Locating and Losing the Self in the World : Cross-Cultural Reflections on Self-Awareness and Self-Transcendence [1 ed.] 9781443869508, 9781443865357

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Locating and Losing the Self in the World

Locating and Losing the Self in the World: Cross-Cultural Reflections on Self-Awareness and Self-Transcendence

Edited by

Laura Specker Sullivan and Masato Ishida

Locating and Losing the Self in the World: Cross-Cultural Reflections on Self-Awareness and Self-Transcendence, Edited by Laura Specker Sullivan and Masato Ishida This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Laura Specker Sullivan, Masato Ishida and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6535-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6535-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I: Locating the Self Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7 What is Separation? The Jump in Levinas’ Analysis of Language Kyle Peters Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Self-Consciousness in Kant: How Much “I” do I Need? Matthew Izor Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 Embodiment and Personhood: Being a Person Amongst Others Sumaya Noush Part II: Losing the Self in the World Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Shameless Salvation: A Study of Enlightenment and Artistic Rescue in Nausea Sydney Morrow Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 81 Why is Emptiness not Empty? The Limits of Schopenhauer’s Ontology Miles Hamilton Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 95 Emptiness and Compassion: Creating the Appropriate Context for SnjnyƗta-Yoga William Barnes

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Table of Contents

Part III: Alternative Approaches to the World Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 111 Pragmatic Belief Formation and Upaya Louise Williams Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 121 Aesthetic Attitude: Full Attention Not Needed Leland Harper Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 131 Evanescence and Persistence: Towards a Buddhist Theory of Persistence over Time Itsuki Hayashi Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 147 The Holographic Universe and the Logic of Place Jeff Hoyt Contributors ............................................................................................. 155 Editors ..................................................................................................... 157 Index ........................................................................................................ 159

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference would not be possible without the support of the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, the Hung Wo and Elizabeth Ching Foundation, and the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa. We also wish to thank the students, faculty, alumni, and staff of the Department of Philosophy for assisting in conference preparation, whether it be reading student manuscripts, coordinating post-conference activities, or processing paperwork. Ruth Kleinfeld-Lenney has also been instrumental in the conference’s success, motivating students to give their best presentations through an award given in her name.



INTRODUCTION

This volume is a selection of papers that grew out of the 2012 Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference held at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa. Bringing together talented students and faculty members in a space of open discussion and inquiry, this annual conference has become the leading graduate student conference for comparative philosophy. In addition to the twenty-three students at the 2012 conference, who together comprised six full panels over two days, the conference also showcased the work of three advanced scholars, including two keynote speakers, Dr. Karma Lekshe Tsomo of the University of San Diego and Dr. Masato Ishida of the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa, as well as yet another distinguished speaker for the opening night, Dr. Carl Becker of the Kokoro Research Center at Kyǀto University. The topics discussed at the 2012 conference represented a broad swath of the field of comparative philosophy, from perennial questions in ethics and aesthetics to emerging studies of salvation and emptiness. Over the course of the conference, however, a definite theme began to emerge through many of the presentations and panels. This theme revolves around the questions of how human beings come to recognize themselves as selves, how they discover the nature of these selves, and how they then relate to the world at large. Thus, the three sections into which this volume is divided reflect the movement of thought through these three stages along the path from self-awareness to self-transcendence: searching for the location of the self, acknowledging the loss or radical transformation of the “absolute self”, and allowing for a reestablishment of a relation with the world. While such issues are also addressed in philosophy as a larger academic field, they have come to have special import in the field of comparative philosophy. To a certain extent, one might say that all philosophy is comparative, in that the ideas of different thinkers are brought into dialogue, compared, and evaluated. Nevertheless, comparative philosophy with a sharper focus refers to philosophical comparisons or relationships found across vastly distinct or contrastive cultures. The recent growth of this field is, in some ways, a response to the unfortunate fact that, despite the extent to which globalization has reshaped our world, most philosophy departments in the United States (as

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Introduction

well as in other countries) continue to focus primarily on philosophers and philosophical frameworks in the Western canon, leaving aside those that arose in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and other areas of the Pacific. This exclusion may be due to the historical development of philosophy as an academic field and the specializations that have been available to scholars of philosophy. However, there are some departments that have committed themselves to expanding this field and increasing the variety of specializations available to future generation scholars. The Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa is one such department, and provides a background to the questions raised by the papers in this volume.

Comparative Philosophy Finds Its Stride Established in 1936 by Charles A. Moore and Wing-tsit Chan, the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa’s Department of Philosophy has been the flagship department in the comparative philosophy movement since its inception. This is due in part to Moore’s launching of the East-West Philosophers’ Conference (EWPC) at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa, first held in 1939 and subsequently convened at the same location ten more times, with the most recent EWPC taking place in Honolulu in 2011. During this time, the number of participants in the EWPC has steadily grown from six in its first year to two hundred sixty in 2011. As Moore writes in his introduction to the 1959 conference, part of the success of the EWPC comes from Hawai‘i’s superb location for scholars of comparative philosophy. Positioned in the center of the Pacific, between the academies of the United States and their partners in Asia, and surrounded by the rich cultures of the Pacific Islands and the multicultural environment of Hawai‘i itself, Hawai‘i offers a natural vantage point from which to consider philosophy, broadly construed. The advantages of this location are also conferred on the Department of Philosophy, which serves as the year-round home of accomplished scholars of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, and Korean philosophy, as well as supporting the premiere journal for comparative philosophy, Philosophy East and West, published by The University of Hawai‘i Press. Receiving the benefits of this worldclass department are about forty graduate students who come to Hawai‘i for the express purpose of specializing in comparative philosophy. These students represent the future of comparative philosophy, and the Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference is designed to both encourage their growth as comparative philosophers and to bring graduate students from institutions worldwide into the comparative discussion.

Locating and Losing the Self in the World

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The Present and Future of Comparative Philosophy Supported primarily through the generosity of The Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, which was established by Tetsuhiko Uehiro to promote the use of ethical discourse and education to bridge the gap between the academy and society, the Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference has been growing steadily since its inauguration by graduate students at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa in 2003. While the 2003 and 2006 conferences were relatively small in relation to other graduate student conferences in the mainland United States, the conference quickly expanded to include numerous young scholars, not only from the United States, but also from China, Japan, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and beyond. Themes of past Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conferences include “Navigating a Pluralistic World” (2006), “Comparative Philosophy Today and Tomorrow” (2007), and “Comparative Responses to Global Interdependence” (2011). As these themes highlight, the concern of the Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference has been predominantly to inquire into comparative philosophy as a field, to ask how students of different philosophies can come to understand each better, and to support wide-ranging cross-cultural dialogues. However, with the 2012 conference it became apparent that the focus of the conference is shifting. Questions about establishing comparative philosophy as a field have given way to more specific questions about how comparative philosophy can help scholars to understand perennial philosophical issues in new and different ways, and even to suggest philosophical topics of its own. Thus, the 2012 Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference included not one but two panels focused on emptiness, a theme that has come to be of primary concern to comparative philosophers due to its importance in Japanese and Indian philosophies. In addition, numerous presentations focused exclusively on non-Western philosophers, including a careful study of the soteriological importance of NƗgƗrjuna’s refutation of reality by Benjamin Zenk, an examination of the Diamond Sutra by Steve Goodrich, and a consideration of Dǀgen’s BeingTime by Christina Da Silva. Several presentations addressed more general philosophical topics in new and exciting ways, including a study of religion and artistry in modern Buddhist Shǀmyǀ works by Hanako Takayama, a feminist approach to Hawaiian identity by Brooke Schueneman, and a consideration of the relationship between subject and institution through the eyes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Kiyoshi Miki by Shota Yokoyama. These presentations were enriched by two keynote lectures, the first by Dr. Karma Lekshe Tsomo of the University of San

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Introduction

Diego on the changing role of women in Southeast Asian Buddhism, and the second by Dr. Masato Ishida of UH MƗnoa on perception as a geographically embodied concept. While the full program of presentations at the 2012 Uehiro Cross Currents Philosophy Conference was diverse, much of the discussions over the weekend, both at formal panels and during informal coffee hours and lunch breaks, focused on three essential philosophical questions: How can we understand the self, both linguistically and phenomenologically; how can we overcome basic human self-centeredness to engage more fully with the world; and finally, once we are committed to this engagement with the world, how can we come to understand it better, whereby the selfcentered perspective is transformed or overcome? This progression of questions is comparative in the best sense of the word, drawing on the interests of canonical Western philosophy as well as reflecting the fundamental concerns of non-Western philosophies. The papers published in this volume represent philosophical viewpoints along this path, from the first paper, Kyle Peters’ careful analysis of how Emmanuel Levinas locates the self through linguistic separation from the other, to the last paper by Jeff Hoyt, a study of how Nishida Kitarǀ’s radical ontology of the logic of place helps us to understand the concept of the holographic universe. In exploring these papers, we hope readers will sit back, relax, and contemplate the multifaceted philosophical perspectives from which we can locate ourselves, lose ourselves, and approach the world in alternative ways. Comparative philosophy has a rich future; this volume presents just one of the most recent directions of its expansion. Laura Specker Sullivan and Masato Ishida Honolulu, July 2014

PART I LOCATING THE SELF

Locating the self in the world is one of the first efforts of the human newborn and is also one of the first efforts of the philosopher. This section presents three essays that consider self-understanding from different perspectives: the intersection of language and morality, the connection between self-consciousness and bodily awareness, and the role of gender in embodied self-knowledge. All three essays seek to capture the elusive complexity of the self in terms of relationships with others, with the phenomenal world, and importantly, with one’s own experience of the self. Such a theme is increasingly significant as philosophers become more aware of the diversity and richness of attitudes towards, and experiences of, the self around the globe. The first paper in this chapter, “Levinas and Separation” by Kyle Peters, makes an effort to not only understand the self in isolation from the world, but to understand the self as it exists in separation from others, and to ask upon what basis this separation rests. Peters undertakes a close analysis of Levinas’ use of the term “separation.” According to Peters, “separation” can refer to two possible philosophical positions: We are separated from the other in that we are not reducible to the other, although there may be certain aspects of ourselves that we share with the other; or we are separated from the other completely and cannot understand the other in terms of any aspect of ourselves. Peters argues that “separation” is most often used by Levinas to refer to the latter philosophical position, and indeed that the idea of “separation in toto” is essential to Levinas’ philosophy of language. However, Peters writes that the idea of “separation in toto” has undesirable philosophical consequences, arguing that if we have no overlapping aspects with the other, we have no way to assess their moral standpoint, such that Levinas’ demand that we “heed the call of the other” places us in morally precarious territory. Peters concludes that in order to save Levinas’ moral philosophy, we must interpret “separation” in the first sense, namely, as “separation in part.” In the second paper, “Self-Consciousness in Kant: How Much “I” do I Need?” by Matthew Izor, the self is analyzed both in terms of internal self-

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Part I

consciousness and bodily experience in the world. Izor begins by considering how Kant fits knowledge of the self into his general picture of knowledge, presenting Kant’s distinction between clear and obscure ideas and noting that according to Kant, we have no clear idea of the “I”, only our experience as a subject without knowing ourselves as an object. This means that our only understanding of ourselves is our sense of “what it is like to be me,” a sense that we have along with our experience of the world. However, Izor argues that in addition to the internal “I” accompanying the synthesis of the conscious manifold, the body also exists as that which synthesizes the sensory manifold, and further claims that the body-synthesis is a necessary condition for the experience of being oneself. In conclusion, Izor emphasizes the importance of the body in the Kantian picture of self-knowledge. The third paper “The Gendered Body of Perception” by Sumaya Noush, also considers the importance of the body in our understanding of the self, but from a perspective that emphasizes that all bodies are not the same, and thus that all experience is not the same. Noush looks at how Simone de Beauvoir sought to revise Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body in order to include the essential perspective of the gendered body. The paper begins with a rehearsal of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to surpass intellectualist and empiricist views with his Phenomenology of Perception, in which he sought to reunite the mind and body through the “body schema.” According to the idea of a body schema, the body is a space of possible experience, and these possibilities are in turn shaped by bodily habits. However, as Noush writes, de Beauvoir criticized Merleau Ponty, arguing that his general picture of bodily experience missed the significance of bodily particularities. Noush presents de Beauvoir’s argument in terms of the concepts of transcendence and immanence, ultimately finding de Beauvoir’s position to be a necessary supplement to Merleau-Ponty’s general theory. In so doing, she seeks to ensure that selves are recognized in their full complexity and particularity. These three essays interrogate the questions of what it means to be an individual self and what it is like to be such a self. As such, they provide a springboard for the remaining essays in this volume, which problematize, on the one hand, our certainty in speaking of the self, and, on the other, our experience of the world from our own particular perspective.

CHAPTER ONE WHAT IS SEPARATION? THE JUMP IN LEVINAS’ ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE KYLE PETERS

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes, “[t]he idea of Infinity implies the separation of the same with regard to the other, but this separation cannot rest on an opposition to the other which would be purely antithetical.”1 Later, in the same section, he writes “[r]evelation is discourse; in order to welcome revelation a being apt for this role of interlocutor, a separated being, is required.”2 Levinas uses this term “separation” to range over a number of different issues, from the idea of the other as infinite to our relation to the other through discourse. What Levinas exactly means by separation, however, remains unclear. In this paper, I analyze Levinas' understanding of separation in detail. I argue that there are two distinct notions of separation at work in his philosophy. The first notion of separation argues that, since there are certain moral dimensions of the other that are not reducible to ourselves, the other is separate in part. The second notion of separation argues that since there is a radical moral break between the other person and myself, the other is separate in toto. Levinas, I further argue, primarily operates under the first conception of separation. He employs this in his writings on the infinite other, his argument against what is understood today as the simulation theory,3 and finally in elucidating our asymmetrical relationship to the other. In his analysis of language, however, he argues for the more radical separation in toto. I will ultimately argue that the notion of separation in toto, used in his analysis of language (which is employed as a positive testifier to his writings on the infinite other, his argument against the simulation theory, and his asymmetrical theory), leads to two undesirable consequences:

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irreconcilability with the rest of his philosophy and a severe distortion of the command of the other.

The Other and the Other In his first major work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas discusses our relation to that which is other. Levinas distinguishes between two types of other. The first type of other, the non-italicized other, does not have a person as its referent. In contrast, the italicized other refers to a specific person. Elucidating this distinction between the other object and the other person is the main task of Totality and Infinity. Levinas expounds our relations to the other object through a phenomenological description of enjoyment. In our most basic mode of being in the world, when not involved with an experience of the other person, we encounter objects as manipulable and controllable. That is, in the weaker sense, objects give themselves such that there is no moral preclusion of control. Taken in a stronger sense, however, objects give themselves such that they are both epistemically and metaphysically controllable. I will discuss how to interpret the extent of this experience of enjoyment further below. Levinas clarifies this phenomenon of enjoyment through the term “comprehension.” Levinas argues that we can stand in a relation of comprehension to the un-italicized other, the other object. In Is Ontology Fundamental? Levinas writes, “[t]o comprehend the tool is not to look at it but to know how to handle it.”4 But, as interesting as Levinas’ writing regarding the distinction between the other object and the other person is, the exact nature of his claim is not made clear. This has led to a schism in the secondary literature regarding the manner in which Levinas discusses our relation to the other object and to the other person. There are three major alternatives present. First, some argue Levinas is making an epistemic claim, and then deriving a moral claim from this position.5 Second, others argue he is making a moral claim in fine.6 Finally, many state he is starting from a moral claim and then deriving a further epistemic claim about the other object and the other person.7 Whether Levinas is making a claim in alignment with the first, second, or third claim is a difficult topic that would necessitate its own paper. Fortunately for our discussion, we can circumvent this topic and agree that Levinas is making a moral claim, regardless of its ambiguous epistemic status. Although I think that the first claim has the weakest argument, I will leave it as a legitimate interpretation because it does not conflict with the moral reading.

