Against the Gods

Peter Bernstein's "Remarkable Story of Risk" had been on the shelf for so long that it somehow migrated into bedtime reading.  While it was engaging and well written, I found I wasn't really the target audience for the book.  I was already familiar with all of the mathematics, and even many of the historical anecdotes, that he discusses in the first half of the book.  And just a routine tour of duty in finance makes the second half's discussion of risk management techniques a bit redundant.  In fact, I almost stopped reading after the eye-rolling-ly triumphant late 90's tone of the introduction; these days, that era's presumption that we had managed to design a foolproof self-correcting risk management system looks nothing short of amazingly naive.  However, I'm glad I pushed on despite my misgivings.  I ended up enjoying the way Bernstein unfolded his story and nuanced the neo-liberal tone he began with.  Ultimately, it's not a bad book to hand someone who has never reflected on the issue of what "risk" is, nor how our definition of this concept has shifted over time.  

Religion and Nothingness

I'm unsure how to approach this review of Keiji Nishitani's collection of essays on the relationship between religion and nihilism.  

From a comparative philosophy perspective, they form a deep reflection on the connection between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the way Nietzsche saw the history of Western philosophy dead-ending in nihilism.  Exploring this connection, and especially examining Nishitani's reading of Eternal Recurrence as, "... breathing ... the same pure mountain air that we felt in approaching the the standpoint of Dōgen ..." (RN, 215), could easily be a review in itself.  It's the only time I've seen anyone transpose Nietzsche's idea to a Buddhist context and ask the rather obvious question -- does the Eternal Return describe samsara or nirvana, the greatest weight, or the most unbearable lightness of being?  Yes.  

But there's so much more to the book than this question that it seems unfair to focus on it exclusively.  In fact, even if we stick with a purely philosophical lens, there are so many point of correspondence with The Fold and Nietzsche and Philosophy that the book also deserves its very own chapter in my forthcoming magnum opus The NonDual Deleuze.  Nishitani reinvents emptiness as the plane of consistency, a field of force that holds everything together in a "non-being that is not the being of the negative".  He insists that this field of experience only arises on the far side of our personal ego, after a journey through the center of an impersonal nihilism again to a Great Death.  He discusses various syntheses of time that lead us to see every instant as a "monad of eternity".  I could go on, but it's clear these two are breathing the same mountain air of non-duality.  

And yet, even this longer review would fail to do the essays complete justice.  Because ultimately Nishitani doesn't even see his point as purely philosophical.  As a devoted Zen practitioner himself, his point is also deeply religious or "existential" -- he is concerned with that aspect of our human experience where we necessarily call into question just who we are and what it means to experience, where we begin to look outside of ourselves in an attempt to understand what's happening on the inside, and thus begin to blow apart the nice stable contained self we imagine is our birthright.  This vertiginous exploration of the ground of our existence is for Nishitani the essence of the religious impulse and directly explains it connection to nothingness.  Colloquially speaking, it's that moment of quiet reflection when we wonder, "what does it all mean?"  When we live, rather than theorize, this search, we find ourselves starting into the same groundless abyss that stared back at Nietzsche. And only by crossing this river of absolute nihilism, this gulf where nothing really means anything, can we reach the far shore where the abyss converts 'full circle' into the empty suchness of the present.  In other words, at the deepest level, I think Nishitani is trying to construct a philosophy adequate to his lived experience of sitting zazen.  In a sense, we might see it as asking what is the transcendental condition of possibility of Zen -- who or what are we that sitting still and doing nothing can have such a profound effect on our experience?  The answer of course is that we are the world, and the world is a field of infinite emptiness.

There's so much more that could be said here.  For example, another interesting review would focus on how Nishitani continues Heidegger's line of thought about technology and the fixation of human telos as mechanism.  He illuminates this question by bringing it into connection with Nietzsche's ideas about the master-slave 'dialectic' and Buddhist thinking about freedom and dependent origination.  Yet another review would be needed to address the theory of Christianity that Nishida develops, which centers on a mystical interpretation of the circumincessional unity of the trinity as another expression of what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing.  But since it's clear that I'm not going to write all these reviews, or in fact any of them, I think I'll just leave it here and start rereading the book.

