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  

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. wrote a typically dreadful self-help type book to popularize her research on the effects of mindset on performance outcomes.  The book is nevertheless worth reading.  While the writing cringe inducing and repetitive, the basic idea is profound enough that any amount of thinking about it is rewarding.

Dweck divides the world into two types of people.   There are those with a fixed mindset, who believe that ability is determined in advance, and those with a growth mindset, who believe that ability can be improved over time.  So a fixed mindset person thinks that people are talented, smart, or athletic by some natural disposition.  In which case, their artistic, intellectual, or athletic performance is always just a test of whether they possess this fixed disposition or not.  All of life then becomes a pass/fail proposition that proves or disproves one's innate superiority or inferiority.  By contrast, a growth mindset person thinks that people become talented, smart, or athletic by working really hard to cultivate those skills.  In this case, performance does not reveal who people are, but simply where they are located on a continuum of possibilities.  Life's tests then become a series of feedback opportunities and chances to learn what skills you already have and which you need to spend more time cultivating.  In short, for the fixed mindset, everything revolves around judging and proving, whereas for the growth mindset, it's all about observing and learning.

Though this contrast is simple, I actually think it's hard to overstate the profound importance of cultivating a growth mindset.  If there's something (in our control) more important to our happiness than staying open to the possibility of learning from every experience, please tell me what it is in the comments.  For myself, I am more convinced every day that life is better when you maintain a beginner's mind.  It's a stance that leads to openness, affirmation, honest examination, and to there being quite simply a lot more to life.  So it's hard to exaggerate the importance of the effects of this idea.

Notwithstanding that, Dweck does her best.   She writes four essentially identical chapters each crammed with nearly identical anecdotes about business, school, relationships, and parenting.  From both an intellectual and stylistic angle, the problem stems from her monomaniacal attempt to prove the cure-all power of the growth mindset.  Because while the growth mindset is a wonderful philosophy, it's pretty lousy as a scientific theory.  Perhaps it's dangerous to venture too much critique of a popular book without being familiar with the original research on which it's based, but I have the impression that the science part here is pretty weak.  Dweck seems to evaluate the independent variable of whether subjects have a fixed or growth mindset by asking them whether they do or not.  Am I the only one who suspects that people might not really know what they believe, or might not believe anything particular or consistent at all?  And though Dweck inserts a one paragraph caveat at some point, she basically seems to believe that people as a whole, are either fixed or growth mindsetters.  Routine self-examination quickly reveals a confusing combination of these two beliefs about different aspects of experience at different times.  It's tempting to say that there are no fixed mindset people, only fixed mindset beliefs about a particular trait at a particular time.  But, obviously, that waters down the concept of "fixed".  

Finally, while Dweck's subtitle is "how we can learn to fulfill our potential", she basically assumes that everyone's potential is wonderfully unlimited and equivalent, but that this fulfillment can be measured with the same tired metrics as always: money, fame, and IQ score.  This is simultaneously unrealistic and counter-productive.  People's potential for a given task varies naturally.  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is innately better suited to basketball than I am.  Naturally, that observation shouldn't take anything away from his efforts to become a great basketball player.  Is it really so hard to believe that what hand you are dealt in life and how you play it are in fact both important?  Does the observation that our given potential varies have to immediately sap us of all belief in the possibility of improvement and turn us into fatalists?  And conversely, while it's certainly helpful to believe that change is possible if you want to see change, do we really have to constantly think that the sky's the limit?  The book isn't really capable of dealing with these more sophisticated thoughts.  But you never know about the sequel.  Dweck might learn.

The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's novel was already sitting on the shelf.  Which made it a convenient choice given that I was looking for something breezy to offset Pale Fire.  It's the thoroughly entertaining story of an Indian servant who escapes the "chicken coop" of poverty by breaking all the rules and offing his master.  Along the way it gives Adiga plenty of room to reflect on what perpetuates the dramatic corruption and inequality of India.  While I enjoyed the story and generally enjoyed the writing as well, I think the fact that it won the Man Booker prize has more to do with politics than art.  Perhaps that's true of all prizes though?  Adiga's most interesting literary device is setting the story in the form of a letter from the protagonist to Wen Jiaboa.  So technically, I guess it's an epistolary novel.  But of course this also allows him to slip in a question that the West considers truly subversive: what's so great about democracy?  And from that ironic distance, he's able to give us a classic suspense story in the sense of Hitchcock: the audience already knows what's going to happen, but they are as clueless as the characters about exactly when and how the ax will fall.  While it was enjoyable, you're not missing much by just watching the Netflix adaptation.

Zen Flesh Zen Bones

Since I so thoroughly enjoyed The Gateless Gate, I thought I'd investigate Zen literature a bit more.  This collection actually contains four different texts packages together.  

The first is a collection of 101 Zen stories that were originally published in the 13th century as the Collection of Stone and Sand.  While these are all entertaining and enlightening to some degree, the majority of them don't live up to the (extremely high) standards of thought-provoking-ness set by The Gateless Gate.  There are, however, a number of gems in here like Nan-In's cup of tea and Toyo's sound of one hand. 

The second is another translation of The Gateless Gate.  I prefer the version I read earlier because the Yamada Koun translation also provides a second layer of commentary specifically meant to take these koans more accessible to Westerners.  

The third is a reprint of the 10 Bulls or 10 Ox Herding Pictures that are meant to describe the stages of enlightenment.  The drawings reprinted here are those of Tokuriki Tomikichiro, with the verses from Kuòān Shīyuǎn, and commentary from who knows where.  I find this the most appealing of all the maps of enlightenment I've encountered so far, mainly for its simplicity and the sense of everyday mystery in those last few drawings.  Also, I have a solid intuitive sense that I'm working on stage 5 right now: Taming the Bull.

The final bit is a translation of a 7th century BCE Hindu scripture that bears a passing resemblance to the style of the later Zen writings.  However, this text is so old, so terse, and so severed from its context and tradition that it reads much like the fragments we have from the Presocratics.  It's not that you can't see the resemblance, it's just that you're given so little information that it's unclear whether you're drawing most of this connection from the context.   If you want to know more about this remarkably old bit of scripture, you can go down the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra wikipedia rabbit hole.  I mean, who even knew there was such a thing as Kashimir Shaivism?  That is, beyond the roughly 1.3b people for whom this question is not rhetorical.

Of Human Bondage

I picked up Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage because it was already on the shelf and because it was supposed to be a classic.  While it's not a bad novel, I just don't see how it's remarkable enough to warrant that description.  Maugham tells the story of the first 30 years of the sensitive young club-footed boy Philip Carey.  While Philip has a basically good heart, he's not really portrayed as that likeable a character, which is surprising since we are told in the author's preface that he is autobiographically inspired.  He's so overly sensitive, so filled with shame and rage, so fixated on class distinctions, so ... British, that he's just a hard kid to love.  Naturally, there's some drama in Philip's life.  He's an orphan.  He's differently-abled.  He falls in love with a whore.  He runs out of money.  All of these events and Philip's reactions to it are portrayed in fluid and mercifully spare prose that unfolds only gradually, growing up with its main character, as it were.  But in the end, it feels like the novel makes a 600 page mountain out of what is, at bottom, a molehill.  Growing up seems really dramatic while it happens, but in a sense it's one of the most boring and commonplace stories humans have to tell.  And despite all the drama, Philip Carey's childhood leads to the most pedestrian and bourgeois of destinations -- a small town doctor with a wife and kids.