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In accord with the above caveat, when Levinas says that our relation with a given object is comprehensible, he is at least arguing that nothing morally precludes us from reducing our relation with the other object to a relation of comprehension. He is claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with standing in a relation in which we understand, or at least attempt to understand, the other object. Levinas deems these relations in which there is no moral preclusion of comprehension, ontological relations.8 In Totality and Infinity, Levinas calls these ontological relations totalities. Simon Critchley writes, “if I conceive of the relation to the other in terms of understanding, correlation, symmetry, reciprocity, equality…then that relation is totalized.”9 Totality is the relation we stand to things like tables, chairs, computers, and so forth. There is nothing morally wrong with standing in a relation of comprehension and totality to these objects. However, the italicized other, the other person, is not a totality; the other is “transcendent.”10 Transcendent, here, does not mean supernatural; it is not something that is above and beyond this world. Rather, transcendence is something that is contained within this world. Transcendent, as used by Levinas, means beyond comprehension. Since the other is given as beyond comprehension, Levinas deems the transcendent manner in which the other is given as infinite. Infinity is the term that Levinas uses to describe the relation to the other person. He writes, “To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.”11 Infinity is not the term that we use to describe the relation to the other object. As discussed above, totality, not infinity, is used to describe our relation to the other thing. This total relation is described as comprehensible. Consequently, the infinite relation to the other is described as something that is not comprehensible. Levinas takes the term “infinity” from the Cartesian notion of infinity. Infinity, for Descartes, is a term used to describe The Other, i.e. God, whose powers completely and wholly transcend my own power. Now, it should be clear that Levinas cannot be using the Cartesian notion of infinity as a metaphysical description of the other person. There is no reason to think, metaphysically, that the other person wholly transcends my own power. Although there are some people whose powers transcend my own in some particular domain, the claim that they wholly transcend my power would be untenable, to say the least. Rather, Levinas is arguing that when we experience the other person, we experience this other as overflowing. Whether or not he is making an epistemic claim I have left undecided, but without refute, this claim is taken as at least moral. That is to say, Levinas argues that, given their

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infinite nature, we should not reduce our relation with the other person to a relation of comprehension or understanding. Levinas writes, the “infinite presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenseless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution.”12 Levinas argues that there is something morally wrong with attempting to reduce our relation with the infinite other to comprehension. Of Levinas’ theory, Joshua James Shaw writes, “(Levinas’claim is) that one’s relationship to the other is primarily defined by moral responsibilities, and thus it differs in significant ways from the neutral, disengaged perspective that defines our relationship to objects of comprehension. The other is not something I know but something I serve” (Italics on other added).13 Maybe the best way to understand this relation of non-comprehension is to quote Levinas in extenso: Our relation with the other certainly consists in wanting to comprehend him, but this relation overflows comprehension. Not only because knowledge of the other requires, outside of all curiosity, also sympathy or love, ways of being distinct from impassible contemplation, but because in our relation with the other, he does not affect us in terms of a concept. He is being (étant) and counts as such. (Italics on other added by me).14

Thus Levinas argues that there is a clear distinction in our relationship to that which is other. Furthermore, he argues that it is morally reprehensible to stand in an ontological, total relation with the human other. They are beyond this. One may argue, however, that there is no real moral distinction between our relation with the other person, and our relation with the other object. If we reflect, I argue, we can see that there are many important differences distinguishing infinite relations from total relations. We can recognize certain differences in the way objects give themselves in experience. On the one hand, the total is given so that it is properly controllable and manipulable. That is, the total is given such that it does not morally preclude being controlled and manipulated. On the other hand, the infinite is given such that it should not be controlled or manipulated. When I experience a chair as it is given, I can control the chair. I can sit in it, I can stand on it, I can, assuming it is a fancy office chair, move it up and down, and I can adjust the back. I can also manipulate the chair. I can remove the leather padding on the chair, I can break the wheels, and I can add a cup holder. I can do various acts to make the chair give itself in a different manner.

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When I interact with the human other, however, there is something that keeps me from freely controlling or manipulating him or her. This is because the other gives herself as properly uncontrollable and unmanipulable. The other is given in experience with her own thoughts, feelings, desires, will, and volition. Accompanying these is a certain moral obligation. Whether or not I have the ability to control or manipulate the other (a topic we remain mute on), there is a moral difference in manipulating the chair and manipulating the other. The other is given in such a way that we should not reduce our relation with them to comprehension. This is part of what makes the other infinite. The fact that the other has feelings, thoughts, desires, will, and volition means that we should not manipulate or control the other. By ignoring these features, that is, by standing in a relation in which we do not take these features into account, we disrespect the other. There is no disrespect involved, however, when we stand in a relation of comprehension to total objects. These notions of feelings, thoughts, desires, will, and volition mark a fundamental distinction between the infinite other and the total other.

Our Relations with the Other Levinas has come to be understood via a variety of metaphors, from an application of Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog who knows “one big thing,”15 to the crashing of a wave on the beach,16 more forcefully hammering down the same point. This “big thing,” this same point “crashing” with more and more force, is contained within the notion of the other.

Against the Argument from Analogy In one of Levinas’ later articles, Humanism of the Other,17 he criticizes certain liberal approaches that demand respect for the other on the grounds that they are similar to me, and thus try to integrate the other into myself. At the risk of being charged with anachronism, we can see modern equivalents in the simulation theory.18 According to this view, I might say that Jill deserves personal freedom because, when I introspect, I realize that I merit personal freedom, and she is similar to me. Goldman characterizes something similar to this view: First, the attributor creates in herself presented states intended to match those of the target. In other words, the attributor attempts to put herself in the target's “mental shoes.” The second step is to feed these initial pretend states into some mechanism of the attributor's own psychology... and allow

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Chapter One that mechanism to operate on the pretend sites so as to generate one or more new states. Third, the attributor assigns the output state to the target.19

Levinas argues that this simulation theory, or argument from analogy, is a problem because we are only respecting the other so long as they are similar to ourselves. What happens, Levinas would ask, when we begin to see the other as different? What happens when, as Sartre says, we are able to see the other purely as an object?20 The problem with this view, for Levinas, is that we are not respecting the other due to their status as a transcendent, infinite being.21 The other presents him or herself as having certain moral demands. These moral demands require that I provide respect. We must respect the other because they are valuable in their own right, not because they are similar or reducible to me.

Asymmetry and the Other In Levinas' essay, “The Paradox of Morality,”22 we see his application of separation in a claim stronger than the previous argument against analogy. Levinas argues that other peoples’ “calls” are so demanding that we have to value them above our own. In other words, as mentioned above, Levinas argues that our relationship with the other is asymmetrical. Once again, I would like to quote Levinas in extenso to get the point across: [W]ith the appearance of the human—and this is my entire philosophy— there is something more important to me than my life, and that is the life of the other (Italics on other added by me).23

In that same piece, his understanding of the asymmetrical relationship is explicated in his writing on saintliness: But we cannot not admire saintliness... that is, the person who in his being is more attached to the being of the other than to his own. I believe that is in saintliness that the human begins; not in the accomplishment of saintliness, but in the value. It is the first value, an undeniable value (Italics on other added by me).24

This is further demonstrated in a dialogue with Phillipe Nemo: Ph.N.: But is not the other also responsible in my regard?

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E.L.: Perhaps, but that is his affair… the intersubjective relation is a nonsymmetrical relation. In this sense, I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair. It is precisely insofar as the relationship between the other and me is not reciprocal that I am subjection to the other… because I am responsible for a total responsibility which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others (Italics on other added).25

Since the other is given as infinite and overflowing, our relationship with the other is so one-sided that we must recognize the other as more important than ourselves. In other words, we stand in an asymmetrical relationship with the other and we must put their needs ahead of our own.

Language, Dialogue, Discourse, and the Other Levinas' argument for language is to be read as a positive testifier to this inherently valuable, asymmetrical relation-based account of the other. This analysis of language, as one might assume, is radically different both from what is deemed the “Linguistic Turn” in Fregean or Russelean philosophy, and the Structuralist approach of Ferdinand De Saussure. Unlike the other two, Levinas is not analyzing the structural or constituent components of language, nor is he looking at the referential aspect of language. Rather, Levinas’ analysis is based on something prior to this breakdown of language, and even prior to the utterance of language. As Wild puts it, Levinas’ analysis shows that language presupposes “the existing individual and his ethical choice to welcome the stranger and to share his world by speaking to him.”26 In other words, Levinas’ analysis of language is prior to the tripartite sub-derivation in linguistics.27 Rather, it is about an “encounter” before any words are actually spoken. This is why language, for Levinas, can be “spoken” without any utterance. Language is the primordial experience of the other which is the condition of the possibility of entrance into a communicative relationship. For Levinas, in our relationship with the other person, we experience the face of an other who gives themselves as something both separate and irreducible. We must find a way to interact with the other without thereby reducing the otherness of the other and thus totalizing our relationship. This is done, according to Levinas, through language. He writes, language “permits me to render the things offerable, detach them from my own usage, alienate them, render them exterior.”28 In other words, language is how we get out of our own sphere and participate in discourse. It is how we render ourselves to the realm of exteriority and thus make ourselves

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Chapter One

open to the other. Language allows us to gain “entry into the sphere of the other” (Italics on other added by me).29 Why, one might ask, do we even bother joining “the sphere of the other?” Why do we not simply go on with our lives, manipulating the various objects of enjoyment with which we are presented? This, Levinas would respond, is an impossibility. Our experience of the face of the other person is imbued with a “call,” and because of this “call,” we are forced to respond. Further clarifying, Levinas writes, “[t]he calling in question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language” (Italics on Other added by me, capitalization added by Levinas).30 Language is the means by which we experience the face of the other as having demands to which we are obliged to adhere. This notion, that in our initial experience of the other they are presented with a “call” that demands response, is treated at length in Levinas’ discussion on the impossibility of murder. The face, according to Levinas, is given in its “call” forbidding murder. He writes, The first word of the face is the “Thou shalt not kill.” It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and whom I owe all.31

Without dwelling on the asymmetrical relationship that our experience of the other entails, we can see that there are demands for responsibility inherent in our experience of the other person. These demands for responsibility attached to our experience of the other are what Levinas refers to when he writes “[t]he face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse.”32 The face not only opens up, but is discourse. This discourse, furthermore, is ethical. The face is the “call” of the other that demands responsibility. It requires a positive response. Thus we start out in the world with the phenomenon of enjoyment. We are freely able to manipulate and control other objects without the slightest crossing of moral boundaries. We are always, however, approached by the face of the other. The other gives himself or herself as infinite, and thus irreducible and separated from ourselves. Despite this fundamental separation between the self and the other, however, we are able to respond to the call of the other in dialogue. Through language and discourse we care able to gain “entry into the sphere of the other” (Italics on other added).33

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Separation in Part or Separation In Toto? The notion of separation runs throughout Levinas’ philosophy of the other person, his argument against analogy, his conception of our relationship with the other as asymmetrical, and his analysis of language. In the second section of Totality and Infinity, Levinas links this difference between the self and the infinite other to the notion of separation. He writes, “[t]o have an idea of Infinity it is necessary to exist as separated.”34 He further writes that the separation between self and other cannot exist simply in “opposition” between the two.35 This notion of separation will remain unclear unless we look at a slightly longer passage. In the introduction to Separation and Discourse (Section I of Totality and Infinity), Levinas writes, The idea of Infinity implies the separation of the same with regard to the other, but this separation cannot rest on an opposition to the other which would be purely anti-thetical. Thesis and antithesis, in repelling one another, call for one another. They appear in opposition to a synoptic gaze that encompasses them; they already form a totality which, by integrating the metaphysical transcendence expressed by the idea of infinity, relativizes it. An absolute transcendence has to be non-integratable (Italics on other added).36

According to Levinas, the self and the infinite other do not enter into a symmetrical relationship. Our relationship “has to be non-integratable.” This is the separation between oneself and the other. The exact nature of Levinas’ separation between self and other, however, is still obtuse. There are, I argue, two ways to understand the claim that the infinite other is separate from myself. First, Levinas may simply be making the claim that there are certain moral dimensions of the other which are not reducible to ourselves. Thus the other is separate in part. The second interpretation, however, is much stronger. This interpretation states that there is a moral chasm between the other person and myself. We are completely separated beings, separate in toto. This stronger notion of separation, I argue, is untenable and leads to undesirable consequences. Levinas’ entire philosophy,37 sans his analysis of language, is in accord with the first claim, separation in part. Levinas’ analysis of language, however, is in accord with the stronger claim, separation in toto.

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Transcendence, Infinity, and Separation Characterizing the other as both transcendent and infinite is in accord with this notion of separation in part. This becomes apparent when we investigate his terminology; more specifically, it is clear when we investigate his use of the word “infinite.” As mentioned above, Levinas took this terminology from Descartes, who used this term to describe God. We can better understand the way that Levinas understands the term infinity if we look at his interpretation of Descartes’ proof for God's existence in the Third Meditation. According to Hilary Putnam, “Levinas believes that what Descartes is reporting is... a profound religious experience, an experience which might be described as an experience of a fissure, of a confrontation with something that disrupted all his categories.”38 If we continue Levinas’ transfer of theological terminology to the other, we can see that Levinas understands the other as something that “disrupts all my categories.” Now, this “disruption of all my categories” must be investigated in detail. Does this disruption entail a complete or partial separation between self and other? To answer this question, we have to look at Levinas’ understanding of God. The question becomes: does Levinas emphasize the utter transcendence of God at the expense of relatability, or does he emphasize relatability with God at the expense of complete transcendence? Levinas, interestingly enough, discredits both positions, understanding this choice as a false dilemma. Levinas argues against the first half of our dilemma, the emphasis of relatability, through a scathing censure of rational theology. In Beyond the Verse, he writes, Rational theology is a theology of being where the rational is equated with the Identity of the Same, suggested by the firmness or positivity of the firm ground beneath the sun. It belongs to the ontological adventure which led the biblical God and man, understood from the standpoint of the positivity of a world, towards the “death of God” and the end of humanism, or the humanity of man.39

Levinas argues against the second half of our dilemma, the emphasis on transcendence, in “God and Philosophy.” He writes, And this analysis implies that God is not simply the “first other,” the “other par excellence,” or the “absolutely other,” but other than the other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with another and different from every neighbor, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion

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with the stirring of the there is (Italics on other and alterity added).40

Levinas does not emphasize the relatability of God over transcendence, nor does he emphasize the transcendence of God over relatability. If he were to emphasize relatability, Levinas would totalize our relation to the other. This is problematic because it would not preclude comprehension. On the other hand, if Levinas emphasizes the utter transcendence of God, then we focus on God's difference “to the point of absence.” Thus Levinas argues for a notion of God and, due to his transference of theological terminology, the other as infinite. Infinity exceeds any idea that we have of it. It does not necessarily follow, however, that we can have absolutely no conception of the infinite. Rather, infinity merely transcends the notion that I have of the finite. Our notions may be in accord with the notion of infinity, but the infinite will always go beyond them.

Comprehension and Separation In his writings on comprehension, Levinas in no way makes the stronger move to separation in toto. This is because it would be difficult for Levinas to maintain that we should never stand in a relation of comprehension to the other. This becomes obvious if we take an example of an everyday encounter with the other. Assume you are at a bookstore, waiting in the checkout line. As the line dwindles and you get closer to the front, as you are approached with the face of the cashier, you place the book on the table and pull out your wallet. In order to pay for the $15.95 book, amid your grumbling about the ever-increasing price of philosophizing, you place a $20 bill on the counter. The clerk thanks you, gives you your change, then the book, and you move on. It seems that in this situation, you were, at least in part, using the cashier as a tool for monetary transactions. Given our above quote, “[t]o comprehend the tool is not to look at it but to know how to handle it,”41 there is a sense in which we stood in a relation of comprehension to the other. She could have been a machine and we would have stood in, for all intents and purposes, the exact same relationship (indeed there is a growing trend in Japan, as well as American supermarkets, towards these self-checkout cash registers). It seems as if we are standing in a relation of comprehension to our cashier. If Levinas cannot maintain that we should never stand in a relation of comprehension to the other, there is no way that he can maintain a complete separation thesis. Given that the notions of infinity and a preclusion of comprehension in no way necessitate a chasm between self and other, we have no grounds to

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claim that Levinas’ philosophy of the other argues for the more radical separation in toto.

