor that I'm not confident of my interpretation.  

The actual theory is entirely mathematical, and meant to provide a precise calculus behind the basic intuition that consciousness is another name for the causal organization of matter.  I wish I could explain that theory to you.  The overall point is clearly to calculate one number Φ that measures consciousness.  However, even though I don't see any math in it above my pay grade, the explanation Koch gives for this calculation is so crummy that I'd have to carefully read another source to be able to tell you about it.  In an otherwise fairly readable book this seems like an abject failure to me.  I mean, in an unforgivable move, Koch doesn't even spend a page or two working through the simple example system he presents.  This part, "the heart of the book" as Koch himself calls it, is just a total and complete flop.    

It's hard to understate how disappointing this failed chapter is for the book as a whole.  If we don't come away with at least some genuine understanding of the theory, how can we evaluate whether it responds to the problems Koch outlined at the beginning or is useful in the applications (mostly thought experiments at this point) he mentions towards the end?  This is a shame because I think there is something really intriguing about the theory.  For one, it shares a flavor similar to the interpretation Manuel DeLanda gives of Deleuze's philosophical system -- the virtual is defined as the structure of the phase space of the actual.  And it also leads to several counterintuitive thought experiments.  For example, one of the most surprising claims of IIT is that even a perfect computational simulation of a conscious system will not be conscious.  This comes straight out of the basic premise that consciousness is not a property of the functional aspects of a chunk of matter, not about the input-output relations between the world and that chunk, but about the internal causal architecture of the given chunk.  As a result, Koch ends up claiming that a brain simulated with a Von Neumann architecture cannot be conscious, but one simulated on neuromorphic hardware could be.  In other words, some day Google may simulate me in such a way that it can predict all of my behavior and store all of my memories without this simulation being at all conscious.  Another intriguing example comes up at the end of the book in reference to something called "expander graphs" which are organized in a way similar to the topographic maps of visual, auditory, or somatic sensation that are so important to our brain (and phenomenology).  These systems are meant to illustrate the opposite kind of surprise to the first example.  While no one claims these systems are highly intelligent or have anything other than a simple function, IIT predicts that they have a surprisingly large amount of consciousness.  I'd love to be able to think more about these debates, but unfortunately Koch has not equipped us to do so.  Perhaps he's a zombie scientist?

Update: The physicist Scott Aaronson, a critic of IIT, manages to give an understandable technical definition of Φ in a blog post.  Which only makes Koch's failed attempt more mysterious to me.  

Cultivating Stillness

A friend of a friend recommended this updated translation and commentary on an old Taoist text several years ago.  Since it was on the shelf and I've been on a Taoism kick, I finally got around to trying it out.  I didn't read the whole works because it quickly became clear that I didn't have the background to understand it.  Everything useful (to me) was contained in the translator's introduction.  The book is composed of an original text attributed to Lao Tzu (though probably written a few hundred years after this already semi-legendary figure's death) and an accompanying commentary written some thousand years later by another Taoist sage.  The original text is cut from the same vaguely suggestive poetic cloth as the Tao te ching.  Actually, it's probably not even as clear as the classic.  As a result the commentary is ridiculous from a literary perspective.  There simply isn't enough information in every 3 lines of the original to adequately inform 5 pages of commentary.  It's clear that the later commentary is operating from within a fully developed Taoist system that he projects back on the original and pretends to elaborate from it.  The introduction provides a little bit of information about this system of "internal alchemy".  Whether fortunately or not, this is really just enough for the casual reader to see that the system is complicated and requires years of tutelage under a master to even begin to appreciate.  In essence, it's designed to be a meditation manual written in code to prevent it from falling into the hands of some dunce like myself.  And it worked.

Chuang Tzu Basic Writings

Continuing my exploration of Taoist book already on my shelf, I picked up the Burton Watson selection and translation of Chuang Tzu writings.  As we saw with Lao Tzu, the writing attributed to "Master Chuang" can only loosely be credited to the third century BCE sage of that name; in fact, what has come down to us is another collection of greatest hits along with a few B sides.  In this case, however, we have at least moved from the level of the telegraphically compressed to the merely obscure.  While there's not enough here to describe a Chuang Tzu system, we at least have more than the fragmented poetry of Lao Tzu.  The short but fully formed allegorical stories that comprise the bulk of this book let you sink your teeth into their interpretation a little more.

