Tao Te Ching

I felt like David Loy's Nonduality had prepared me to better appreciate Eastern philosophy, so I dove right in with Lao Tzu's classic.  I read the D.C. Lau translation because I had the Penguin Classics version sitting around on the shelf.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a whole more out of reading the whole text than I did reading the first chapter that Loy analyzed.  The only real theme you can definitively point to in this cryptic work is the paradoxical confusion of opposites.  Which of course is simply a restatement of the definition of nonduality.  I also gleaned little from Lau's philosophically narrow-minded introduction.  The idea that the book is mainly just about how to survive in the Warring States period in China is almost laughable.  However, it was useful to learn that, while there was a Taoist sage named Lao Tzu, this also simply means "old man".  Accordingly Lau sees the text as one of several compilations of Taoist oral traditions that have been collected under the rubric of the "advice of a wise old man".  As with the Buddhist suttas, I think this goes a long way towards accounting for the modern reader's sense of the work's obscurity; it was never meant to be a stand alone piece of literature the way that, say, a Platonic dialog is.

99 Variations on a Proof

I picked up Philip Ording's aesthetic and amusing little book because I'm still trying to work some more math into the reading pile.  While I enjoyed his wit, the book wasn't quite what I expected.  Instead of mainly showing how many different areas of mathematics a simple polynomial equation can touch -- the proof is for the solution of a cubic equation -- Ording mainly shows us how many different styles a mathematical proof can be written in.  The two things are subtly different.  

Ording was inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which retells the same simple story using 99 varieties of narrative technique.  So the focus here is literally on the style of each proof, with some reference to the history of that mathematical style, rather than directly on the mathematical content of the proof.   In fact, many of the proofs are mathematically equivalent, differing almost entirely in typesetting and wording.  And the ones that introduce (for me) new mathematics, for example like the one that uses group theory, are only really examined from the same stylistic and historical perspective, without delving much into how the math works.  In other words, while you can learn something about math from this book, you can't actually learn much math.  The author's implicit understanding is that you will either be able to read a proof without trouble, or you won't -- and that's fine, because it's not really the point.  There's not enough information provided within Ording's commentary on each proof to go from it not making sense to it making sense.  That would have been a different book.  And shorter. 

Nonduality in Buddhism and Beyond

I picked up David Loy's study of the philosophy of nondualism because it was recommended reading for Michael Taft's Vast Sky Mind course.  Not only did the book complement the course material perfectly, but it also provided me with a whole new vocabulary to describe what has long drawn me to philosophy.  There are a lot of ways to describe this attraction, but a pithy version that fits the current context would claim that philosophy is exactly what happens to your theory of everything when it has to account for the fact that you're coming up with a theory of everything, which accounts for the fact that ...  While Loy doesn't point directly to this vertigo of immanence, the philosophy of nondual experience he describes is constantly dealing with the paradoxes generated by the idea that we, the subject, are not dualistically separated from the objective world.  So I was surprised and delighted to find that this study of Eastern nondual philosophies had so many parallels to the theories of Spinoza and Deleuze.  The book also gave me a great background for the next phase of my philosophical investigations into Lao Tzu and Nagarjuna.

Nonduality is broken into two sections.  In the first, Loy outlines a theory of nonduality by synthesizing the philosophies of Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism.  He then builds up plain english ideas of what nondual perception, action, and thinking would be like by augmenting descriptions given in those traditions with various Western ideas and his own metaphors.  In the second section, he compares the substantial differences between these traditional nondual philosophies in an attempt to show that they represent different ways of describing or interpreting the same core meditative experience.  

First though, Loy begins by trying to pin down exactly which two things are not dual in nondualism.  He explores 5 possibilities.  1) We could mean the nonduality of opposites, or the general failure of binary, black and white thinking to convey the complexity of the world.   At the limit, this can even entail a repudiation of the law of the excluded middle, and an embrace of paradox.  2) We might also, or instead, mean that "things are not really separate and opposed to one another".  Loy calls this the "nonplurality" of the world.  Exactly how we mean this is a complicated question though.  The temptation is for this version of nonduality to tip over into a simple monism -- the claim that everything is one.  As I've already alluded to though, this claim becomes unstable as soon as "you" make "it" about "the world".  Which brings us to 3) the nonduality of subject and object.  The central claim of any nondualist philosophy is the lack of essential distinction between subject and object.  In fact, Loy takes the rejection of our common sense idea that the world is inherently divided into separate objects (one of which is me) interacting in space and time as a working definition of nondualism throughout the rest of the book.  Finally, and perhaps most deeply, Loy discusses two ways we may think of nondualism applying to itself.  4) Nagarjuna famously claimed that even samsara and nirvana were not dualistically opposed, which might be construed as suggesting that even dualistic and nondualistic experiences are nondual.  5) Some theistic nondualists (eg. Meister Eckhart) seek to overcome the dualism between God and man in the form of a mystical union with the divine.  At the very end of the book, Loy seeks to carefully distinguish these last two options, but I find it easiest to think of them as two flavors of the same idea.  Both express the paradoxical nonduality between the transcendent Absolute and immanent phenomena.  Emptiness is form and form is emptiness.  PLURALISM = MONISM.  This is an exceedingly difficult thought to comprehend, perhaps even a limit we can never reach.  Or a point where philosophy becomes life (or vice versa), just another expression of the inexhaustible.