The Argument against Analogy and Separation We can further see that Levinas’ application of separation in his argument contra analogy relies on this first notion of separation, separation in part. In his argument against the simulation theory understanding of other persons, Levinas states that the moral demands of the other require that I provide them with respect. We must respect the other because they are valuable in their own right, not because they are similar or reducible to me. We have no reason to believe that Levinas is making the stronger argument to complete separation. This proof is rather simple. Remember, Levinas states that the other is not reducible to me. An argument against reduction, however, in no way precludes a certain level of overlap. In fact, it usually requires it. In other words, an argument to reduction does not necessitate extension to an argument for separation in toto. Rather, it warrants the less ambitious claim, separation in part. We can see parity here with reductive arguments regarding the “hard problem” of consciousness. A reductive explanation of consciousness argues that the facts about our subjective experience are entailed by facts about neurology or physiology. In a reductive argument, the reductive base is meant to explain fully everything that there is to explain. So, regarding the “hard problem” of consciousness, a reductive explanation argues that all of our subjective experiences can be fully explained by neurology or physiology. In responding to this reductive argument, these “hard problem” philosophers do not simply respond that neurological and physiological explanations have no bearing on the problem of consciousness. Rather, they state that, although you can have a detailed explanation of the physiological and neurological base of consciousness, there is still an explanatory gap in a reductive account of conscious experience. David Chalmers writes, [Further questioning] is the key question in the problem of consciousness... Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery.42

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Arguing that the problem of consciousness, or the other person, cannot be fully explained in a reductive manner does not necessarily entail that they are completely unrelated. Rather, it shows that they have certain things in common, but also diverge on other points. In other words, Levinas’ argument against reduction provides support for separation in part.

Asymmetry and Separation Without going into too much detail, similar reasoning demonstrates that, in making the stronger move from an argument against the simulation theory to asymmetry, Levinas makes the more plausible claim of separation in part. He explicitly states that “there is something more important to me than my life,”43 and further, “[i]n this sense, I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair.”44 These quotes in no way indicate anything about an asymmetrical relationship, because the other is completely different than myself. The fact that the other and I enter into an asymmetrical relationship can be based on the fact that the other is given as transcendent and overflowing. This, as I demonstrated above, does not necessitate the more radical complete separation. All that I have shown thus far, however, is that the notion of asymmetry is in accord with the reading of separation in part. We must further discuss why it precludes separation in toto. I present this in conjunction with my criticism of separation in toto.

Language and Separation Rather than continuing his understanding of separation in accord with the rest of his philosophy, Levinas’ analysis of language uses a stronger understanding of separation. Levinas argues not merely that there is some part of the other that is morally separate, but rather that the other is separate in toto from ourselves. This, I argue, is a much stronger and much more difficult claim to justify. In “Ethics and Spirit,” through his exposition of the “call” of the other, Levinas writes, ... a self can exist which is not a myself. This self, viewed face-on, is consciousness, existing by virtue of the fact that a sovereign self, invading the world naively—like “a moving force,” to use Victor Hugo's expression—perceives a face and the impossibility of killing. Consciousness is the impossibility of invading reality like a wild

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Chapter One vegetation that absorbs or breaks or pushes back everything around it. The turning back on oneself of consciousness is the equivalent not of selfcontemplation but of the fact of not existing violently and naturally, of speaking to the Other (Italics on Other added).45

In this article, written approximately eight years before the publication of Totality and Infinity, Levinas strives to emphasize a self “which is not a myself.” Via poetic imagery, even harkening to Victor Hugo to help him out, Levinas tries to emphasize a “sovereign self” that traverses the world, and if it was not repelled by the face of the other, would push forward “like wild vegetation.” Here we see an understanding of the other as “sovereign.” A “sovereign” self, encountering the face-to-face relation, indicates separation in toto. However, one may argue that in characterizing this notion as “naïve,” Levinas is arguing against the notion of a “sovereign” self, and thus against separation in toto. If the “naïve” in the above paragraph is referring to “sovereign,” then our interlocutor is correct. Unfortunately, “naïve” is attached to the clause “invading the world naïvely.” It is the invading that is done naïvely, not the notion of a sovereign self. One may further argue that Levinas is claiming that this is impossible. If we look at the passage, however, it is the violent invading of reality, that which “absorbs or breaks...everything around it,” which is impossible. The impossibility is not the notion of a sovereign self. Thus, the fact that Levinas is using sovereign as a description of the self, without any qualifiers, indicates that he is operating under the latter conception of separation, separation in toto, when elucidating the “call” of the other. Regarding our analysis of language, this notion of separation in toto continues in Totality and Infinity. Levinas starts with an ambiguous account of separation, writing that “discourse relates with what remains essentially transcendent” (Italics on discourse added by Levinas), “[l]anguage is a relation between separated terms,” and finally “[t]he fact that the face maintains a relation with me by discourse does not range him in the same; he remains absolute within the relation.”46 This beginning section can be read in accord with an account of the other as separate in part, or separate in toto. That is, either view is not necessitated in the aforementioned quotes. As he continues, however, Levinas begins writing in stronger terms. In part five of the Separation and Discourse section, Levinas discusses the way in which we operate in a meaningful world. Levinas says that we do so by virtue of the fact that we are alongside others. He writes: Things acquire a rational signification, and not only one of simple usage,

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because an other is associated with my relations with them. In designating a thing I designate it to the Other. The act of designating modifies my relation of enjoyment and possession with things, places the things in the perspective of the Other (Italics on other added by me, capitalization added by Levinas).47

In the beginning of this quote, Levinas argues that we exist in a meaningful world because we are thrown in the world alongside the other. Levinas continues that, since we are afforded a meaningful world because we are alongside others, we must rely on signs. In elucidating the role of signs in this meaningful world, however, Levinas harkens to a notion of the other as separate in toto. He writes, Utilizing a sign is therefore not limited to substituting an indirect relation for the direct relation with a thing, but permits me to render the things offerable, detach them from my own usage, alienate them, render them exterior... Objectivity results from language, which permits the putting into question of possession. This disengagement has a positive meaning: the entry of the thing into the sphere of the other. The thing becomes a theme. To thematize is to offer the world to the Other in speech (Italics on other added by me, capitalization added by Levinas).48

In this quote, we see a separation in toto understanding of the other. It is because the other has his or her own “world” or “sphere” that we have to “alienate” and “detach” things from our selves. Because the other is in a completely separate sphere, we must “alienate” the object in order to gain “entry” into their sphere. If the other were separate in part, we would occupy the same “sphere,” and there would be no need to bring in locutions such as “detach them from my own usage,” “alienation,” “entry,” and “sphere of the other.” In using the aforementioned vocabulary to describe one major aspect of our relation to the other, Levinas seems to be continuing the separation in toto understanding of the other started eight years prior. In this way, certain aspects of Levinas’ analysis of language rely on separation in toto. This, furthermore, is in opposition to the understanding of separation in accord with the rest of his philosophy, including his understanding of: transcendence and infinity, comprehension, the argument against the simulation theory, and even the asymmetrical relationship.

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Problems with Separation In Toto This stronger reading of separation leads to two undesirable consequences. The first undesirable result of a jump to separation in toto comes to light in relation to the rest of his philosophy. Since, as shown above, his understanding of the other, all the way up to his understanding of our relationship to the other, relies on separation in part, we run into the problem of consistency. It is not possible to form a consistent set with the two members, separation in part and separation in toto. The first excludes the second, and the second excludes the first. For, if one is separated in part, then there must be some level on which the two are together. This precludes separation in toto. Similarly, if one is separated in toto, there cannot be some level on which the two are together. This precludes separation in part. Thus the first undesirable result is an inconsistency in Levinas’ moral understanding of the person. It is impossible that the other is both separate in part and separate in toto. Simply arguing for separation in part on the ground of inconsistency, however, belies the necessity to which Levinas must abandon this stronger claim. The best way to get the Levinasean to grasp the severity of the situation is to elucidate the undesirable ethical consequences of an analysis of the other based on separation in toto. There are three things that we must keep in mind at this point. First, we are interpreting separation in toto as a moral claim. Second, Levinas cannot be maintaining a thesis that understands the other as both separate in part and separate in toto. If Levinas understands the other as separate in part, he does so wholly. The same is true regarding separation in toto. The third point is closely related to the second point. Levinas’ analysis of language is a positive testifier to his phenomenological account of the other. Language is to be understood in relation to the rest of his philosophy. For these three reasons, if Levinas is arguing for separation in toto, he is arguing for it in all of his philosophy. Thus when elucidating problems with this complete understanding of separation, it is important that we do this on the level of his entire philosophy. If we are completely separated from the other person on moral grounds, then it follows that, in an early encounter49 with the other, we would not know anything about their moral values. This point is further complicated by Levinas’ argument against the simulation theory. Recall Levinas’ argument that we must respect the other because they are valuable in their own right, not because they are similar or reducible to me. This means that we cannot, via introspection, see that the other is similar to me, realize that I have upright moral values, and then place

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those moral values onto the other. Because of this, in our initial encounter with the other, we are presented with the face of one who may or may not have moral values. Even if they do have moral values, furthermore, they are such that we know absolutely nothing about them. This in-and-of-itself seems undesirable. Unfortunately for Levinas, it gets much worse. Negative consequences are exponentially increased when we see that, in our first encounter with an other to which we have no possible way of assessing their moral standing, we have a responsibility to adhere to their call. This becomes clear if we look at another asymmetrical quote: The first word of the face is the “Thou shalt not kill.” It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and whom I owe all.50

Now, there is nothing wrong with his claim that the face is given with the “[t]hou shalt not kill.” The problem, however, is the extension into a “commandment,” “as if a master spoke to me.” The slave-master relation, or the wealthy-poor relation to whom “I can do all, and [to] whom I owe all,” becomes troublesome when you in fact know nothing about the moral values of the other. When the other is separate in toto, we know absolutely nothing about their moral values, yet we are compelled to adhere to their demand. A demand to which we are required to adhere without knowing the moral stripes of the face is highly problematic. The slave-master dynamic is more apt in this situation than the wealthy-poor dynamic. The other, in complete separation, becomes a master to whom I must adhere regardless of his or her status as good or evil. Not only is the other a completely unknown “master” to whom I have an obligation to respond, they also, regardless of their moral stance, are the person to whom I owe my entire life, as discussed above. Separation in toto sets up a relation between the self and the other, such that without prior knowledge of the other’s moral standing, I have no choice but to adhere to their demand regardless of whether or not it harms me. I am forced into a relation in which I could do myself complete and utter damage in an effort to respond to an other with corrupt intentions. Both of these undesirable consequences, irreconcilability and the negative ethical component, are nullified when we operate under a conception of the other as separate in part.

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Conclusion In this paper I have presented certain inconsistencies in Levinas’ notion of separation. There are, I argued, two differing and irreconcilable notions of separation at work: separation in part and separation in toto. I have further argued that the stronger conception, separation in toto, leads to certain unacceptable consequences, namely irreconcilability with the rest of his philosophy and a severe distortion of the command of the other. In order to assuage such an ailment, the Levinasean must switch to an analysis of language based upon the less demanding notion of separation in part. This is possible because the thrust of Levinas’ philosophy, that we have an infinite obligation to the other, does not require separation in toto, and the rest of his philosophy harkens to separation in part.

Notes  1

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press 1969), 53. 2 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 77. 3 I discuss this view in more detail later. Put briefly, this view argues that a given person deserves personal freedom because, when I introspect, I realize that I merit personal freedom and she is similar to me. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Perperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, (Indiana University Press, 1996), 4. 5 Michael Lewis and Tanja Staehler, “Emmanuel Levinas,” In Phenomenology: An Introduction. (New York: Continuum, 2010). 6 Joshua James Shaw, Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First, (New York: Cambria Press, 2008). 7 Leslie MacAvoy “Review of Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First,” http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24163-emmanuel-levinas-on-thepriority-of-ethics-putting-ethics-first/, (East Tennessee State University, 2009). 8 This notion of an ontological relation is seen in Heideggerean analysis. See Levinas’: “Is Ontology Fundamental?” and “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” 9 Simon Critchley, “Introduction,” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. ed. Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, (Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2002), 13. 10 Levinas follows his phenomenological predecessors in using the term “transcendence.” Although Levinas uses it in a slightly different manner, “transcendence” was used in both Husserlean and Heideggerean analyses. Levinas studied under, and critiqued, both of these phenomenologists. 11 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 69. 12 Ibid., 199-200. 13 Shaw, Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics, 64.

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 14

Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” 6. Crichley, “Introduction,” 6. 16 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” In Writing and Difference, (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 312. 17 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other. (University of Illinois Press, 1972). 18 R. Gordon and J. Cruz, “Simulation Theory,” In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. (London: Nature Publishing, 2003). 19 Alvin Goldman, “Imitation, Mind Reading, and Simulation,” In Perspectives on Imitation II, eds. S. Hurley and N. Chater, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 80-81. 20 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (Washington Square Press, 1956) 21 Levinas, Humanism of the Other. 22 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality,” In The Provocation of Levinas eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, (London: Routeledge Press, 1988). 23 Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality,” 156-157. 24 Ibid., 173. 25 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 99. 26 John Wild, “Introduction,” In Totality and Infinity, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991), 14. 27 The tripartite sub-derivation of language consists of language form, language meaning, and language in context. 28 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 209. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 171. 31 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 89. 32 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 69. 33 Ibid., 209. 34 Ibid., 79. 35 Ibid., 53. 36 Ibid., 53. 37 In brief, I argue that: Levinas' philosophy of the other as transcendent and infinite, his understanding of our relationship as not comprehensible, his argument against simulation theory, and his asymmetrical understanding of our relationship to the other, are based upon separation in part. 38 Hilary Putnam, “Levinas and Judaism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, (Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2002), 42. 39 Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, (New York: Continuum, 1994), 148. 40 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” In Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 166. 41 Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan Perperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, (Indiana University Press, 1996), 4. 15

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42 David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” In Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 206. 43 Levinas, The Paradox of Morality, 156-7. 44 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 99. 45 Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics and Spirit,” In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, (John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 9. 46 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195. 47 Ibid., 209. 48 Ibid., 209. 49 I put in early encounter because it is possible that we would learn something about the other's moral values after repeated encounters. 50 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 89.

CHAPTER TWO SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN KANT: HOW MUCH “I” DO I NEED? MATTHEW IZOR

We may posit all illusion as consisting in taking the subjective condition of thinking to be the cognition of the object.1 Nonetheless, nothing is more natural and tempting than the illusion of regarding the unity in the synthesis of thoughts as a perceived unity in the subject of these thoughts. One might call this illusion the subreption of the hypostatized self-consciousness.2

Introduction In this essay I will give an examined look at what Immanuel Kant has to say about consciousness of the self. In the first section, I will summarize Kant’s view of self-reference and the conceptual role of the use of “I”. Section two will consider the necessary conditions for the possibility of the “I think” from the point of view of the form of the “I think”. Section three will attempt to elucidate a stance on the body that I find hinted at in Kant’s language, but not fully explicated. I will examine how a bodysynthesis still leaves us considering the self through the pronominal use of “I”. In the end, several points will have been explicated. We will see a clear distinction between cognition and thinking, or between selfknowledge and self-consciousness. I will highlight the importance of the senses in making this distinction. The limitations of the sensuous manifold will be understood as horizons, and we will see the importance of a particular horizon in terms of consciousness of the self. My argument will suggest that the unity of apperception be seen as an overlapping of the subjective limits of the senses organized in a body-synthesis. Finally, I will show that, even as we experience our own apperceptive unity, what

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we experience is itself something like a pronoun, and thus even I need “I” to conceptualize my subjectivity.