As with Lao Tzu, the defining feature of this philosophy seems to be the inversion of opposites.  Again and again we see that the things the ordinary man values are mere encumbrances, and the things he holds as useless or base are where true wisdom lies.  With Chuang Tzu though, this takes on an almost Nietzschean tone advocating the revaluation of all values, a dimension that wasn't obvious in the Tao Te Ching.  There's more humor here, more levity of style, more "free and easy wandering", to quote the title of one chapter, that matches the counter-cultural content.  There's also more signs that fit with interpreting the Way along the nondual lines that David Loy laid out.  A boundaryless vastness, a stillness, a silence beyond words and even conceptualization -- these are the core features of the emptiness that replaces the subject-object duality as the ground of things.  That said, to use the book as a meditation manual is still clearly impossible.  Which leads me to wonder just how Taoist meditation is taught.  These classic texts so far appear to be entirely philosophical in their outlook.

Our Pristine Mind

I picked up Orgyen Chowang's very accessible introduction to Dzogchen meditation because it was recommended reading for Michael Taft's fundamentals of non-dual awareness class.  Chowwang takes a tact almost diametrically opposed to the dense and philosophical one we saw from David Loy.  Our Pristine Mind aims to be a completely practical, jargon free meditation manual.  Chowang is at pains to make his language as simple as possible, to use similes that anyone can easily understand, and to avoid almost any reference to all religious or philosophical traditions.  In fact, I don't think he even mentions that what he's explaining is the basics of Dzogchen until the final chapter!  This makes the book so breezy and accessible that you can hand it to anyone, a style which fits perfectly with the minimalist approach of nondualism.  

Minimalism, however, is often, and in a sense rightfully, accused of being repetitive.  And, at least as a book, Our Pristine Mind suffers from this same problem.  Chowang does a great job of introducing the concept of Pristine Mind and distinguishing it from ordinary mind by explaining that we ordinarily identify ourselves with "mental events" such as our thoughts and emotions and perceptions.  But then he goes on to say that developing our connection to Pristine Mind is the cure for literally everything that ails us.  Feeling bad?  Return to PM.  Getting arrogant?  PM.  Relationship got you down?  World on fire?  Mini-bread catastrophe?  Yep, all you need to do is reconnect with your innate Pristine Mind.  Seriously though, while perhaps the path is really this simple, perhaps we just keep repeating It's Gonna Rain till the magic happens, it makes for a bit of a boring book by conventional standards.  

Nevertheless, I found myself very excited about the first half of the book.  Having had a few glimpses of the mindset that Chowang is describing, I found that his description of it was the simplest I've come across.  You are not your mental events!  If you are anything, you are the space in which those mental events take place -- the empty space of Pristine Mind.  All of our thoughts and emotions arise and pass away within the immanence of this space just as the clouds float across the clear blue sky.  They are empty in themselves, mere effects, like special effects, not causes.  If you have never experienced this change of perspective, this shift in identification, you may rightfully wonder what it means and if it's even possible.  Unfortunately, Chowang can't immediately help you with that doubt because these ideas only begin to make sense when you meditate on them and experience them for yourself.  Until that point Pristine Mind is as tangible as Never Never Land.  Fortunately though, Chowang does provide both the framework that gives you an image to aim for, as well as the simple step-by-step recipe his master taught him.  Don't follow the past.  Don't anticipate the future.  Remain in the present moment.  Leave your mind alone.  This pacifist and minimalist program seems to be the core of many different schools of nonduality.  Like minimalism, while it may take a long time to develop into something, when it does, you feel like you've gotten something beautiful from absolutely nothing.  

