Infinite Powers

If you're one of those people who had a dreadful calculus teacher who convinced you the whole subject was both totally uninteresting and utterly beyond your comprehension, Steven Strogatz has written the book for you.  He tells a wonderful story about the long history of calculus from Archimedes to Poincaré.  He gives examples of many applications that show you why the abstractions of calculus are so useful in practice.  But most importantly, he actually explains the core ideas of calculus in a simple, progressive way that enable nearly anyone to fully grasp the central insight.  In other words, the book isn't just about the history of calculus and its applications -- you can actually learn calculus from it.  In fact, the math in the book is explained so clearly and simply that they should probably just hand it out on the first day of math class.  Sure, if you want to study advanced math or physics, you'll still need to power through all the rigor of delta-epsilon proofs and whatnot.  But everyone else probably only needs to carefully read this one book to say they truly understand the central mathematical concept that Strogatz calls, "The Infinity Principle" -- you can solve a hard problem by differentiating it into infinitely many infinitesimally simple problems and then integrating their solutions back together.  

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

I didn't know anything about Shunryu Suzuki (and actually confused him with the other Suzuki) before picking up a copy of his classic that I had sitting on the shelf.  And since the book consists entirely of excerpts from informal talks he gave at the San Francisco Zen center back in the sixties, I still feel like I've only just gained a little flavor of his teaching.  As with all things Zen, it's hard to know what to say about it.  I enjoyed reading his plainly spoken but utterly paradoxical explanations of true zazen.  Some parts of it resonated deeply.  Other parts felt like they were at the tip of my tongue.  And some of it was simply baffling.  Perhaps the thing I will remember is his repetition of the idea that we cannot practice zen with any "gaining idea".  Zen is good for nothing.  In turn, anything we do without expectation, without attachment to is outcome, is zen.  That is all.

An Inquiry Into the Good

After spending the past six months reading Eastern philosophy almost exclusively, I've reached the end of the list of the original texts I wanted to cover.  Of course, I'm now even more painfully aware of how limited this list was, as every book spawned an interest in three new ones, ranging from other original texts, to the vast secondary literature on Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta.  This is hardly the last time I'll study the Asian non-dual philosophies.  But the time has come to look back to the West for a moment.  

Before I did that, however, I noticed an old copy of Kitaro Nishida's first book sitting forlornly on the shelf, only half read two decades ago.  Since the dust jacket billed him as a serious student of both Zen and Western philosophy, I thought he might serve as a perfect pivot point.  And, actually, the book does serve as a good transition, though not quite for the reasons I expected.  An Inquiry Into the Good is not so much a synthesis of Western and Eastern ideas as it is a traditional book of Western philosophy written by someone whose basic worldview is deeply informed by the fundamental experiential insight of any non-dual philosophy -- subject and object aren't always and essentially distinct.  Nishida makes surprisingly little mention of any Eastern writers, thinkers or religious figures.  Instead, at least in this book, he prefers to approach philosophy entirely on Western terms, and speaks more (and positively) about Christ than he speaks about the Buddha.  Yet you can plainly see the influence of Zen ideals that run underneath everything and provide -- to use a phrase Nishisda is fond of -- the alpha and omega of his thought.  In short, An Inquiry Into the Good is Western philosophy elaborated from an Eastern starting point.  Therein lies both its interest and its shortcomings.  

The most interesting part of the book is the way it starts.  In Part 1, Nishida begins with a description of "pure experience" that will serve as the foundation for all his philosophy.  It is immediately obvious that he is describing what I prefer, less judgmentally, to call 'non-dual experience'.  This is the state where subject and object are not yet separate and distinct entities.  It's not an easy experience to describe, which is why most descriptions tend to the metaphorical -- a vast and spacious awareness that is like the sky or the ocean.  Nishida isn't satisfied to rely on these traditional metaphors, and tries to pin down the most salient aspect of the experience in philosophical terms -- namely, that it is not your experience.  You don't have the experience or possess it.  It doesn't happen inside of you as a subjective state.  Instead, it's more like the experience has you, that your everyday self appears inside the experience, as a bit of content that you no longer particularly identify with.  Or as he puts it:

Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience arises because there is an individual, but that an individual arises because there is experience.  (Preface, xxx)

In other words, pure experience does not belong to an experiencing self, but it more like an experience of self.  Hold off on the question of to whom this experience belongs if not you.  