Self-Consciousness as Opposed to Cognition of the Self One of the main issues addressed throughout the Critique of Pure Reason is knowledge. Kant wanted to know how knowledge was possible. He wanted to investigate what justifications were to be had for the use of our concepts in referring to objects. For our discussion, we will see what Kant’s larger project has to offer with regards to self-consciousness. Knowledge in Kant’s system consists in both sensuous intuition providing a manifold of sense data, and the understanding ordering that manifold of intuition into an experience. In order for there to be knowledge of something, the understanding must synthesize the manifold according to the form of the categories of judgment. We can only have cognition of objects of experience when the understanding combines the given sensuous manifold. Something given in intuition must be ordered by the activity of the understanding. In order for us to have knowledge of the self, we would have to be given a sensuous intuition of the self, which the understanding would then subsume under a concept providing an object for experience and cognition. However, Kant does not think that we can have cognition of our self as an object, but can only think ourselves as we appear to ourselves: I do not cognize any object by merely thinking, but I can cognize any object only by determining a given intuition with respect to the unity of consciousness in which all thought consists.3 All the modes of self-consciousness in thought as such are, therefore, not yet understanding’s concepts of objects, but are mere functions that do not allow thought to cognize any object at all, and thence also do not allow it to cognize myself as an object.4 I know myself only as I appear to myself, not as a thing in itself.5

In this discussion, Kant distinguishes thinking and cognizing. When Kant writes that in thinking ourselves we do not create an object, he is implying that we can create concepts about things that are not given directly in sensuous intuition. There are two important points to gather from this. First, that there can be concepts without direct sensuous intuition, and thus no object of cognition. Consciousness of the self will involve thoughts about such concepts. The second point will be to emphasize the

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importance of the senses in Kant’s system. Cognition only occurs when the sensuous intuition of something in the world can be determined by the understanding. To do otherwise is merely to think a concept, and not to have cognition of an object that the concept determines. The senses are vital for cognition. This will be important, as I will argue below that the origin of the concept of a self is due to an overlapping of the particular limits of sensation. Kant’s Copernican revolution was to point out the limits of being a subject. He was concerned with detailing the limitations of what we can know, given that our experience is constituted, and thereby limited, in a particular way. The only way in which we can know things about the world is by fully elaborating the necessary conditions for the possibility of our experience, and from there grasping what we can know about the world and what we can know about our constitution as subjects. We know the world of objects only by how they appear to us. Their appearance involves the conceptualization of the manifold, and thus cognized objects of experience are entirely conditioned through our particular construction. We have no access to the things-in-themselves, but only as our senses and understanding represent them. In our experience of self-consciousness we appear to ourselves, but not as something given in sensuous intuition. Thus, the inner appearance of one’s self does not imply a thing-in-itself in exactly the same way that such an appearance of the empirical world would. We now need to understand what it is that allows for such a glancing thought of oneself without cognition. Kant gives a description of how we can have a concept of something for which a direct sensuous intuition is lacking. In the first few sections of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant discusses attention and abstraction as aspects of voluntary consciousness. Through attention we can focus on some particular aspect of intuition, whether that aspect be in empirical intuition involving sensuous intuition of objects, or in inner intuition involving no direct sensuous intuition. We then generalize about this focused-upon aspect to create a concept of it. Kant writes, Our effort to become conscious of our ideas is either paying attention to or [abstracting from] an idea of which we are conscious. In abstracting we are not merely neglecting to pay attention… we are, rather, performing a real act of the cognitive power by which one idea of which we are conscious is held apart from its connection with other ideas in one consciousness… that is, to abstract from a characteristic of the object of our idea. In this way our idea gets the universality of a concept and so is taken into the understanding.6

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Kant goes on to claim that of these powers, abstraction is the far superior power, due to a certain freedom and autonomy by being able to construct concepts spontaneously, that is, without the influence of direct intuition. The ability to abstract from an idea, even when the senses urge it on us, is a far greater power that that of paying attention to it; for it demonstrates a freedom of the power of judgment and the autonomy of the mind, by which the state of its ideas is under its control.7

Abstraction is a function of the imagination. In the Critique, the imagination plays two roles: productive and reproductive. The productive imagination is the understanding’s creation of concepts in relation to what is given through sensuous intuition. The understanding synthesizes the manifold of sensuous intuition in the form of generalized concepts, according to which the sensuous data will be ordered into a worldview. Reproductive imagination is more akin to maintaining systematic unity, as the concepts being formed are fit into the already ordered empirical worldview. Kant writes, Now insofar as the imagination is spontaneity, I sometimes also call it the productive imagination, thereby distinguishing it from the reproductive imagination. The synthesis of the reproductive imagination is subject solely to empirical laws, viz. to the laws of association. Therefore this synthesis contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of a priori cognition, and hence belongs not on transcendental philosophy but in psychology.8 What we are concerned with in this discussion is the nature of the productive imagination and its spontaneity. Imagination is the power of presenting an object in intuition even without the object’s being present.9

The productive imagination in the Anthropology is described as having the ability to intuit objects that are not there. That is, the understanding can formulate concepts that would suggest an object; however, no such object appears in sensuous intuition. The question is then what allows this to occur. How can I have an idea of myself if I cannot have direct intuition of myself? Kant explains that there is a distinction between clear and obscure ideas. We have clear ideas by virtue of being immediately conscious of them. We have obscure ideas by being mediately conscious of them, that is, conscious of them through something else of which we are immediately conscious. His example is an intuition of someone off in a meadow at some distance from the perceiver.10 We are immediately conscious of the

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sensuous intuition of some object over there. From the understanding ordering that sensuous intuition we judge that it is a person out there in the meadow. People have attributes such as eyes, ears, a mouth, etc. When we judge that object in the field to be a person, we judge it to have eyes, ears, a mouth, etc., because as a person it will have such attributes. However, these features of the face are not immediately given in sensuous intuition. All that is given is something like a silhouette of a living creature resembling a human being. Thus, in judging it to be a human, we become mediately aware of that person’s eyes, ears, mouth, etc. Thus, in this particular case, we judge the immediate intuition of a shape to be a human shape, and in so doing come to be mediately conscious of the features of this person, without having an immediate intuition of those very features. If we take this example into our discussion of “I”, we must note that Kant distinguishes between observing ourselves and noticing ourselves. In Section IV of the Anthropology, Kant writes that observing ourselves is comparable to keeping track and taking the sum of each individual state of consciousness that we experience. The added result will be the definitive self as observed in intuition. Noticing oneself, on the other hand, is something more like being aware of oneself in the play of cosmopolitan self-confidence while interacting with others. This “art of pretense,” when pulled off appropriately is like “being at ease” in the world; a “pay[ing] attention to ourselves” that “must not become… either embarrassed or stilted.”11 In other words, this reference to social interaction provides an everyday example of how we can be confident in ourselves, thus having some level of self-awareness, or consciousness of the self, without trying to hold the self qua definite object in our grasp. In fact, Kant is clearly warning against attempting to observe the self as an object: But the real purpose of this section is to give the strict warning mentioned above, against occupying ourselves with spying out the involuntary course of our thoughts and feelings and, so to speak, carefully recording its interior history… For, without noticing what we are doing, we suppose we are discovering within us what we ourselves have put there.12

This warning implicitly refers to the understanding being able to create a concept that has no corresponding cognized object because there is nothing given in sensuous intuition. Of course, this does not mean that the understanding is always faulty or wrong. Rather, the understanding simply does its best work when it is determining objects that are experienced in sensuous intuition. Kant writes,

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Chapter Two But it is only with regard to objects of experience that sound understanding can show its superiority.13

In other words, when the understanding is conceptualizing what is directly given in empirical intuition, the concepts thus produced are valuable as cognized objects of experience and knowledge. Therefore, when the understanding conceptualizes what is not directly given, but rather mediately given, the resulting concept will be obscure, and thus not as a cognized object of Kantian experience. In thinking ourselves as an “I”, we are not given a direct intuition of the self referred to by “I”. If we did have such an intuition, then the “I” would be a cognized object of experience, and we would thus be capable of having self-knowledge. As seen above, this is not the case for Kant. It would seem that we are then confronted with an instance where the self that is inferred from the use of “I” is an obscure idea, of which we have only mediate consciousness. Thus, if “all experience (empirical knowledge)—inner no less than outer,” is always of things “as they appear to me, not as they are (considered solely in themselves),”14 then what directly appears to me is merely inner intuition, or the way that I am affected by objects. I am directly aware of inner intuition, as this is “what it is like to be me.” This immediacy gives rise to a mediated notion of the self. This self as object is what Kant warns us against looking for. Instead, here we would see an instance where abstraction can autonomously create a concept without any direct sensuous intuition. We can still have a concept of it, nevertheless, due to the power of imaginative abstraction in the understanding. However, it must remain obscure, for we can only know it mediately, as it appears through the form of inner intuition. At this stage it would seem that we do in fact need “I” as a personal pronoun, not merely linguistically, but conceptually as well. To sum up my intentions in this section, I think it will be helpful to look at Section 24 of the Anthropology, titled “On Inner Sense.” There, Kant writes that the inner sense is not the consciousness of the activity of synthesis, because this consciousness is the pure apperception. Rather, inner sense is just “what we undergo insofar as we are affected by the play of our own thoughts.”15 As these inner experiences become built up by synthesis, we begin to think that we see the self as a cognized object of experience inside us. That is, we perceive the self as a thing corresponding to the concept that we have formed through abstraction, in regards to that which was not given directly in intuition. We must be careful not to accept inventions and thereby not be tricked into taking what we put into our own minds for something that was there already. To do otherwise would be to have “discovered in the depths of our [being] what we have really obtruded on

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ourselves.”16 In other words, in noticing the self mediately through the form of inner experience, we must not mistake this as observing the self immediately. “I” as a personal pronoun takes the place of something else, a proper noun, which it stands for. Here, even conceptually, this “I” or “I think” of Kant must remain something akin to a personal pronoun, because it could not be replaced with a noun, or a thing, a cognized object of experience, for which the pronoun stands.

The Form of the “I Think” We are now left with the necessity of the “I think”, which must be capable of accompanying all of my thoughts. Following the methodology of Kantian critique, we need to examine the necessary conditions for the possibility of such an “I think” from the form of the “I think” as it appears. Kant writes, The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations. For otherwise something would be present to me that could not be thought at all—which is equivalent to saying that the presentation either would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.17

Peter Strawson notes two distinct thoughts in this complex assertion by Kant. Namely that 1) intuitions must be subsumed under concepts in order to be experience, and thus the faculty of understanding is needed, and 2) if different experiences are to belong to a single consciousness there must be the possibility of self-consciousness.18 Strawson writes, What we are in quest of is precisely the fundamental ground of the possibility of empirical self-ascription of diverse states of consciousness on the part of a consciousness capable of knowledge of its own identity throughout its changing (or constant) determinations.19

Rephrasing Strawson here, we are looking for what allows the unity of apperception to become aware of itself as a unity amidst continually changing experiences. In order to do so, we must examine the nature of unifying activity of synthesis. In the activity of synthesizing the manifold into an ordered representation, and thus a Kantian experience, the “I think” necessarily must be “present” in the ordering. In this case, this “I think” is a logically simple subject. Kant writes, The I of apperception… is a singular… and therefore designates a logically

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One way in which we can consider this logically simple nature of the subject is to consider the connection between the subjective unity of apperception and the unity that we find to be empirically objective. An analytic statement, such as “unmarried men are bachelors,” is one in which the two main concepts are contained in each other; one is the definition of the other. Thus, if the “I think” is a logically simple subject, analytically drawn out of another concept, then the other concept is defined within it. Kant writes, [Combination] is solely something performed by the understanding; and understanding itself is nothing more than the power to combine a priori and to bring the manifold of given intuitions under the unity of apperception.21

Combination is when the understanding orders the given sensuous intuition according to the categories, which are the form of unity of both objectivity and subjectivity. In order for the combining to be significant for me, the concepts and objects so produced must stand in some relation to me. The synthesizing of the manifold is the same as the subsumption of the manifold to concepts imaginatively created by my very understanding. It is a double move, at once creating a unified object of experience and necessarily also creating the unity of the subject which is subjected to that object of experience. This activity produces an analytically simple self, the logically necessary “I think” capable of accompanying all of my organized representations. Organizing implies a point of view from which order is established. Thus, this analytically implied double move of synthetic activity creates the logical poles of objective and subjective: both the “empirically real” and the “transcendentally ideal.”22 Let us briefly return to Strawson to see two points he makes about the synthesizing activity that strengthens what I have just argued for. First, there is a necessary connection, by way of synthesis, between the unity of consciousness and the ordered relation of “incoming” representations to the systematized empirical worldview. Second, subjectivity is the source of the unity we perceive to be in nature, but only as is necessary for yielding a unified objective world of our experience. In other words, the order that we seemingly find outside of us in the external world is constructed by means of the synthesis of the sensuous manifold. Synthesis creates a viewpoint and a world thus viewed. For Kant, I do not have access to how the world actually is, but only as it appears in this “thusviewed” world of synthetic unity. We have seen, then, that synthesis

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creates a model objective world that is mediated by the categories of judgment, as they are the form of synthesis. In doing so, the subject, the transcendental ego, which is subjected to that objective worldview, is also conceptually created. The subject is merely analytically inferred from the subjection, which we can be directly aware of as the form of inner empirical intuition. We need now to consider consciousness of the synthesizing activity (the “I think”) according to a formal condition for the possibility of such. In the Anthropology, Kant discusses two types of “I”: the “I” of apprehension, and the “I” of reflection.23 The “I” of apprehension is referred to as the inner experience. It is an intuitive consciousness and contains the manifold of empirical inner intuition. The activity of synthesis of the manifold of inner intuition is the way in which I am affected by it being my synthesis. This inner experience, or “I” of apprehension, is then the “what it is like to be me,” which can also be described as the subjection of the subject; the way in which my thoughts are meaningful to me. The “I” of reflection, on the other hand, is pure apperception. It contains no manifold, but is instead the form of inner experience, which is time. The form of inner experience is the necessary condition for the possibility of such experience. In this way, it is always the same. This “I” of reflection is the subject of the subjection. It is the analytic correlate to the “I” of apprehension. If there is something that it is like to be me, then that must be my experience. Again, remembering the discussion above, we have immediate direct intuition of inner experience. Without mediation we know the subjection of the subject, the way in which I am affected by my understanding working on the manifold of sensuous intuition. However, in being directly conscious of the subjection, we are then mediately conscious of the subject of that subjection. Just like above, the “I” of pure apperception is perceived only as it appears: as the logical correlate of a unifying activity of subjection. From the directly perceived subjection we infer the subject. There is no direct intuition of the subject, and thus no cognized object, only the form itself (though we have seen that such spontaneous concepts can be legitimately formed about obscure mediated ideas). Given both sections discussed up to this point, Kant gives reason to understand that activities of synthesis are activities of ordering. Ordering necessarily involves ordering into or according to some system, and at the same time ordering according to some point of view. The form of such ordering is the categories, which work on a manifold of sensuous intuition. The ordering creates a logically simple subject that is inferred from the

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direct awareness of being subjected to this world-ordering activity, which operates upon some simple structured data that we are given through the senses. The inference of the subject through the subjection of the activity is analytic, and so is itself contained in the definition of the activity. Thus, we have direct awareness of the activity that analytically contains subjectivity within it. Our access to the subject of apperception is mediated analytically by our direct inner experience of what it is like to be subjected to the empirical world that one is subjected to. No direct intuition of such a subject means that we do not have a cognized object, and thus selfknowledge is merely self-awareness. The “I” as pronoun in our language must phenomenologically remain something like a pronoun as well. The self as internally experienced is inferred from the direct experience of subjection. Even my own awareness of my own internal experience is awareness of an “I” without a definite experience of any rigid self for which this “I” stands. It appears that I need “I” all the way down. Both in linguistic reference and in the inner experience of my own unity, the “self” must be only a stand-in for a continually functioning unifying activity.