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues

When I saw that my thesis advisor from back in the day was publishing a new book on Plato just as I finished reading his complete works, I felt compelled to complete the circle -- Andrea Nightingale was the professor who brought Plato to life for me for the first time back in sophomore year.  A lot of what I remember distinguishing her as an excellent professor seems to be exactly the same.  The book explores Plato's extensive reference to ancient Greek religious practices as his way of marking the Forms as divine entities.  In other words, she still explores Plato's ideas in context and treats his writing as literature.  This technique quickly makes the received interpretation of Plato's philosophy as "Platonism" look like a pretty one dimensional reading.  She also remains a very clear writer and thinker.  There's nothing grandiose and vague in her ideas, and nothing trendy and jargony about her style.  So while her book is clearly an academic work mainly meant for the other two people who specialize in this sort of stuff, even a fucuuking amateur was able to read and understand it without too much trouble.  At the level of specific details, I got a lot out of reading this, and I'll go into the particulars of what I learned about each of the four dialogues she analyzes in a moment.  

First though, the bad news.  Nightingale's thesis that Plato considered his Forms divine cuts against the grain.  If western philosophy has a deeply religious bent from right from its inception, it undermines the claim that western thinking is uniquely rational, scientific, and universal.  While this claim has obviously changed its form many times since Plato, having today morphed into what we might call 'scientism', discovering an overtly religious aspect right at its root can't help but make us more aware that this same thread runs through the whole project.  Today, this is an inconvenient fact for pretty much everybody.  As you might expect from someone who proposes a controversial thesis -- indeed, she begins by observing this idea goes against all her own training -- Nightingale is at pains to nail her argument down against every possible objection.  This makes for a very clear and thorough presentation, but also for a lot of repetition.  Sadly, it also means that in 250 pages, we don't really get that far, philosophically speaking.  Because the fact that Plato's Forms are "out of this world" and that his style tends towards myth and poetry the more closely his content approaches them, is actually kinda obvious if you read these texts with an open mind.  To excise this aspect of Plato and treat him as a purely rational thinker clearly does violence to the man and his work.  Since I had already come to this (apparently controversial) reading, all the time spent convincing me to take seriously the idea of Plato's mysticism was time wasted.  I would have liked to see Nightingale take the next step and ask what impact this thesis has on our overall view of Plato's philosophy and what implications it might hold more generally for our view of the western cannon and mindset.  Perhaps the last question is too broad and vague for an academic work, but it seems to me the first should be a natural companion to her thesis.  After all, while all the detailed textual work is indispensable, when I listen to someone who has spent 30 years studying Plato, I hope to come away with something broader than the knowledge that the word ἐπόπτης at line 210a in the Symposium refers to an initiate to the Eleusinian Mysteries.  That's fascinating and all, but shouldn't there be some attention given to why I should care?  Aside from a brief mention of Heidegger's ideas about Plato's "ontotheology" or Ricouer's claim that there is a "polytheism of Forms" the larger questions are simply not addressed.

The good news is in the details.  First, there's a lot of Greek language in the book, which alerted me to all kinds of etymological connections I hadn't known about.  For example, I'd never noted that theoria has a reference to the divine (theos) hiding in plain sight -- originally it meant a kind of sacred pilgrimage to gaze on religious objects.  Kinda changes the resonance of "theory", no?  Or who knew that autopsy literally means "seeing for oneself"?  Or that our "choreography" is a reference to the choreia or "choric dances" that the Greeks used for religious festivals?  Or  that "harmony" is the translation of kosmos?  Or etc ... it's enough to make you want to learn Greek.

Second, Nightingale's real contribution with this book is how she puts together the details of Plato's language with what was already known about various aspects of ancient Greek religious life.  Her basic thesis is that Plato considered the Forms a new type of divine entity.  So when he tries to talk about what these new divinities are like, he couches the discussion in a language already familiar to his readers.  Not only does he deploy a new mythology, but he makes specific reference to the Greek habit of seeing the gods directly in the form of a divine epiphany, as well as particular reference to both Orphic and Eleusinian mystery cults.  Nightingale does a great job of pinning down exactly where and how Plato's language takes this religious turn when it comes to talking about the Forms.  As I observed, while Plato's "high and mighty" tone is obvious and unmistakable, there are many details the casual reader will never catch.  