Middlemarch

I was a little surprised when my esteemed colleague from Tejas suggested we read George Eliot's classic.  I didn't know a whole lot about the book when we began.  I think I mentally lumped it together with "the Jane's" -- Jane Eyre and Jane Austen -- simply because these were British female authors of roughly the same era.  And I very vaguely remember disliking the Jane's as sort of soap-opera-y.  As it turns out Eliot was born after Austen died.  A while it's true that she and Brontë were contemporaries, and one could indeed call Middlemarch a kind of soap opera ... I rather enjoyed it. 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the book was its dry English sense of humor.  There are not merely many droll comments from the narrator, but some wonderfully sarcastic dialogue that must have been hilarious in the original 19th-century English, but comes through fine even in translation.  Beyond that, there is also a lot of perceptive and even wise psychological observation.  Eliot only rarely provides any 'realistic' detail about settings and dress and the way the light glimmered in her father's eye on that dappled afternoon in the ... etc ... etc ...  Instead, she provides something I consider much closer to reality by ignoring all this setting and delving deeply into the psychology of each character.  We see their strengths and flaws in such clear light that we almost feel as if we're reading non-fiction, a case study where all the characters simply did what they had to do, given who they are.  If most soap operas rose to this level, I would certainly watch more TV.

Sanity and Sainthood

In a way, I'm probably not the best person to objectively review Tucker Peck's book about "Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy.  After attending his weekly eSangha classes for roughly three years, I'm not terribly surprised to find that there's almost nothing in the book I haven't heard him mention in conversation on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, this is hardly a critique; I wouldn't have listened to Tucker talk for ~150 hours if I didn't think his teaching was valuable.  But it does mean I can't come to these ideas with the same mindset as someone hearing them for the first time.  The book was still fun to read regardless because it compiles and organizes all these insights for future reference.  It also gives me something simple and tangible to hand to other people who are interested in quickly (it took less than 150 hours to read this) understanding what Tucker has to offer as a teacher.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who is both a dharma teacher and a professional therapist, the basic point is that both modalities are useful and even complementary, but they serve different purposes.  Meditation helps us to become aware of the process of our thoughts, whereas therapy works at improving their content.  While this simple distinction seems pretty intuitive, it contains a wealth of wisdom.  Because on the deepest level, it helps us to give up on the craving to have perfect content -- to be perfectly happy -- all the time.  As Tucker repeats throughout the book, and I've seen myself, meditation has a lot to offer, but it does not show any signs that it will magically deposit me in a state of permanent bliss anytime soon.  And while that might sound disappointing, I think perhaps we should see it as a blessing.  Do we really want to do something that leads us towards being unable to feel human emotion?  In fact, while meditation does seem to improve life overall, it actually has a tendency to open me to a much wider range of possible emotion.  A lot of the book gives advice for dealing with this sort of destabilization in a way that leads towards a broader dynamic stability that lets us function as a better, more wise and compassionate person, both towards others and ourselves.  And if this isn't the point of life, then what is?

Deleuze and Buddhism

How could I resist a title like this?  Unfortunately, this collection of essays did not live up to the potential I imagined, and still imagine, in exploring how Deleuze's thought overlaps with Buddhism.  They range across the non-sequitur (Higaki), the awful (See), the amateurish (Cook), and the word salad (Bradley), before culminating in the stream of consciousness (Ueno).  That is, five of the six essays are philosophically useless.  The best that can be said of them is that they made me aware of a few Japanese thinkers who sound interesting -- Kenji Miyazawa and Toshihiko Izutsu -- and drew my attention to a particular passage in A Thousand Plateaus (below).

The only essay I found particularly thought provoking was Simon Duffy's.  He approaches the connection between Deleuze and Budddhism by what seems to me a very natural path -- through drawing on Deleuze's reading of Spinoza.  Spinoza's system already bears comparison to Buddhism, and Deleuze's atheistic reading of it only accentuates this resemblance.  Deleuze reworked Spinoza's puzzling and seemingly contradictory idea that knowledge of the third kind gives us a window onto eternity in terms of an intensive and an extensive part of the individual.  Duffy, in turn, goes on to apply this concept to make sense of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation.  Basically, the more my self-definition begins to revolve around the constructive connections I have with the world, the more "I" shift towards being a intensive virtual singularity and away from identifying with my current extensive actualization of this essence.  In everyday terms, I get closer to being a pure possibility, a way of being that can be taken up by any being and hence re-actualized indefinitely.  This is a very complex thought, and the essay manages to be both a bit pedantic and yet short on the details.  Nevertheless, it poses the interesting question of "what happens when a Bodhisattva dies?"  They become completely expressive, completely virtual, only an intense essence that can live on in any of us indefinitely.  Duffy doesn't make it clear exactly how this differs from an eternal soul, or even from the way a lineage actively preserves the memory and spirit of a sage, so we're mostly just left with this suggestion that the path to immortality is in defining oneself as pure connection.  It may not be the version of immortality you were looking for.  But I found it food for thought.