An Elucidation of the Body-Synthesis One of the main premises leading up to this point in my argument is that concepts formed without direct intuition are left obscure. Thus, not only are the senses necessary for concepts to do work, but their role in obscure and mediated conceptions is of interest, particularly in regards to the unity of apperception. Kant claims that [The unity of apperception] does declare as necessary a synthesis of the manifold given in an intuition, a synthesis without which that thoroughgoing identity of self-consciousness cannot be thought. For through the I, as simple presentation, nothing manifold is given; only in intuition… can a manifold be given, and [then] only through combination can it be thought in one consciousness. (emphasis added)24

I would like to reconsider the necessity of the senses with regards to the concepts of time, as the form of inner intuition. First, by examining the limits of sensation as inextricably linked with the act of sensation, and second, by considering the manifold to be a non-conceptual structure providing a workable product for the understanding to generalize according to concepts. Let me begin with the phenomenology of sensation including its own limits. To include or to know the limits would mean to know the actual boundary, and thus something about the other side. Therefore, the

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boundary would not be a strict boundary. If we instead consider the limits to be horizons, then there is not such an issue. Instead, the perceptive field naturally contains several horizons beyond which the sensory organ cannot quite access directly. Consider the visual field. There are three types of horizons involved here. First are the edges of the visual field, the peripherals. They encircle the entire visual field. Beyond them you just cannot directly see, though you can be conscious of what is there. Of course you can turn your head and illuminate what was just beyond it, but now the encompassing horizon has moved, too. You have got blinders on, so to speak. Next there are the horizons that exist within the field. These horizons are best illustrated by the backs of solid objects. They are just beyond the immediate reach of the eye. Again, you can move, but so will the horizon. This also goes for the curvature of the earth, the most immediate horizon likely brought to mind by the term. No matter how far you travel, it will always be there. This horizon also includes things-in-themselves. Even though this would at first seem like a conceptual horizon, we can perhaps consider it to be a perceptual blindness with regards to the constitutive history of the particular object. In doing so, I think that it can still be included in this type of horizon. Now consider the eyeball itself. It, too, is a type of horizon, for it cannot be an object in its world, yet it is in no way disconnected from that world. The eyeball, in this particular example, is the point of view. It is that to which the visual field has any meaning. Opening the eye creates both the visual field, or empirical world, complete with horizons, and the subjective viewpoint, itself being a horizon; the intimate or subjective horizon, let us say. It is the point of view of the sensory organ. The limits of sensation are part of the very nature of sensation. The act of opening the eye creates the horizons all over and around the visual field. They are inseparable parts of the same movement. Analogously, though a bit clumsier to describe, the same situation would be the case for the rest of the senses. Thus every sense has a subjective horizon, the point beyond which it cannot sense itself directly through its own sensory channels. Of course, the senses are not isolated. They overlap and check each other. Is that an orange I see over there on the ground? After saying this I pick the orange thing up and say no, rather it is an orange foam ball. My ability to touch the same thing that I (think) I see allows me to form more accurate concepts about said thing. In this example, both sensory channels, touch and sight, would respectively involve subjective horizons. Not only do the fields of each sensory channel overlap, but so too do the subjective horizons. What appears to me in

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vision can be checked by what appears to me through touch. It is this overlap of subjective horizons that I want to introduce and emphasize here. I now want to compare this with Kant’s thoughts on time and thus show how this overlap of subjective horizons relates to self-consciousness. The overlap of all of your senses is what it is like to be you at any given moment. What it is like to be you is the input of all of your senses at once. It is what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting at the same moment. Though you might only be able to direct your full attention to one or two senses at a time, all functioning senses are sensing. Consider again Kant’s discussion of the form of inner experience. Remember that he references inner experience as being the way in which I am affected; the way in which the world is to me. The form of this inner intuition is time. Time is understood in terms of simultaneity and succession. Kant writes, Now the formal constitution of this [intuition] cannot be borrowed in turn from the senses but must (as intuition) be given a priori—that is, it must be a sensuous intuition that is left over even if all empirical elements (comprising sensations) are left out; and in inner experience, this formal element of intuition is time. (emphasis added)25

Now, when you take all of the empirical elements out of the overlapping senses what you have left is the fact of their overlap. Overlapping senses are the necessary condition for your inner experience; what it is like to be you. This simultaneity of sensory overlap is present in all of your sensory intuitions, as a manifold. This is one aspect of time-determination. The senses must be excited, or stimulated, in order to bring in information about the dynamic world around us. Individually, a sensory organ must be capable of discerning or detecting some amount of change in what appears to that sense. How else would it provide sensation? The act of the world influencing the sensitivity of the sensory organ provides the variance in sensory data that is detected as part of the full field of a sense in sensation. Thus, here we have succession as that which is given by the interaction of the sensory organ and the world. These aspects of simultaneity and succession, as time, can be explained by the synthesis constituted by sensory overlap in the body. It seems as though this might be a candidate for a non-conceptual synthesis a priori. It is a necessary condition for the possibility of inner experience; otherwise known as the form of inner empirical intuition. This would also seem to fall into Kant’s description of the “I” of apprehension. If there is a synthesis in the overlap of senses in the body that produces the necessary condition for the possibility of inner experience as it is, then

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the necessary analytic subject of the subjection, the “I” of reflection, the “I” of pure apperception, follows as the understanding creatively working on the already figuratively synthesized manifold. Here we can have an understanding of the two syntheses that Kant references: This synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition, which is a priori possible and necessary [given the way experience is], may be called figurative synthesis (synthesis speciosa [synthesis particular]). This serves to distinguish it from the synthesis that would be thought, in the mere category, in regard to the manifold of an intuition as such; this latter synthesis is called combination of understanding (synthesis intelletualis).26

What I want to suggest from the preceding discussion of the limits of sensation and time-determination of inner experience is that we can read the first sentence of the quote above differently. Not as “a synthesis of the manifold of sensuous intuition,” as we normally regard the understanding, but rather as “a synthesis of the sensuous intuition into a manifold,” in the manner of a body-synthesis. This synthesis and the “latter synthesis” are both parts of the complex idea that “I” stands for. The first synthesis is a structuring of the disparate sensory avenues into one sensuous manifold, which the understanding can then conceptualize. The understanding needs a workable substrate, and the senses individually present nothing as rich as empirical experience. However, the overlap of the senses in the bodyperspective creates a manifold, a structured, sensuous world, which the understanding then organizes. On the surface, this poses a problem. If the very activity of synthesis creates a logically implied subject, then a body-synthesis and a synthesis of the understanding would seem to each create a subject. Therefore, we would have two subjects: a subject analytically resulting from the synthesis of sensory channels into one structured manifold, and a subject analytically resulting from the organization of that structured manifold according to formal conditions of the categories of judgment. Kant, however, makes reference to these distinct and yet fully intertwined subjects, “I as a thinking being am one and the same subject with myself as a being in the world of sense.”27 In other words, the subject that is formed by the process of systematized conceptualization (thinking subject) is the same subject as the subject that is in a world of sense (body subject). This does not present a dualism, for the thinking subject is dependent upon the body subject. The understanding is worthless without material to work with, and intuition cannot think itself. If my analysis works, we can consider the body as a synthesis of disparate intuition into a manifold, the form of which is time. Succession

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and simultaneity can be understood in terms of immediate experience of the world as such a structured manifold. Sensibility and understanding, while being distinct aspects of the possibility of cognition, are perhaps best considered as a “self-subsistent unity in which, as in an organized body, each member exists for the sake of all the others and all exist for the sake of each one.”28 This leaves us with a complex subjectivity, on one hand synthesized in the gathering of sensation into a structured sensuousness which is the condition for the form of time-determined inner experience, and on the other, inferred in the conceptual ordering of this manifold according to the systematic form of the categories. The manifold that the body provides is an overlap of senses and as such provides the formal structure of inner intuition, which is time. Kant writes, All appearances are in time; and solely in time, as substrate (viz. as permanent form of inner intuition), can either simultaneity or succession be presented. Hence time, in which all variation by appearances is to be thought, endures and does not vary.29

At this point, self-consciousness consists in being aware of the subjective limit of each sensory channel whilst they are all unified into a single manifold. The affectivity of inner experience, the “what it is like to be me,” is shaped by this form and the form of the mind’s systematic way of processing a world view and organizing concepts according it. This substrate that is time, which does not vary, is presented here as a necessary component of being a creature in a world of sense. The body as an a priori synthesis is a necessary condition for the experience of being oneself. The human body in activity makes sense of the sensuous world according to the constitution of its understanding. The activity of making sense of the world allows for an idea of a subject behind it all, yet this subject is only analytically implied from the synthesizing activity itself, as it creates an empirically objective worldview according to the categories. The body-synthesis also involves the overlap of the subjective horizons mentioned above. The unity of both the external objective world and the internal subjective apperception are results of disparate sensory channels being synthesized. This synthesis, or overlap as I am calling it, involves both the fields of the sensory channel, but also the overlap of the viewpoints of these respective fields. It is also the overlap of the subjective horizons of each sensory channel. Our awareness of ourselves results from experience of the horizons of sensation. After all of this, do I need “I”? The linguistic pronoun and the conceptual idea were aligned earlier. My discussion showed that in our

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discourse with others we must refer to ourselves most intimately through the medium of the personal pronoun and also in consciousness of one’s self, as the self is beyond the limits of sense and thus not directly cognized. Our concept of ourselves as the unified subject is known inferentially from the unity of a world as ordered. Finally, after attempting to elucidate the nature of the manifold, if we have gotten any further towards seeing the body as a necessary synthesis in Kant’s system, the self is not simply comprised by the body. Rather, it is circumstantially localized there. As a synthesizing activity, the body must be animate, and as the being in the world of sense begins to buzz, the thinking subject is inferred from the act of conceptualizing the world. The “I” is now even more necessary, as the subject has become even more complex through this elucidation.

Conclusion A summary of my argument is in order. I began by examining the distinction between cognition and awareness as described by Kant’s system and the role of sensation in each. We saw that cognition, and thus knowledge, is only possible when concepts are determined according to direct sensuous intuition. Yet, due to the powers of abstraction and attention, our focus can be drawn to the particular limits of our sensuous experience and concepts can be formed for which there is no direct sensuous intuition, but according to that which is intimated by the nature of the horizon. Next, I demonstrated that there are several sorts of horizons of sensation, one in particular being the intimate or subjective horizon of the sensory organ itself. It is this particular limit of sense that provides a nondirect sensation of self, which, when overlapped with the same sort of limit of the other senses, provides an even stronger intuition of the unity of apperception. This overlap still does not provide us with any direct sensuous intuition of the self as an object, and thus it remains something beyond the limits of sense, but still that to which we can refer linguistically, conceptually and also phenomenologically through the pronominal use of “I”. Finally, as a result of this discussion, the unity of apperception can be understood as a body-synthesis, and the self we are aware of understood as an integration of sensory limits, naturally involved in the functioning of sensation. The outcome of my argument goes to show how we can have consciousness of a self that has no existence beyond the unifying activity of experience. I have also shown how Kant’s system provides an analysis

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of our subjectivity without positing a self that exists as an a priori subject. Rather, the coherence of our experience of self is of a self continually in development, and the coherence itself is the result of the process of the world being encountered by an embodied creature.

Notes 

1 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1996.) 419 (A 396). 2 Kant, Critique, 422 (A 402). 3 Ibid., 425 (B 406). 4 Ibid., 425 (B 407). 5 Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) 22. 6 Kant, Anthropology, 13. 7 Ibid., 13. 8 Kant, Critique, 191-192 (B 152). 9 Ibid., 191 (B 151). 10 Kant, Anthropology, 16. 11 Ibid., 14. 12 Ibid., 14-15. 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Ibid., 21. 15 Ibid., 39-40. 16 Ibid., 40. 17 Kant, Critique, 177 (B 132). 18 Strawson, Peter, Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. (Routledge, 1966) 93. 19 Strawson, Bounds of Sense, 94. 20 Kant, Critique, 425-426 (B 407-408). 21 Ibid., 179 (B 135). 22 Ibid., 89-90 (B 52). 23 Kant, Anthropology, 22 24 Kant, Critique, 179 (B 135). 25 Kant, Anthropology, 21-22. 26 Kant, Critique, 191 (B 151). 27 Kant, Anthropology, 22. 28 Kant, Critique, 26 (B xxiii). 29 Ibid., 253 (B 224-225).

CHAPTER THREE EMBODIMENT AND PERSONHOOD: BEING A PERSON AMONGST OTHERS SUMAYA NOUSH

Introduction The goal of this paper is twofold: to discuss bodily awareness as a structural feature of the phenomenal field of perception, and to indicate how particularities of bodies are an integral part of an account of perception. These particularities contribute to understanding the importance and benefit in letting go of a system of idealized bodies, or bodies conjured up in a vacuum, in order to challenge and accurately examine the systems of relations between varieties of bodies and the world. The phenomenological philosophical theories of both embodied, and particularly embodied, perceptual experience will shine light on the accuracy of an embodied theory of perception, and show how real problems arise when particularities of bodies are sidestepped. This paper will emphasize the importance of maintaining the organic quality of first-person perception as individually unique and inextricably tied to personal and world development, in order to problematize imbalanced relations between bodies. Currently, the system of relations between bodies has unfortunately tainted the very individuality of firstperson perception of the world, self, and others by systemically privileging a normative type of body, one unperturbed by the gaze of others, and by ignoring or minimizing the particularities of bodies. The interplay between a body that perceives and behaves in a certain way, and the body that is seen and is perceived in a certain way, is complex and needs to be accounted for in a phenomenological description. Nevertheless, the evocative phenomenology is not enough if we do not modify our modes of interaction so that individuals are not objectified in another’s field of perception, and are instead respected as peoples with their own projects and aspirations.

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The argument of this paper has two distinct parts. First, there is a discussion about the roles of bodies in perception, with an examination of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of lived perception. As such, the transition from modern modes of thought that discounted the body, to one that privileges the body in perception, confidently asserts and assures a more correct method of acquiring knowledge; a valid application of this method is inherently required to consider the individualities of bodies. Subsequently, the next move involves Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist existential ethics as it pertains to the particularities of bodies, especially in relating to people. The discrimination involved with gendered bodies, and how it limits equitable access to the world and influences bodily development and management, indicates that this changes perception indefinitely. First-person bodily perception, as in Merleau-Ponty’s primary lens, is no longer feasible when individuals become conditioned to see with a body that is seen. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigation is committed to understanding the awareness of the possibilities for world engagement as feasible through the human body. This investigation, however, has taken on the narrative of the masculine bodies, which have developed it into philosophical discourse. The tropes of the masculine body inadequately represent the common-sense assumptions of the everyday experiences examined in phenomenology, since they deprive all other sexed beings of unadulterated perception. The prerogatives of phenomenology, a study investigating consciousness as experienced individually, have unfortunately been insensitive to the peculiarities of the female narrative. The objective of this discussion of bodies, their role in perception, and the importance of not privileging some bodies over others, is to indicate why it is important to recognize bodily perception as dynamic and inherently relational. As bodies change and interact with the world, so does perception. However, not all bodies are the same, and there is just as much danger in being one of Merleau-Ponty’s normative or privileged bodies as there is in being one of Beauvoir’s othered bodies. Although Merleau-Ponty identifies bodily existence in the world as primordial, his ignorance of the idiosyncrasies and politics of bodies prompts Beauvoir to address these meaningful aspects of being, specifically gender, as a sort of calibration of perception and engagement with world. Between these two philosophers, there is a serious critique of the system of relations between bodies. By complementing an account of the lived body as found in Merleau-Ponty with an account of the female situation as discussed by Beauvoir in order to describe the phenomena of an interplay between the body that perceives and behaves itself in a certain way and the body that is

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seen and is perceived in a certain way, the hope is that the goal of this project is met both rhetorically and literally.