The reason Nishida calls this pure experience is because it does not involve the addition of any conceptual fabrications.  Leave your mind alone.  He has in mind a direct and immediate experience, unmediated by a subjective self, an experience that is unconcerned with identifying or representing anything with concepts.  The initial idea is that all our abstract thinking only comes afterwards, when experience becomes impure, as it were.  Hypotheses like our belief in a material world made of atoms are nothing but abstractions we add to pure experience to make sense of it.  This might at first sound like a version of subjective idealism -- all we can really know about directly are our internal sensations; everything else is just a matter of speculation.  But that reading of it inappropriately installs a primary subjectivity where Nishida sees only a derivative one.  Sensations can be a non-dual experience, but only if they are no longer the sensations of a pre-given subject.  Pure experience isn't about what we usually call our most 'basic' 'inputs'.  We're not looking for the 'atoms' of experience, which in the end would be nothing more than another abstraction created by comparing various experiences.  What makes experience pure is the fact that it is complete in itself.

The directness and purity of pure experience derive not from the experience's being simple, unanalyzable, or instantaneous, but from the strict unity of concrete consciousness. (6)

This seems to me to be a great starting point.  Nishida seems to be trying to ask the largest possible question -- what is experience? -- with the fewest possible presuppositions.  But there are a couple of things about this starting point that should give us pause.  Both the idea of purity and the concept of consciousness seem to me to smuggle in some expectations right from the start.  If we are willing to question the idea that experience belongs to a human self, why wouldn't we go a step further and question the idea that experience needs any unifying consciousness at all?  The word 'consciousness' cannot help but suggest the model of our own individual consciousness, even though this is exactly the assumption we're trying to find a way beyond. In which case the 'unity' that for Nishida is constitutive of experience is immediately in danger of simply duplicating the most familiar unity we have -- our self identity.  Likewise, the word 'purity' has a long and checkered history that is inseparable from its political and moral implications.  Talking about pure experience implies that there is impure experience.  And we all know that impure stuff is both derivative and bad, as well as essentially distinct from the pure stuff.  So it seems that Nishida is surreptitiously introducing a new duality, one carrying 2,000 years of moralistic baggage.

However, these observations are in no way intended as some sort of refutation of his philosophy.  The most interesting aspect of the book is the way that you can see Nishida struggle mightily against the problems these words express.  The difficulty is of course not merely linguistic, though perhaps to really develop any new philosophical concept we need to introduce new words and liberate old ones.  The difficulty lies in consistently thinking outside our selves, outside our own empirical subjectivity, without accidentally reimporting these selves at a transcendental level.  Nishida tries to do this, and fails.  Perhaps this is due in part to his very abstract and propositional style?  I would call it the 'Western' style of philosophy if Plato's genre-bending dialogues didn't sit so uncomfortably with this description; certainly it's the post-Cartesian (pre-Nietzschean) style.  At any rate, as the book progressed I increasingly had the sense that his core non-dual insight was gradually being swallowed up by and tending to return to the same philosophical platitudes that had been imperfectly ejected at the beginning.  I'm certain Nishida was attempting to reach old mystical concepts like, "God is love" and, "Reality is inherently spiritual", from a new angle.  But in this book at least he simply ends up sounding like a Christian mystic.

Intriguingly, Nishida himself would agree with this assessment.  In a preface written 25 years after the initial publication, he sympathizes with critics who regarded it as "too psychological".

As I look at it now, the standpoint of this book is that of consciousness, which might be thought of as a kind of psychologism.  Yet even if people criticize it as being too psychological, there is little I can do now.  I do think, however, that what lay deep in my thought when I wrote it was not something that is merely psychological. (Preface xxxii)

This suggests that it would be interesting to revisit Nishida's philosophy towards the end of his career, when presumably he was able to more faithfully develop his brilliant starting point.  The situation reminded me strongly of Deleuze's comments about the trajectory of Bergson's philosophy:

Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life.  And it is true that Bergson had to express himself in this way, at least at the outset.  But, increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round.  That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox.  Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change.  (Cinema 2, 82)

Of course, Nishida does not begin with the idea that experience is in us.  Quite the contrary.  But what he ends up saying is effectively that experience is in God, that it is a manifestation of God.  Perhaps later he can finally reverse this formula to say that God is in experience.  But here at the beginning of his philosophy, he seems to get trapped in the idea of a divine subjectivity that that is as closed and completed as we, alongside the early Bergson, imagine our own to be.  An open and unfinished God whose unity is anything but given perhaps still awaits us.