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I imagine that the camouflage fish reference in this quote was inspired by its (dis)appearance in Neo-Finalism (probably not Ruyer's only use of this example).  Regardless, it caught my attention as an apt metaphor for non-duality.

Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance, any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by continued or superposed "traits," or strokes. (ATP, 280)

Individuation Project

Here's the bibliography for the individuation project spawned by my preliminary reading of The Fold.  It includes the philosophy of technology detour that happened between the first and second Simondon books.

Gilbert Simondon -- On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,

W. Brian Arthur -- The Nature of Technology

Langdon Winner -- Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought

Lewis Mumford -- The Myth of the Machine, Volume 1, 2

Joanne Macy -- Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory

Gilbert Simondon -- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

Jakob von Uexküll -- A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch -- The Embodied Mind

Raymond Ruyer -- Neofinalism

Erwin Schrodinger -- What is Life?

Bernard Cache -- Earth Moves

Richard Halpern -- Leibnizing

Gilles Deleuze -- The Fold

Healing Back Pain

My rolfer suggested I read Dr. Sarno's simple and slim volume about the psychological roots of back pain.  Sarno spent many years treating patients with recurring back and neck pain and came to the conclusion that in many cases the pain is actually psychosomatic.  He describes a medical condition which he calls, somewhat unmemorably in my opinion, tension myositis syndrome.  The idea is very simple.  When we have some chronic emotional disturbance (Sarno points particularly to represessed anger) our nervous system can protect us from this threat by using a physical pain to distract us from seeing the emotional suffering.  It's a trick as old as the Freudian unconscious (which itself goes all the way back to the minute perceptions of Leibniz).

After all, in our culture we have trained ourselves to believe that all physical things have a physical cause and that any pain we feel must signal some sort of 'real' physical tissue damage.  That is, we literally can't imagine that a pain could be caused by the mind, because there is no possible mysterious woo-woo new-age mind-body connection.  We take this naive materialist position as an article of faith these days, and indeed, that is what it literally amounts to -- scientism.  When looked at with even a modicum less religious fervor, however, we can immediately see that this sermon can only convince the already indoctrinated choir.  After all, if there's no mind-body connection, there's no pain and hence nothing to explain.  That'll be $4.5 trillion please.  The very possibility that we should look into the mind to find the cause of a pain in the body is excluded in advance, which of course makes this a perfectly airtight mechanism for repressing the consciousness of an emotional state.  It becomes literally unthinkable that the physical pain could be caused by an emotional disturbance.  

By contrast, Dr. Sarno successfully treated back pain simply by talking to patients about their emotions.  The only prescription is mental awareness.  In fact, in order to maximize the potency of this medicine, Dr. Sarno suggests completely ignoring the physical pain, literally pretending that it doesn't 'really' hurt at all, and that it therefore requires no special physical attention or treatment of any kind.  Forget all the scary X-rays and MRI images and other medical rites and rituals.  Once we convince ourselves that the problem is simply repressed emotional tension, the pain which served to hide this tension from us can no longer serve that purpose, and so evaporates.  He says this has worked for many people.  And, at least so far, it has worked for me as well.  

Attentive readers may notice that there is a funny irony to this mind-only diagnosis and treatment.  It requires a similar yet opposite faith that the physical cannot possibly be the cause of the pain.  From the perspective of the efficacy of the treatment, this makes perfect sense.  But from an intellectual perspective, it encloses us in another self-justifying loop of faith.  For now we have convinced ourselves that pain can have nothing to do with the physical body, which is of course only slightly less ridiculous a hypothesis than we began with, since it leads us directly to the idea that there is 'really' no body at all.  The resulting logic isn't quite as self-refuting as naive materialism, but it still leaves us with a very deep mystery.  Why is the idea of a pain in "the body" so convincing that it literally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if there is no such thing as "the body"?