Section One: Merleau-Ponty’s Explanation of the Role of the Body in Perception Going Beyond the Intellectualists and the Empiricists The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty criticizes the representationalist philosophy of consciousness that predates him. First, an explanation of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of the intellectualists and empiricists, where the question of what the body is becomes evermore important, will be taken up. Next, the discussion will shift to the kind of world that is disclosed for an embodied perceiver, and the important role the body has in cognition. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body in his Phenomenology of Perception provides a philosophical correction to the intellectualist and empiricist theories of cognition. He pulls away from modern philosophical accounts of perception, knowledge, and truth in order to give an account of a third term necessary in the calculus of worldly experience. In MerleauPonty’s view, modern philosophies such as empiricism and intellectualism do not have the correct starting points in their inquiries about perception. Each one is biased in wanting to separate the mind from the body in their accounts of perception, and merely giving reasons for experiences instead of describing them accurately. By way of ignoring the intelligence of the body, the very phenomenon of worldly perception is missed in their accounts. Merleau-Ponty writes, Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.1

According to Merleau-Ponty, both accounts are unable to describe perception accurately because they avoid its own integrity as a phenomenon and distance themselves from it in order to focus on explaining how to apperceive the objective world. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy will start by understanding that “we see things,” rather than explaining “how we see things.” The pre-reflective quality of being is particularly important for Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and builds a

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platform from which to explain how people experience the world around them. As shown in the above quote, Merleau-Ponty is unwilling to resolve the problem of perception in a traditional empiricist or intellectualist way, because both are unable to describe perception accurately. In MerleauPonty’s view, the early modern period’s theories either reduce things to the physical phenomena, or they conceive of it in the most abstract way, wherein the body has no role in cognition. While these traditional philosophies have difficulty accounting for the mind-body dualistic relationship in light of explaining perception, Merleau-Ponty introduces an innovative mechanism, namely the body schema (which we will return to later) to develop and explain the connection. The empiricists and the intellectualists do not pay attention to the importance of the body, and assume it does not play a role in perception. Rene Descartes, an intellectualist, concludes that a person is endowed with a mind or soul that is separate from the body and has the capacity to think and guide the behavior of the unintelligent body. He writes in his Meditations, Finally here I am, having insensibly reverted to the point I desired, for, since it is now manifest to me that even bodies are not properly speaking known by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by the understanding only, and since they are not known from the face that they are seen or touched, but only because they are understood, I see clearly that there is nothing which is easier for me to know than my mind.2

Although Descartes acknowledges a body as an organism worthy of understanding, he hesitates to offer the body as another reliable source of knowledge. Descartes greatly distrusts his body because of his wariness of sensory knowledge about the outside world. His doubt of perceptual knowledge, as acquired through bodily sensation, effectively creates a ghost in a machine. This is a typical theoretical framework for intellectualists, namely the general belief that the mind can transcend the physicality of experience. On the other hand, Thomas Hobbes, an empiricist, finds it troubling to say anything real is incorporeal. In the Leviathan he writes, A thing may enter into account for matter, or body; as living, sensible, rational, hot, cold, moved, quiet; with all which names the word matter, or body, is understood; all such being names of matter… it may enter into account, or be considered, for some accident or quality which we conceive to be in it; as for being moved, for being so long, for being hot, etc.; and then, of the name of the thing itself, by a little change or wresting, we

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make a name for that accident which we consider; and for living put into the account life; for moved, motion; for hot, heat; for long, length, and the like: and all such names are the names of the accidents and properties by which one matter and body is distinguished from another. These are called names abstract, because severed, not from matter, but from the account of matter.3

Hobbes, like others who are part of the greater modern empiricist movement, finds it peculiar to claim that knowledge can be attained without a physical or material motivation for believing it, and just be fully had a priori. However, when it comes to the body, the intellectualists and the empiricists are both alike in their phenomenological misunderstanding. By denying that the body is a realm of causes, like the empiricists believe, or that the body cannot have any intellectual input, like the intellectualist believe, Merleau-Ponty shows how a theory that starts from sensations like empiricism, or uses concepts or judgments to make sense of impressions and perception like intellectualism, will never accurately be able to describe and explain the phenomenon of perception. MerleauPonty claims that only a philosophy of perception that can show how the body is capable of intrinsically making sense of perception would be able to account for this phenomenon. The body is the third term to the mind and world. Here there is mental content, a world, and the body, all co-engaging with each other consistently. A consideration of the body and its role in perception will allow us to understand how we relate intentionally to the world, whereas in the other theories, the body is an unintelligent obstacle they navigate around. All that remains of a body in one theory is an incredibly complicated objective figure, and in the other a scientific observer who is really just a ghost in a machine.4 A real description of perception as it unfolds pre-reflectively will allow the mind-body relation to be described as it is experienced concretely rather than abstractly.5 Merleau-Ponty describes this relation in terms of how the world and body give themselves to each other in a realm of all possible action and knowledge. He develops this with a variety of representations such as his body schema, body habit, and his use of Gestalt psychology.

Perception, the Body as Perceiver, and the Gestalt World Instead of giving reasons for our experiences in a mechanistic way, Merleau-Ponty wants to examine and describe our experiences holistically, as we live through them. Merleau-Ponty’s first step in examining and describing our perceptual experience is to reject the notion of our body as

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just an object of our experience. Merleau-Ponty shows how our bodies are not just objects to us by appealing to experience. Common everyday phenomena that we experience can really serve as testimonial proof for this claim. When looking at objects, we see them and relate to them in reference to our bodies. By virtue of these objects appearing in a certain way to our bodies, our capacity to relate to them is always in reference to our bodily capabilities. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “There are many unclear sights, as for example a landscape on a misty day, but then we always say that no real landscape is in itself unclear. It is so only for us.”6 This means that the fog does not obstruct my vision of the landscape, rather my vision is not strong enough to detect the landscape through the weather conditions. Being a bodily capability, my sight will make visible the landscape from a certain perspective. Another practical example of this account of perception is how one can identify where an object is in the context of its relation to the body. As Merleau-Ponty writes, When I say that an object is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or in the object, and I apply to them a category which theoretically fits the relationship of my body to external objects. Stripped of this anthropological association, the word on is indistinguishable from the word “under” or the word “beside.”7

A thing is only on or under or left or right to something in relation to my body. This is how we experience the world around us. This is prereflective experience, meaning I do not have to return to an experience to understand each minute calculation that allowed my brain to process my surroundings. It is automatic, part of my online processing, and allows me to efficiently continue throughout my day. The way in which the world appears is structured in relation to my body as well. An incredible quality of the body is that it directs itself. This is something Merleau-Ponty calls bodily habit, which we will turn to in the next section. The body schema is not just the sum of bodily experience at one moment. Rather, for Merleau-Ponty the body is a possibility. The spatial relations of parts of the body are not the same as a kind of objective space. It is a particular kind of personal space; more accurately, it is bodily space. The bodily space is oriented towards the respective person’s tasks and projects. The experiences of the body itself, such as sensation, overlap. However, body schema is more than just bodily sensation. It is a gestalt, in which its body parts receive meaning. Merleau-Ponty gives the example of the blurred sensation of where the arm begins and ends.8 However, body schema is much more than just sensation. It is a whole gestalt in which the body parts receive their meaning. I understand my particular body and it

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becomes a way of directing myself towards possible and actual tasks. This indicates that the body is intelligent. The presupposed theory of the Gestalts guides Merleau-Ponty here in believing that there is an organized totality, where things have a function and role, which cannot be taken over by something else without a rehabitualization. As one develops their body, their world inversely becomes richer. For instance, take the simultaneous cognitive and bodily development of an infant, progressing from crawling on hands and knees to walking upright. From having a preference for visual stimuli to being able to grasp that which it desires, the objects in an infant’s world become far more accessible once they have better mobility.9 Analogously, bodies change and motor abilities weaken as one matures. There is a bodily adjustment when one becomes more mature in accessing their world. A table may no longer be just a table for dining and socializing; it becomes very much a tool to help keep one balanced as they walk across the room. Bodily perception of the world is dynamic and context sensitive. The body schema develops, and this allows one’s perception of the world to also develop. As their world develops, the individual becomes habituated to particular trends that make their lives simpler, and engages with personal freedom. These body schemas, which develop from the moment we are born onward, are established in body habits and are not easy to forget or cast off in the event that we lose a part of our body that allowed us access to the world. However, it is important to note that these abnormal bodily idiosyncrasies that Merleau-Ponty enlists are categorically distinct to the particularities of individual bodies in normal perception that Beauvior presents. Nonetheless, the discussion MerleauPonty provides is greatly important. He gives the example of the person who loses their limb but chooses to deny their new-handicapped body and contrariwise develops a mild psychopathological disorder: The phenomenon of the phantom limb is here elucidated by that of anosognosia, which clearly demands a psychological explanation. [Anagsognosic] refer to their paralyzed arm as “a long, cold snake,” which rules out any hypothesis of real anesthesia and suggests one in terms of the refusal to recognize their deficiency… no psychological explanation can overlook the fact that the severance of the nerves to the brain abolishes the phantom limb.10

Anagnosics avoid situations where they will be confronted with their handicap. In contrast, one experiencing a phantom limb does not actually have the limb but they use their imagination and count on it. MerleauPonty says we do not count on our bodies because we see the body

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because the person with the phantom limb still relies on the limb as if it were there. More accurately, the phantom limb still fulfills a function in the body schema, by virtue of it having once been an actual part of it. Merleau-Ponty argues that it is not that you still have feelings in your arm or think you have an arm in the place it has usually been; rather, the phantom limb is an ambivalent presence. It is an in-between stage. This is because, on the bodily level of our normal relation of body to world, this new body (minus the old limb) has not been updated to the new situation, and this incidentally shows that the body is a habitual body. The problem is that they have not adapted to the new situation, and this will take the development of a new body schema with habit. There is no denying that inherent to the experience of the lost limb is the awareness that it is my lost limb and my lost way of relating to the world, and initially, I do not let go of it.

Body Habit In the previous section, I claimed that body habit and body schema are part and parcel to how one accesses the world around them. They constitute a type of give and take between the body and its relative environment. The world gives itself in a particular way because the body of the perceiver can access it in a way that is appropriate for their body. Developing a body habit takes time and coincides with both normal and abnormal bodily development, and in the case where there is a disruption in the once “normal” or familiarized body habit, this calls for a rehabituated body schema. Habit is what makes our bodies into the bodies that we are. If I see something and I have to reach out to it and I need to stand up, I expect my leg to fulfill the role of holding up my weight and pushing me forward. Knowledge of the body is intimate knowledge, and we are the body. Consciousness comes from this bodily acquaintance to the world. “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can.’”11 The body is how a person recognizes the capabilities of existence, and therefore consciousness is contingent on this body-awareness. The importance of the body schema is in combining one’s skills that can be used in incorporating a world before having actual thoughts or mental phenomena. This is preparation for the world that relies on habit. Habit enables motor intentionality. The body appropriately “understands” how to gain habit. It is an organized body in an organized world. I do not have to direct the fingers on my hands to type on this keyboard; my body is doing this as a habit. This bodily habit, like all bodily habits, is achieved pre-

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reflectively. It is a back and forth between the body and world. The world will draw out answers from my body when a task is directed at my body. The body does direct the world to me, but the world equally directs things to me. As explained earlier, Merleau-Ponty claims that thoughts, or any mental phenomena, have a gestalt-dynamic of a sort, in which they are the foreground to the background of perceptual activity that we understand in bodily terms. He does not need to deny that mental occurrences happen; rather he just attests that they necessarily occur in the background of perceptual activity that we understand in bodily terms.12 However, one must also recognize that there is a gestalt inherent to the body itself. The foreground of one’s body, such as one’s hands, are set upon the background of the rest of the body. Gestalts are a dynamic way to understand the unity of perception and how the body is inherently part of the discernment of perception.

Section Two: Where the Rubber Hits the Road: Recognizing Differences in Bodies The Privileged Body of Perception So far, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, perception is an embodied phenomenon, and any cognition that happens does so in an embodied subject. However, Merleau-Ponty’s account has come under criticism by philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, who hold that his account misses the particularities of bodies. The bodily subject described by Merleau-Ponty is full of capabilities, and the range of bodily proficiencies he explains support his account of perception. Such an account normalizes a class of perception not necessarily accessible by individuals that are limited by the very particularities of their bodies. The type of body Merleau-Ponty describes is privileged, because it does not seem to be influenced by things and other bodies in the world that can both stimulate and stifle one’s bodily perception. Instead, his body just engages with the world relatively ignorant of these normative qualifications of being in the world. Fundamentally, the flipside to privileging one type of body means that different types of bodies are underprivileged and potentially oppressed. The kind of body MerleauPonty describes does not experience the social prejudices of race, age, disability, or gender. These are relevant particularities that need to be addressed in order to understand bodily perception of the world and of others.

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Beauvoir suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s bodily perceiver is bodily privileged, or simply unaware of the normalcy of these bodily idiosyncrasies. In particular, the body of another, a more privileged and different type of body, dominates the feminine body Beauvoir describes. Beauvoir identifies the particularity of gender as weighing heavily on bodily perception, and this particularity alone magnifies the need to discuss bodily particularities as parts of the regular bodily perception of Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that bodies perceive with the analogy of gestalts, he does not recognize that such bodily perception can reduce other people to just bodies in the environment. The perceptive body Merleau-Ponty writes about is capable of using other bodies in the environment instrumentally, just as it uses any other stimuli. Reducing persons' bodies to objects, as mere means to another's end, and ignoring that they too are persons with goals and aspirations is morally problematic. The type of body Merleau-Ponty describes has advantages that allow access to the world, most akin to the characteristic advantages experienced by male bodies. These bodily privileges that males assume are now systematically and institutionally entrenched and aggravate the inequalities between bodily perceivers. For this reason, gender will be the main social construct and bodily particularity addressed in this section. A large question Beauvoir attempts to answer is: How does an international society become organized in a way that favors male projects and aspirations that in turns creates universal sexism? By giving a variety of origins for the patriarchal oppression of women, Beauvoir explains how women have maintained themselves in a subordinate position by fully manifesting themselves as “the Other.” Upon examining her philosophy, I will discuss the limitation put on women to further their projects because of socialized sexism based on the differences of bodies. I will also explain why the differences in bodies are not inherently prejudicial.

Beauvoir Questioning Male Transcendence The body is a topic that is taken up quite seriously by French phenomenology, but up until Beauvoir, no one figured it was important to account for sexual differences as much as she did. To understand her gendered embodiment as an amalgamation of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body and a feminist ethic creates a better calibrated phenomenology that, at minimum, recognizes the tropes of femininity and masculinity as part of the understanding of being in the world.

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In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir understands and explains the ambiguity and the exhaustive stress that is involved in personal freedom as a plausible cause for the subordination of particular groups of people. In general, humans typically avoid the reality of their freedom because it is easier to choose not to make particular kinds of choices, particularly conscientious or moral choices, and they treat others as means to ends or find themselves objectified in the world. In The Second Sex, like in Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir believes there is a natural ontological freedom that every person possesses by virtue of the world in which they participate. Every choice made is a choice that reflects one’s existence within this world.13 However, particular kinds of choices, namely moral choices that treat other humans as subjects with projects and agendas, furthers the original choice maker’s own freedom as well, because they do not have to worry about their own goals being thwarted by someone else. The subordination of others (women) deviates from this implicit universal ethics, to a real power struggle between at minimum two entities which will benefit one group to transcendence, making a choice that will affect their future in a way they elected, while sealing another group into immanence. Treating a person as any other object in the environment, to use them as a mere means to further another’s goal, is to seal a person in an “initself” role. The “in-itself” can be considered to be a class of objects that have a predestined or intrinsic value. In contrast, the “for-itself” would volitionally choose how to act or have the ability to decide what kind of future or existence they would like to have. It can be plainly seen that the former is less empowering than the latter. Towards the beginning of Beauvoir’s section called “Facts and Myths,” she explains transcendence as something that can break down into immanence, which means ethical freedom is something that is either electively or forcefully lost. She writes, Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms… Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into “in-itself,” of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.14

Because Beauvoir sees that one can both be forced to abdicate their ability to transcend and choose to conform to the force of another’s oppression, she argues that men and women both perpetuate patriarchy:

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Chapter Three Men wanting to maintain masculine prerogatives… invented this division; they wanted to create a feminine domain—a rule of life, of immanence— only to lock woman in it. But it is above and beyond all sexual specification that the existent seeks self-justification in the movement of his transcendence: the very submission of women proves this.15

Her conspiracy theory may be extreme, however, in spirit, an important message is conveyed. Women are sexually particularized by their bodies, and may have to circumvent this characteristic so intrinsic to their perception in order to attempt to limit men’s transcendence over them. For Beauvoir, men occupy the domain of transcendence because they engage in projects that reach into the future. Women are trapped in a domain of immanence, where their choices are not ones that further their naturally given freedoms. Within Beauvoir’s “Facts and Myths” section, there is a chapter called “History,” which provides historical evidence in this respect. Beauvoir notes the domestic domain that women are limited to in a variety of cultures that privilege men. Women do not participate in a selfless sphere nor venture into more enjoyable and productive venues that allow their own personal projects, whatever they may be, to successfully manifest. She writes, I recall an underground cave in a troglodyte village in Tunisia where four women were squatting… Leaving this gloomy den—realm of immanence, womb, and tomb—in the corridor leading up toward the light, I met the male, dressed in white, sparklingly clean, smiling, sunny. He was returning from the market, where he had bantered about world affairs with other men; he would spend a few hours in this retreat of his own… For the old withered creatures… there was no other universe but the murky cave from which they would emerge only at night, silent, and veiled.16

The situation that Beauvoir describes is one of a patriarchal society trapping women into being objects in-themselves instead of people with projects for-themselves. However, as this quote strategically indicates, the sexist domesticity of women transfers other issues and responsibilities to men. This very system of relations where men are out in the world, not only “bantering” with other men, but working and providing social and political capital for their families, is also overwhelming men. The main argument of the “History” section is that throughout history women have been the “Other” in relation to men, and have been denied access to an independent existence. Men have been able to position themselves to be fully responsible for public life, and women have been marginalized to support male interests without their interests ever being considered. The resulting sexism is one that then progresses and feeds off

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of superficial differences of masculine and feminine bodies. The male body becomes understood as privileged or superior, and further promotes the male agenda while making the female situation even more brutally difficult to overcome in hopes of reaching transcendence into being.