Like I say though, the interest of the book lies in the way we can still glimpse the possibility of this new road even if we get lost in the thickets surrounding it.  Accordingly, I want to examine some of these breadcrumbs in the hopes that they will later enable me to return to the original insight.  Maybe the most interesting aspect of Part 1 is the way that Nishida tries to divide experience into categories like representing, thinking, willing, knowing, and intuiting, while simultaneously trying to undo the damage that these distinctions threaten to do to his theory of pure experience.  For example, one his early statements is that pure experience, since it is not representational, is also, strictly speaking, meaningless.  It always happens spontaneously in the present.  Any judgement about the value or meaning of this experiences, or any memory of it, is not pure experience.  Except that memories, plans, and judgements about experience are also experiences in their own right.  They too have to happen in the present, even if their contents is interpreted as belonging to some other time or dimension.  So Nishida is quickly led to passages like this one:

Assuming the pure experience is [already] endowed with discriminations, what are the meanings or judgements added to it and how do they relate to pure experience?  People usually argue that when pure experience is connected to objective reality it generates meaning and takes the form of judgements, but from the perspective of my theory of pure experience, we cannot leave the sphere of pure experience.  Meanings or judgements derive from the connection of a present consciousness to past consciousnesses; meanings and judgements are based on the unifying activity in the great network of consciousness.  They indicate the relation between present consciousness and other consciousnesses, and therefore merely express the position of present consciousness within the network of consciousness. (9)

Here you can already see that Nishida needs some sort of fractal structure to discuss pure experience.  There are unities nested within other unities in a way that threatens to topple the 'purity' of experience into meaninglessness.  If all experience is pure experience, then what does 'pure' add to the description?  A version of this question will appear throughout the book, and it is the underlying force that eventually pushes Nishida to his divine mysticism -- the buck only stops with God's consciousness.

The same problem recurs in the chapter on thinking.  Nishida begins by describing thinking as the subsequent relation of two representations.  In this way it would differ from the immediacy of sense perception.  But this relation of experience is also is an experience of relation.  This opens the door for Nishida to claim that most of our thinking is, like all pure experience, not really ours.  

In the instant it shift from one representation to the next, thinking, too, is unconscious, and as long as the unifying activity is actually functioning it must be unconscious.  By the time we are conscious of this activity as an object, it already belong to the past.  The unifying activity of thinking is in this way completely outside the will. (14)

While this is a suggestive passage, introducing the unconscious here raises more questions than it answers.  Is our unconscious (out-of-conscious) precisely within the consciousness of some larger being?  Are we, as Nishida seems at one point to suggest, merely the differentiated moments in the unified development of something like Hegel's Absolute Spirit?  Is Absolute Spirit the same thing as God and both of these equivalent to Non-dual Awareness?  I don't think these are the same concept.  But if your only image of nested unities is a set of concentric circles, then you will find that the larger space in which your self-consciousness exists looks just like the smaller you.  The point of non-dual awareness cannot simply be to discover that your little ego is inside a bigger ego structured in exactly same way.  This is why, despite the fact that Loy shows us how the two formulations can be philosophy equivalent, I find the Buddhist concept of non-self less easy to misinterpret than Advaita Vedanta's concept of the absolute self.  Throughout An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida will overload terms like 'self' and 'consciousness' and 'unity' in ways that at first seem like mere problems of terminology but later turn out to undermine his whole project.

We can finally leave behind Part 1 by noticing the same pattern cropping up in the chapter on will.  At first, it seems as if Nishida considers will a distinct and somewhat derivative category of experience that deals with the relations between objective representations of the world and subjective representations of our movement.  If there is no subject nor object in pure experience, then will seems to be the last thing that would qualify as pure.  But then Nishida goes on to once again relativize these distinctions that at first seemed absolute.  In his theory, pure experience is always positing a goal for itself.  This goal is exactly what allows for the experience to have the unity that constitutes it.  In other words, pure experience is inherently teleological, with its end operating from within right from the beginning, and Will is the most fundamental category of experience.  Yet while Nishida makes it clear that he has in mind a larger and more absolute Will, not our small self-centered "free will", it's hard to see how we're not now even more mired in the same problem as before.  Absolute will seems destined to be an absolute subject that harmonizes and unifies the (for it) absolutely objective world of little subjects.  

I won't discuss the rest of the book in detail because I think you can already see its essential trajectory.  Once Nisihida slips into this teleological view of pure experience as carrying its own goal within it as the endpoint of its unifying will, it's almost impossible for his theory of the Good to amount to anything other than God working out his divine plan.  From there, it's downhill into the 'bad mysticism' that has nothing concrete to offer us beyond an assurance that all is one and all is for the good in this most perfect of worlds.  The book gets less interesting the further it goes.  Hopefully I can someday return to the late Nisihida to see how his philosophy changed in response to the charge that he was too "psychological".  

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