For example, in the Symposium, Diotima's speech (given via Socrates) makes unmistakable reference to the two stages involved in entering the Eleusinian mystery cult.  First, you become an "initiate", and later a "see-er" or epoptes.  In the second and final stage, through what sounds like a combination of clever tricks with torchlight, you get to see some dazzlingly bright vision of the goddess Persephone.  That is, you don't just understand something about the goddess or learn some secret information; the epoptes actually sees the goddess, has some direct experience of the divine.  Likewise, the whole point of Diotima's speech is that the philosopher, through a series of stages, can actually have some experience of Beauty in itself.  Understanding the Forms rationally is a stepping stone to experiencing them directly in the form of a divine epiphany.  Plato is introducing a new theology here.  I think taking this mysticism more seriously could put a substantially different spin on our interpretation of the Forms.  Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious to me how to join this idea to the more rational and dialectical aspects of Platonism.  Of course, I presume it isn't obvious to Nightingale either, as she doesn't suggest any means of integrating what she's uncovering.  At the very least, it bears mentioning that Socrates' trial and execution for "profaning the gods" looks a lot different in this light.  Perhaps the Athenians understood him much better than we do!

The other big and non-obvious example Nightingale gives us is her analysis of Plato's references to Orphism in the Phaedo.  In reading Plato, I was often struck by just how Christian he sometimes sounds.  I mean, he's all about ascending, purifying, leaving behind the dirty world and our corrupt physical body.  In fact, Phaedo famously ends with Socrates owing a cock to Asclepius, presumably because this god of healing has cured him -- of the illness called life.  Obviously, calling this aspect of his philosophy "Christian", and interpreting it through the lens of original sin, redemption, and guilt, is an anachronism.  Except, it turns out that Plato did have a Fall myth available to him.  The Orphics believed that humans were created from the soot of the Titans that Zeus killed with his thunderbolt upon discovering that the Titans had eaten his son Dionysus.  As a result, we inherited something of the guilt for the Titans' action.  Our punishment, according to the Orphics, is to be born into a body and doomed to perpetually reincarnate until ... well, until we become initiated into Orphism, purify ourselves, and obtain forgiveness and release from Dionysus.  After that, our immortal soul will dwell in some non-incarnate paradise.  Plato makes extensive reference to this myth in his dialog.  In fact, it's built right into its structure.  Socrates is literally imprisoned, but with his death, his soul is about to be freed from the prison of his body.  As a true philosopher, since he has practised leaving his body behind for so long, undoubtedly his soul will ascend to the realm of the Forms after this purification.  So again, Plato is creating a new theology here.  He takes an existing religious story and substitutes in his own new, more abstract, gods.  

Nightingale covers several other ways that Plato either explicitly marks the Forms as divine or refers to the experience of them in the same way that his contemporaries would have referred to seeing a divine epiphany.  But I imagine you get the idea by now.  Plato's project was to make what is literally "out of this world" actually appear within it.  It's an inherently mystical and religious project, and the master used all the tools at his disposal to bring it alive for his readers.

Sons and Lovers

I can't remember now how this D.H. Lawrence novel ended up on my kindle; I hadn't really planned to read it.  But it slowly transitioned from something that was conveniently lying on the nightstand at the right moment, to something that drew me in enough to read the whole thing.  Sons and Lovers is the story of the Morel family, and more specifically, the story of the coming of age of the world's most archetypical mama's boy, Paul Morel.  While I enjoyed the keen psychological insight of the novel as well as the writing, at times I felt it reeked a bit of soap opera.  Perhaps the problem is that Lawrence manages to get you invested in characters that you never actually quite like.  As humans they are a bit of a caricature, with their stubborn obsessions and chronic inability to really figure themselves out.  Which of course actually makes them as realistically frustrating to deal with as yourself and everyone you know.  The other thing that drew me into the novel was the way the complexity of the writing progressed as the story unfolded.  Early in the book, when the story is mostly focused on the mother, the succinct, matter of fact tone matches her personality and education.  Then, as the story of her first two sons begins to take shape, the writing changes to reflect their development, until it culminates in the almost cosmic speculative tone that Paul embodies by the end of the novel.  It's a pretty impressive piece of literature that also manages to be an engrossing tale.