The Threat of the Other: The Female Body Part of a woman’s situation is her body. This is because one’s anatomy and its physiology is not something that one can easily elect to change or separate oneself from. Sara Heinamaa, author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, explains this functional aspect of the body thus, I am “stuck” to my body in a specific way: I can change my position in relation to any other material thing, but I do not have the possibility of distancing myself from my body.17

For both Heinamaa and Beauvoir, the body is going to be analogous to the subject. It is not something purely material, because it after all does influence how people perceive and relate to the world. Heinamaa writes, “This means, in short, that Le deuxieme sexe studies sexuality and sexual difference in a methodic framework in which the body is taken as a subject of experience, not as a bioscientific object.”18 So, another kind of ambiguity that one can experience is the contention between being a subject with motives and having a material body. Beauvoir suggests that there is an interchange between one’s body and how they see the world, similar to Merleau-Ponty. However, for women it has regrettably meant that the bodies of women have established more presence in the world than their projects. By discussing the existence of sexual differences, Beauvoir problematizes how men choose to assume a normative role that situates all other people who are different, not just women, into objectification. Beauvoir contests that this separation is due to fear that the status of the One can collapse into the less than favorable realities of the Other. In the section entitled “Myths,” Beauvoir describes this through the heartbreaking distancing of a son from his mother. She writes, And while the little boy in early childhood remains sensually attached to the mother’s flesh, when he grows up, when he is socialized and becomes aware of his individual existence, this flesh frightens him; he wants to ignore it and to see his mother as institution only… an adolescent boy becomes embarrassed, blushes if he meets his mother… when he is out with his friends: their presence recalls the regions of immanence from

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Chapter Three which he wants to escape; she reveals the roots that he wants to pull himself away from… Being conceived and born is the curse weighing on his destiny, the blemish on his being. And it is the warning of his death.19

This last part indicates that the young man in question fears collapsing into the role he originated from because it is such an unflattering and difficult position to live in. Although every person is both a material thing and a thinking thing, women are constantly materialized and cast off as something one does not want to emulate. The duality of human nature, that humans are condemned to be free but can only really have transcendence if they are allowed out of their facticity by others’ recognition that they too are subjects and not just objects, is a particularly difficult situation for women who have systematically been denied subjectivity by men. It is also very difficult for women, because this systematic objectification has conditioned women to live under the assumptions of patriarchal propaganda, and made women wholly subservient to men’s goals. This conditioning has even lead women to adopt and internalize the method of men to objectify women as their bodies.

Bodies that are Seen: The Hataera, Narcissist, and Mystic Women are conscious of how they are perceived, internalize this perception, and may only see themselves in light of men’s gazes. They are seeing with a body that is seen, which is the problem we address in the last section of the paper. They seek complete meaning for their existence in the value of the male gaze. Beauvoir illustrates this by explaining that the way a woman sees her physical self is as an endeavor to earn the admiration of a man’s gaze. She writes, She aims for her body’s glorification through the homage of men for whom this body is intended; and it would be a simplification to say that she wants to be beautiful in order to charm, or that she seeks to charm to assure herself that she is beautiful: in the solitude of her room, in salons where she tries to attract the gaze of others, she does not separate mans desire from the love of her own self.20

In the role of a woman, where one is stuck in the facticity of one’s situation, in particular having the element of the material body outweigh one’s consciousness, transcendence is not possible because of men’s tactics to systematically oppress women. The hetaera is a particular type of woman who exemplifies the objectification of women completely. She is flaunting her body as an object that serves the lust of men. Beauvoir writes,

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Common prostitution is a hard job where the sexually and economically oppressed woman—subjected to the arbitrariness of police, humiliating medical checkups, the whims of her clients, and the prospect of germs, sickness, and misery—is really reduced to the level of a thing.21

Beauvoir holds that women who prostitute themselves are giving into the male expectation of objectifying women as physical bodies meant not to disrupt the desires, goals, and projects of men. However, Beauvoir is also in favor of developing female sexuality. The issue therefore lies in the autonomy in making the choice to prostitute oneself. If the choice is informed by consent, lacks coercion of the other’s gaze, and is not a means to an end such as mere financial gain, but is conceived as a valuable practice in itself, then prostitution is not an issue for Beauvoir. It is only when prostitution lacks choice and is institutionalized by men is it an issue. Another type of woman is the narcissist. The narcissist thinks that she is not giving in to the male gaze, but her ideals of beauty reflect nothing but the standards men have set. Beauvoir writes, Many women prefer to miss a party than go badly dressed, even if they are not going to be noticed. However, although some women affirm “I dress for myself only,” we have seen that even in narcissism the gaze of the other is involved.22

The narcissist embraces being an object, and even if she does not recognize this as feeding into the objectification of women by men, she does not mind being an object wholly in herself. The last type of woman who tries to escape freedom does so by seeking to lose herself in God. “Her feelings take on a mystical dimension; she no longer asks God to admire her or approve her; she wants to melt into him, forget herself in his arms.”23 This type of woman, the mystic, feels the anxiety of freedom, but she cannot make the kinds of choices that would lead her to being a transcendent being because of the systematic misogyny that rules her world. Instead, she turns to another institution, religion, which will absorb her attention and relegate her anxiety. Peacefully resorting to religion, however, is not the only way in which women can deal with the obvious gender gap in transcendence. Beauvoir acknowledges that, because immanence is imposed on women by men, women will seek to dominate men in a similar way in the 20th century and beyond.24 This is because women are now becoming more transcendent than they ever have been, and there will be a war-like struggle between two transcendent powers, where the freedoms of each will not be respectfully recognized, as it is necessary for there to be ethical

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freedom for all. However, this may not be the correct approach to maximizing universal freedom. A comprehensive solution would bridge the account of embodied perception discussed by Merleau-Ponty and the description of the difficulties of being a woman in society that Beauvoir describes, to create a morally guided new order of relations between individuals. Iris Marion Young includes both of these motifs in her philosophy on the female body experience, as I will now explain.

Seeing with a Body that is Seen: Implications of Gender Particularity on Bodily Perception in Psychology This section draws on Iris Marion Young’s work for its insight on how persons in the environment can distance one from experiencing their body as an intelligent source of perception. As Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir have stated, the body is part and parcel to perception. However, since we have outlined how the female experience is different from the male experience by virtue of the different politics involved in bodies, it is now important to see the implications of treating people differently based on bodies. Although Merleau-Ponty successfully indicated that the body is a necessary third term in understanding how one can relate to the world, the particularities of bodies make a difference in how that world can be lived in. Gender-role ideologies, or attitudes towards men’s and women’s respective roles, are more or less constantly being tested and changed. However, the traditional gender-roles that separate the spheres of engagement for men and women, even in the most egalitarian of situations, remain. A critical function of Young’s piece is its careful evaluation of female embodiment within spaces that reflect societal traditions, as well as woman’s tendency to live her body as an object, or as Beauvoir says, sealing herself forever in immanence. As Young points out, the settings which bodies gravitate to are a reflection of their personal understanding of their reproductive roles. Young writes, I find such an explanation wholly unconvincing. If girls do tend to project an enclosed space and boys to project and open and outwardly space, it is far more plausible to regard this as a reflection of the way members of each sex live and move their bodies in space.25

Young’s critiques, such as this one, are a method of outlining typical bodily experiences and problematizing them so that new archetypes can be created.

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To evaluate the experience of being viewed from an outsider’s perspective, I would like to take a look at Young’s analysis. Young’s phenomenological description of female restricted bodily motility shines light on an important psychological concept that I will introduce below. She describes the typical woman as experiencing herself as a mere bodily object because she has to take distance from herself the same way that others view her from a distance. By internalizing an outsider’s view of herself, she not only has the same reflexivity in bodily understanding that Merleau-Ponty defines when describing how a person is both object and subject, but she becomes a mere thing when she only sees with a body that is seen. Young writes, The objectified bodily existence accounts for the self consciousness of the feminine relation to her body and resulting distance she takes from her body… Thus, to the degree that she does live herself as mere body, she cannot be in unity with herself but must take a distance from and exist in discontinuity with her body. [This can also account for] why women frequently tend not to move openly, keeping their limbs closed around themselves.26

The threat of being seen is a threat of objectification for women. Her bodily perception is manipulated by the threat of not appearing a certain way, and lacks development of bodily skills in order to relate to the world and encourage controlled use of their bodies. Young writes, The feminine body underuses its real capacity, both as the potentiality of its physical size and strength and as the real skills and coordination that are available to it. Feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality, which simultaneously reaches toward a projected end with an “I can” and withholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a self-imposed “I 27 cannot.”

The significance of these limitations is that they lead to a less developed engagement with the environment because of the hesitation to experience the environment using bodily space and schema, and this also means that what it means to “be” is limited. With regards to this dual limitation, not only is one jeopardizing oneself, but this also ruins the experience of being with others that is part and parcel to being. This shows how the particularities in bodies, as in Young’s phenomenological analysis, lead to real differences in bodily perception.

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Suggestions and Closing Remarks By combining Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s viewpoints and offering criticisms and critiques along the way, I hope it is clear that these two perspectives are not incommensurable, and that many commonalities exist in their quest to understanding bodily perception and engagement with the world. In addition, I hope that this paper models how to address the problem of ignoring individualities of other bodily perceivers. People need to be defined and redefined in everyday discourse, in order to inhibit objectification and to sustain equitable bodily transaction.

Notes  1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Chapter 3: Attention and Judgment,” in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002, Originally Published 1945), 30-59. 2 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy ed. Ralph M. Eaton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Originally Published 1641), 106. 3 Thomas Hobbes, “Chapter 4: Of Speech,” in The Leviathan (Originally Published in 1651), http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents .html (accessed January 2, 2014). 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “‘Association’ and the ‘Projection of Memories,’” in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002, Originally Published in 1945), 29. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Phenomenal Field,” in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002, Originally Published in 1945), 70-71. 6 Maurice, Merleau-Ponty, “The ‘Sensation’ as a Unit of Experience,” in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002, Originally Published in 1945), 7. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility,” in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002, Originally Published in 1945), 116. 8 Merleau-Ponty, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility,” 114. 9 Daniel C. Molden and Carol S. Dweck, “Finding ‘Meaning’ in Psychology: A Lay Theory’s Approach to Self-Regulation, Social Perception, and Social Development,” American Psychologist, 61, no. 3 (2006): 192-203. 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology,” in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002, Originally Published in 1945), 89. 11 Merleau-Ponty, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility,” 159. 12 Merleau-Ponty, “The ‘Sensation’ as a Unit of Experience,” 3-14. 13 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel, 1976, Originally published in 1948). 14 Simone de Beauvoir, “Facts and Myths: Introduction,” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011, Originally Published in 1949), 16.

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Beauvoir, “Facts and Myths: Introduction,” 74. Ibid., 92. 17 Sara Heinamaa, “Chapter Two: The Living Body,” in Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield), 30. 18 Heinamaa, “Chapter Two: The Living Body,” 25. 19 Simone de Beauvoir, “Facts and Myths: Myths,” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011, Originally Published in 1949), 166. 20 Simone de Beauvoir, “Facts and Myths: The Girl” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011, Originally Published in 1949), 350. 21 Simone de Beauvoir, “Lived Experience: Prostitutes and Hetaeras” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011, Originally Published in 1949), 610. 22 Simone de Beauvoir. “Lived Experience: Social Life” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011, Originally Published in 1949), 578. 23 Simone de Beauvoir, “Lived Experience: The Woman in Love” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011, Originally Published in 1949), 691. 24 Beauvoir, Simone de. (2011). “Lived Experience: Conclusion,” In The Second Sex (New York: Vintage (originally published in 1949)), 754. 25 Iris M. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality,” in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1990), 141-159. 26 Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Mobility and Spatiality,” 155. 27 Ibid., 148. 16

PART II LOSING THE SELF IN THE WORLD

While part one focused predominantly on how one goes about locating the self in the world through linguistic separation from others, selfconsciousness, and bodily perception, part two is more concerned with how one might detach from the discovered self. The concept of selfdetachment is present in many Western philosophies, most notably in theories of aesthetic experience, but it plays a more positive and significant role in a number of mainstream non-Western philosophies, especially those of Japanese and Indian origin. This is due, in part, to the role Buddhism has played in these traditions. It is fundamental to Buddhist teaching that there is suffering in the world; suffering is caused by craving and other forms of attachment to the self; and relief can be attained by relinquishing this attachment, leading to the cessation of suffering. This teaching calls into question various oversimplifications of the self, and attempts to reveal the possibility of deeper or more fundamental experience that lies at the root of our self-centered daily existence. Each chapter presented here highlights a different perspective from which to think about the process that one undergoes in order to recognize the suffering that comes from attachment to the self, and achieve release through non-attachment, or emptiness. The first paper, “Shameless Salvation: A Study of Enlightenment and Artistic Rescue in Nausea” by Sydney Morrow, examines the concepts of salvation and enlightenment through Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. In this paper, Morrow considers whether Antoine, the main character of Sartre’s novel, can be said to experience something like enlightenment. She argues that, while Antoine recognizes the constraints of his ego and the way in which his experience of the world as “nauseous” is determined by this ego-centric view, he does not seek to transcend this nausea, but accepts it as his normal state. In Morrow’s view, however, Antoine’s realization cannot be said to be the same as salvific enlightenment, as in the philosophy of Patanjali, for whom true salvation entails denying the ego in order to escape the merely deterministic world. Morrow concludes that Antoine cannot even be considered as engendering

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some kind of artistic salvation, given that the artistic attitude at the end of Nausea is that of resignation to one’s fate. The second paper, Miles Hamilton’s “Why is Emptiness not Empty? The Limits of Schopenhauer’s Ontology,” also takes a comparative perspective. In this paper, Hamilton compares German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s and the Madhyamika philosopher NƗgƗrjuna’s theories of emptiness, arguing that although the two bear certain similarities, they are vastly different philosophies. Moreover, Schopenhauer’s theory has deficiencies that are not present in that of NƗgƗrjuna. According to Schopenhauer, each being exists as both a fleeting phenomenon and a thing-in-itself. As a phenomenon, being is meaningless, and only gains meaning through the action of an absolutely real will. In this theory, emptiness is akin to meaninglessness, an absence. NƗgƗrjuna, while also drawing a line between conventional and ultimate reality, conceives of emptiness differently. For him, the emptiness of conventional reality is meaningful as the denial of ultimate existence. This does not mean that ultimate reality is absolutely real. Rather, ultimate reality is also empty. Hamilton concludes that while Schopenhauer remains attached to the idea of absolute reality, NƗgƗrjuna is able to set it aside on the path to enlightenment. The final paper presented in part two is by William Barnes, entitled “Emptiness and Compassion: Creating the Appropriate Context for SnjnyatƗ -Yoga.” This paper extends the conversation of the previous two papers to the realm of human action situated in communities. Barnes asks whether recognition of emptiness can be encouraged in others and supported by a community through ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga, or emptiness experience, given that it can radically transform people from within, or whether it must be a discovery made by each individual practitioner in solitude. In raising this question, Barnes has in mind the practices of Zen Buddhism and other Buddhist communities, which seek to support individuals on the spiritual path to enlightenment. Barnes concludes that enlightenment can be sought within carefully constructed communities, if the communities are dedicated to safely pursuing transformative experiences of emptiness. The three essays presented in this chapter interrogate the complex process by which it is thought that enlightenment or salvation may be achieved through recognition of one’s true self and the experience of emptiness. The authors advance one very unique dimension of the field of comparative philosophy by clarifying the different meanings of the idea of emptiness and the types of practices that such meanings permit.