So the key question of the first section of the book becomes what perception, action, and thinking can possibly be like if there is no subject to perceive an object, no actor to execute the action, and no separate thinker to be conscious of the contents of their thoughts.  Since a dualism of subject and object is so central to our understanding of each of these categories, you might contend that the nondualist is actually saying that there's no such thing as perception, action, or thought.  And indeed, all three main nondual traditions discuss these categories via paradoxes that appear to negate them.  Zen famously hears the sound of one hand clapping, the sound of no sound.  Lao Tzu suggests we practice wei-wu-wei, the action of non-action.  And all three cultivate a "thoughtless" thought without a thinker to holds successive thoughts together in a logical chain.  In all these cases though, as with the very name non-dual, the negative formulation is really only meant to confuse us enough to get started.  They do not literally mean that we should sit around blind and deaf, and do nothing but let our mind go blank.  The paradoxes are just a way to deliberately stall our experience, to de-automatize it by breaking through our everyday habits.  As Deleuze said in his discussion of Plato's Sophist, we are actually looking for a non-being without negation, a (non)-being or ?-being, a being of difference.  We're looking to characterize a different type of perceiving, acting, and thinking that goes beyond binary opposition just as it goes beyond subject and object.

According to Loy, nondual perception differs from regular perception in not having a representational overlay associated with it. Instead of perceiving objects like tables and trees, we perceive something closer to the bare sensory experience that our brain later interprets as a set of permanent objects.  Likewise, we also lose the perceiving subject, becoming so absorbed into the music or sight that we forget ourselves as well.  While this endpoint is mystical, Loy paints the path towards it as relatively straightforward.  The trick is to de-automatize our perceptions, to unlearn the habits of recognition that so quickly force our sensory signals to converge on a known object out there, presented to a subject in here.  Naturally, this is where meditative practice comes in.  When we suspend our normal mode of interacting with the world long enough to train our brain to look more closely at its data, we discover that there's way more going on with the blue vase than we realized.  We discover the very process of seeing.

The possibility of this different type of perception brings up all sorts of philosophical problems, and Loy does not shy away from any of them.  In fact, he invokes Heidegger, James, Russel, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein to suggest that Western philosophers have encountered some of these same problems as well.   However, while the details of this discussion are very interesting, I didn't find Loy's overall conclusion -- that the theory of nondual perception is a variety of phenomenalism -- a terribly helpful description.  It seems to me that the easiest way to misunderstand nondualism is to characterize it as a form of subjective idealism that claims all objects are merely mental constructions.  Indeed, the traditional description of the core idea lends itself directly to this misinterpretation; a book I picked up on Mahamudra approvingly quotes the Samputa Tantra:

All things, external and internal, 
are imputed by the mind.
Apart from the mind nothing else exists.

So, when I read about phenomenalism, and find it classified as a variety of idealism, the label has only served to deepen the misunderstanding.  

Later in the book Loy points out that of course this can't be the correct reading of the sutra.  No buddhist sect has ever espoused any version of subjective idealism for the simple reason that none of them believe the self exists.  Anatta is incompatible with our usual understanding of idealism.  The "mind" the sutta is referring to is not my mind, not the mind of a self-conscious subject.  It would be closer to call it the mind of the universe, since my mind arises within it, not vice versa. 

This begs the question of why you would want to call this ground of nondual perception a "mind" at all, a question that Loy spends a lot of time addressing in the second section of the book.  In Advaita Vedanta this underlying "thing" is called Atman/Brahman whereas in Mahayana Buddhism, they call it emptiness. Loy argues that these two schools of thought are really just two interpretations of the same nondual experience.  If "you" experience a perception before or beneath the appearance of a distinct subject and object, you might describe this either by saying that the only thing left is the object (buddhism), or by contending that all that remains is the pure subject (vedanta).  The Mahamudra quote above, despite the buddhist source, seems to go in this second direction.  For me, describing the ground as empty seems to bring us closer to the mark and lead to less confusion, so long as we don't hypostatize emptiness into a thing itself.  In the end, as Loy points out, neither of these responses make perfect sense, since the concepts of subject and object are entirely relative.  If one subsumes the other, the remaining term now taken as absolute has surreptitiously changed its meaning.  For myself, I prefer the approach Deleuze adopts in his final essay -- Pure Immanence: A Life.  

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.

It's clear that any term we choose here is going to suffer from problems, because we will always be in danger of denaturing the immanent operation of this groundlessness by converting it into a transcendent ground.  But calling it "a life" or "a transcendental field" instead of "a consciousness" or "a mind" at least takes it out of the realm of (alleged) human privilege.  This change in our frame of reference also requires a change in terminology.  Instead of saying that nondual epistemology is a variety of phenomenalism, a subcategory of idealism (even if we understand this as a Kantian transcendental idealism), we should say that it's a form of transcendental empiricism, that is, an empiricism beyond the subject and object.  

Loy next expands on the Taoist idea of wei-wu-wei, the action of non-action, to characterize the way nondual action differs from our dualistic concept of action.  The basic idea here is similar; a nondual action allows for no separation between actor and act.  When we become completely absorbed by the process of acting, we forget our expectations for the action, and lose our sense that there is some puppet within us that intends to act.  As with perception, this different concept of action has some big philosophical consequences.  When we realize that the self which intends an action is merely a convenient fiction that appears after the fact, the only candidate left for "agent" becomes something like the universe as a whole.  This has the effect of making the absolute freedom of spontaneous action coincide with the strictest determinism.  Just as Spinoza discovered in the same situation, this converts moral questions, which are judged from some transcendent perspective of right and wrong, into ethical questions which can only be judged immanently.

Finally, Loy tries to sketch what nondual thinking would look like.  By analogy to perception and action, the problem here is not to somehow stop thinking, but to think in a different way, one where thoughts "spring up" without a thinker.  While this may sound paradoxical, so far I find this the easiest nondual experience to actually have in practice.  Thoughts appear like lightning strikes, out of nowhere, and disappear just as quickly.  In practice, most of the time we spend "thinking" is actually spent remembering and reconstructing an afterimage, testing out whether one thought might link up coherently to another, fleshing it out with further words and images that would better explain it to us or to an imagined other.  By contrast, nondual thinking is fully absorbed by each individual thought, without adding this discursive or rational or representative extra dimension that seeks to link them together.  Loy goes on to relate this type of thinking to many artists' and writers' accounts of creativity, as well as to the late Heideegger's descriptions of a philosophical thinking that thinks from the perspective of Being itself (so to speak).  I haven't read enough late Heidegger to comment on how successful this interpretation is, but it did remind me of the profound quote Deleuze cites: " 'What gives us most cause for thought is the fact that we do not yet think' " (D&R 275).

As I've already mentioned, the second section of the book revolves around Loy's claim that the various nondual traditions, and particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, are only in apparent conflict.  Loy spends a long chapter discussing how their seemingly opposed view about the self, the nature of substance, the reality of time and causality, and the path to liberation are actually two sides of the same coin.  Or, more specifically, two possible descriptions of the same nondual meditative experience.  By comparing these viewpoints, Loy builds a convincing argument that either school of thought makes sense, but that, by choosing to collapse everything into one side of the subject-object distinction, neither manages to adequately express the most fundamental truth of nonduality -- that this distinction makes no sense to begin with.  

He then ends his important chapter 6 by leveling the same type of critique at Derrida.  Unfortunately, I found this section fairly superficial.  He argues that Derrida's project of deconstructing texts is limited to the negative -- he can only de-construct the idea of the "true interpretation" or the "master signifier" we used to take for granted.  For all I know, this might be an accurate critique of Derrida.  Certainly my perception is that he's a bit of a wanker who may have had a good point, but used his theory that there is no substance as a smokescreen to favor style over substance.  But this is on the basis of a pretty limited exposure.  However, the deeper point shouldn't concern just Derrida, but the possibility of a positive version of deconstructive philosophy that doesn't limit itself to only taking apart theories, but actually creates new ones, albeit in the full consciousness that none of these can be the final word.  To accept Derrida as "the end of (Western) philosophy" is a huge mistake.  The lack of a master narrative, the inevitable and endless circulation of différance, shouldn't be held up as requiring a sort of terminal nihilism that licenses any academic idiocy, regardless of what Derrida in particular does with the root idea of post-structuralism.  Instead, we should think of this as another moment like the one Morton Feldman felt after meeting John Cage: "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do."

 

#reread