CHAPTER FOUR SHAMELESS SALVATION: A STUDY OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND ARTISTIC RESCUE IN NAUSEA SYDNEY MORROW

In contemporary Western philosophy, the words salvation and enlightenment are handled gingerly, as if they wield the power to demolish a carefully crafted analytic argument with their very mention. Perhaps this is one reason why philosophical comparisons between this tradition and Indian philosophy can seem rather imprudent to a Western reader. Yet, in considering these vastly different perspectives in parallel, discoveries are made of each. In this essay, I will do just this, treading the ground between Sartre’s Nausea and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. In the former, the main character achieves a realization about the meaning of his surroundings that has been called “enlightenment,” but I feel that to compare this discovery with yogic enlightenment overshadows the subtleties of Sartre’s work.1 His particular brand of illumination has no positive component, nor does it involve a modification of thought. It is more accurately called a realization, or at best, a negative enlightenment. Also troublesome is the idea that artistic salvation constitutes the conclusion of Nausea. I will argue that salvation is not an option for Sartre’s “hero” for two reasons. First, the use of irony throughout the novel prevents the reader from creating any sort of humanizing bond with the main character, and this makes it difficult to accept the altruistic denouement. Second, only creations that exist can bring about any sort of salvation. An imaginary work that one intends to carry out in the future does not have the power to change one’s circumstances today. To begin, I will contextualize the climax of Nausea in which the main character, Antoine Roquentin, makes his discovery, however more or less enlightened.

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Nausea: A Sickness from Outside Notably, the enlightenment of concern is not that of the European aesthetic movement or Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” but the peculiar modification of thought rooted in the Indian tradition, i.e., the achievement of Nirvana. In this state, desire and suffering are renounced, and clarity reveals itself from beneath the veil of appearances. Analytic concerns about knowledge supply no route to approach this experience, viz., reaching a new plateau of epistemological certitude by exercising the mind. The Western philosophical canon of epistemology involves analysis of what is happening in the mind, rather than gaining control over its processes (that is, until Edmund Hussurl burst onto the scene and implored his readers to make a practice of disregarding the actions of the mind that color objects according to prejudice and habit). But, the perennial question asks whether one may induce a complete suspension of the mind’s natural tendency. Jean-Paul Sartre made a hearty attempt to reveal the true nature of things in his novel Nausea. His unlikely hero, Antoine Roquentin, finds that the objects surrounding him no longer conform to his attempts to know them, categorize them, or name them. Objects press upon him from outside, crowding him and causing him to feel insubstantial, and it makes him feel physically ill. These occasions increase in an entropic crescendo, until nausea becomes his prevailing state. This state has important connections to the psychological claims in Sartre’s early work, The Transcendence of the Ego. Following Husserl, Sartre held that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The mind has an intentionality that is the manifestation of its function. However, emotions are a special case, because they are not necessarily directed at any specific object. These states are crystallized outside of experience, in the realm of the reflective consciousness. The reflective consciousness is also the realm of the ego. It is where the actions that take place in the world are realized and supplied with the I-concept. Sartre writes in The Transcendence of the Ego: When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc.2

When thrust into the world of objects, the intentionality of the mind is strict in its scope. The focus of its attention is solely the objects of its surroundings, and these objects can be attractive or repellant. Time, in this realm, creates a unity of contingent and instantaneous experience. Only when it is reflected upon does the I appear, and with the I comes the

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availability of transcendental experiences. The transcendental can be identified by the realization of one’s personal participation in the world, and explicitly by the presence of emotions. After many instances of objectdirected disdain, for example, a state of hatred “overflows the instantaneousness of consciousness.”3 It becomes a consciousness without intentionality, and as it is no longer directed at an object, consciousness settles on itself and becomes reflective. The intimacy of this relation creates the possibility of a metaphrastic aerial perspective, encompassing the instance of “I am thinking/feeling/doing this.” However, the movement of the consciousness is halted, yielding a crystallized impression that is not of anything but the empty concept of the I. “Thus,” Sartre continues, “to say ‘I hate’ or ‘I love’ on the occasion of a particular consciousness of attraction or repugnance is to effect a veritable passage to infinity, rather analogous to that which we effect when we perceive an inkstand, or the blue of the blotter.”4 Emotions require no particular instantiation, because they exist only on the reflective level as an inert state. This, I argue, is the nature of the state of nausea exhibited in the like-titled work. The literary form of Nausea is interesting, given Sartre’s distinction between nonreflective and reflective consciousness. As a diary of the main character’s thoughts, only the reflective consciousness is presented. The reader has no access to the objects of Antoine’s world except through the lens of his ego. And his ego is so odd! Reflection inserts distance between the objects of the world and the I of the ego, and the objects of his world disgust Antoine. Robert Solomon describes what the strange nature of Antoine’s reflection arouses in the mind of the reader: .

And this… is a reflective experience in which what he experiences is his lack of engagement with the world or, alternatively, the unwanted intrusion of the world and its existence into his resisting but ultimately victimized consciousness.5

The world elicits from him an emotional response that canvases all of its substance. He writes that the nausea is “out there” in the walls of the bar and the faces of its patrons. The nausea is sticky, sickly sweet goo that oozes over every experience. It comes from outside, but it swallows him up. It is his unsolicited state of existence. Even in his reflective outpourings, the objects remain undigested, whole, and this causes him to suffer. He suffers throughout the book and wonders why. Then, while sitting on a bench in the park, he has his oft-quoted realization. He realizes that “existence” has nothing to do with the names arbitrarily given, or any other reference to surface appearance or abstract categories. Once these human attempts to assign meaning to objects were exposed as contingent

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and absurd, a mere construction to make the world appetizing to our minds, Antoine had the realization that “the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful obscene nakedness.”6 Antoine suddenly sees that the nausea is in fact not out there alongside or surrounding the objects, but that it is his own, and that it comprises a part of who he is. In his diary, an entry begins: I can’t say I feel relieved or satisfied; just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I wanted to know; I have understood all that has happened to me since January. The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.7

With the realization that all is contingent, including his existence, the origin of the nausea is known. If this is to be called “enlightenment,” it is a negative sort. This is evidenced by his writing that the trees and everything else had no choice but to exist, whether they wanted to or not. Not one of them is necessary. From Antoine’s diary: But why, I thought, why so many existences, since they are all alike? What good are so many duplicates of trees? So many existences missed, obstinately begun again and again missed—like the awkward efforts of an insect fallen on its back. That abundance did not give the effect of generosity, just the opposite. It was dismal, ailing, embarrassed at itself.8

All of these existences, including Antoine, are only “in the way” and intrusive, and he is ashamed. This is the meaning of his existence. What Sartre wants to show is that the world is not meaningless, it indeed has meaning, but it entails that we and all of the other existences are merely crowded into this world in no particular order. Meaning in the world is this “fundamental absurdity.” This is what is referred to as his “enlightenment,” and serves as the point of comparison with the Indian notion described in the book Sartre and Yoga by Ashok Malhotra. But can this properly be called enlightenment? Because “to say enlightenment is to say light, and absurdity is opacity itself, it is the contrary of what gives light.”9 The question then concerns whether the discovery of this opacity by the light of the mind engenders any sort of positive change. In the next section, I will address this question by giving three Sartrean solutions.

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Sartrean Enlightenment: The Free and the (Not So) Brave The three solutions I will give fall into two categories: the first draws from Sartre’s psychological assessment of emotions and the other two concern freedom as expressed in the novel and in his tome on ontology, Being and Nothingness. It is quite clear that Antoine undergoes some sort of psychological change after his experience in the park. But to call it “enlightenment” is hasty, unless the exact meaning intended is clarified, especially if this is the fulcrum of a comparative philosophy project. After many encounters with the nausea as a result of particular objects, the bartender’s purple suspenders for example, the sickness begins to pervade all of Antoine’s experience. Just as with experiences of gustatory nausea, once it is provoked, it is exacerbated by even the most mundane encounters. Flowers begin to smell sickeningly sweet, a sunny day becomes oppressively yellow, and the windchime tings too shrilly. No longer does the state of nausea have a direct object, as it did when it began, such as uncertainty about the quality of a burrito or the fury of an impending infant, but it pervades all experience. For Antoine, objects impose upon him unbidden. They overwhelm the intentionality of his consciousness. His experiences of sickening distaste, over time, congeal into a consistent state of nausea. His realization that the cause of the nausea is rooted in the contingency of existence sets the nature of the state of nausea out in stark relief. It is not fleeting and unnecessary, it is inert and affects every passing moment. Yet, the inert object that is the cause of his nausea is an opaque, unknowable object of the mind. This has important implications for Sartre’s claims about what he calls psychical, or reflective experience. According to Sartre’s theory, a consistent state cannot consist in unreflected experience, because there is no unification of consciousness. Unification can only occur if presented in concurrence with a being that subsists through time. Sartre describes two poles of unity for consciousness. The first is constituted by the unreflective encounters with the objects and the qualities of either attraction or repulsion that are produced. The second is the “transcendent pole of synthetic unity” that appears “solely in the world of reflection.”10 This unity is constituted in the ego, which effects the reflection upon experience. Yet the ego is not the support of the pole, for it cannot represent the totality of transcendental objects of reflection. It is one transcendental object among a potentially infinite many. Hatred, for example, is also considered a transcendental object, because it is a state that exists through time without a specific intentional object. Sartre sets this apart from the unity of unreflected

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experience while simultaneously making the state a static “object” of consciousness: The passivity of a spatio-temporal thing is constituted by virtue of its existential relativity. A relative existence can only be passive, since the least activity would free it from the relative and would constitute it as absolute. In the same way, hatred is inert, since it is existence relative to reflective consciousness.11

Sartre’s expression of the psychical hinges on the fact that the ego is, in the same way, inert. When consciousness attempts to direct its focus upon itself, it encounters an opacity that is beyond comprehension. Consciousness can only be posited as the object that allows the experiences of an individual to coalesce into one narrative, for it has no substantial qualities. It is too intimate to be observed or analyzed; it is indistinct even in its proximity. To put it bluntly, “it is evident that I shall never be able to say: my consciousness, that is, the consciousness of my me. The ego is not the owner of consciousness: it is the object of consciousness.”12 This is also true for emotions and states of mind. No longer can one honestly consider “my ego” or “my hatred” as purely subjective objects, because they are not the exclusive property of individual knowledge. The ego and the states associated with it are very much a mystery to their “owner.” Or rather, their production is confounding, as it is a spontaneous generation of individual consciousness. One must accept that it is not our activity that promulgates the unifying ego or emotions, because spontaneity cannot in this way create itself. Sartre words his thesis as follows: Transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines its existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement, but a new existence. There is something distressing for each of us, to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. At this level man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself, of being surprised by riches which are always unexpected.13

When Antoine realizes that the nausea is in him, I argue that he is positing it as an emotion or a state in the transcendental sense formulated in Sartre’s early work, The Transcendence of the Ego. It fits the criteria because it is (1) a state that has no direct (objective) intentionality;14 (2) although he discovers the cause of it, he is unable to discover what the nausea is; (3) the nausea becomes his “normal state”;15 and (4) it seems to

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have sprung out of nowhere, spontaneously, as he wrote in the beginning of his account. Although it ebbs periodically, he feels it lurking in the back of his mind. The nausea transcends the contingent existence of the objects that surround him, and reminds him of his own absurd reality. The realization that the nausea is his own consists in the recognition of his ego. This brings up an interesting question: Is it possible that the writing of a diary can be nonreflective? On the surface, this question seems absurd. Entries in a diary are essentially a series of reflective acts. Yet, when reading Nausea, it is difficult not to be perplexed by the notion that the nausea exists outside of Antoine, as he declares. Commonly, nausea is thought to be caused by some thing or things, but it is still something that happens within us. It seems backward to think of it as doing something to us, because that would place it outside of ourselves. And what could externalized nausea possibly be like? Antoine’s oddities aside, the reader never glimpses the nonreflective consciousness of the life we assume he leads and is recounting. But we can imagine him sitting at a desk in a room fervently writing, then going back and rereading his entries. Upon reading them, he may begin to reflect upon what they entail in their entirety. Alas! It is not out there! This experience belongs to me! Antoine constructs his own world, and only after this creation does he realize it belongs to him. The ego constitutes itself in the reflective consciousness, and in so doing, it also casts itself as an object and, as such, another contingent and unnecessary object. The second category of potential enlightenment concerns its relation with freedom. Freedom is a topic heralded by Sartre as perhaps the most important aspect of human existence. Whereas the previous paragraphs focused on the moment of Antoine’s so-called enlightenment, the following concerns what happens afterwards. Once one realizes the contingency inherent in all existence, Sartre indicates that the recognition of one’s complete freedom follows. However, he presents freedom in vastly different ways in the novel Nausea, compared to Being and Nothingness. In the former, recognition of freedom produces anxiety and dread. In the latter, freedom entails responsibility and hence what can be considered the basis of Sartre’s moral claims. These negative and positive aspects, respectively, will comprise the remainder of this section. At this point, it would be unwise to look forward into the ontological depths of Being and Nothingness in order to explain Antoine’s conception of freedom. He accepts this heavy weight as he would an inescapable curse. One gathers from his entries that he is not a particularly responsible man. He is apparently moneyed enough to trot the globe for extended

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periods of time, and throughout the novel, a gainful occupation is neither mentioned nor hinted at. Also, he does not care to preserve his relationships with people from his past or present. In fact, he seems to find his misanthropy amusing and clever. Furthermore, he decides simply to cease working on the project that brought him to Bouville because he finds that it no longer vindicates his existence. In short, he has no goals, so he has no substantial decisions to make. Here is an entry in his diary: I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living, all the ones I’ve tried have given way and I can’t imagine any more of them. I am still fairly young, I still have enough strength to start again. But do I have to start again? I am alone… Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.16

One gets the sense that there are no more attractive options left for dear Antoine. No matter where he goes from here, the nausea will travel with him, reminding him that his is merely an intrusive and gratuitous existence. Bob Solomon puts this point succinctly: Indeed, one might wonder if nausea itself is the experience of freedom, an oddly perverted form of anxiety, or the very opposite, an experience of unfreedom, the experience of there being nothing to do. In Nausea, it seems to be both.17

This negative element is not present in Sartre’s later philosophy, where freedom is equated with responsibility. Enlightenment is here cashed out as the negative discovery that, even though one’s existence is contingent, decisions must still be made. Yet, the decision of whether to stay in Bouville or travel to Paris has no meaningful consequences for Antoine. This is Sartre’s representation of an encounter with Kierkegaardian anxiety. There is no reason to make one decision rather than another, and each decision is as contingent as any possible outcome. The anxiety would remain with any set of options, attractive or otherwise. These features of freedom in Nausea are distinguished from the notions described later in Sartre’s philosophy because there is no positive feature. Not only in the sense that it is downright depressing, but also because freedom comprises nothing substantial. In Nausea, decisions are only tethered to their consequences via their attachment to the same ego. Decision-making here is not creative, and one gets the impression that Antoine has no concern for the repercussions of his choices. This is the counterpoint of freedom as expressed in Being and Nothingness. There, freedom represents the ability to make and transform oneself. There is no end to what one may become, even to the extent that one can be completely remade every instant. This entails that every assertion of

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freedom comes with the responsibility of ownership. This is part and parcel of Sartre’s infamous declaration that “existence precedes essence.” The human condition necessarily involves freedom, in order to effect the fulfillment of essence. Of course, this enlightenment is positive because it is indicative of what it is to be human. “Freedom is our reality; it does not need proof, but only a moment’s experience.”18 But this freedom is not something that is created, because it exists absolutely. According to Sartre’s ontology, although freedom is a nothingness, as it is neither a faculty of the mind nor an emotion, it supplies man with the creative force to make the world. To be human is to have this freedom. I do not believe that Sartre includes this developed sense of freedom in Nausea. The descriptions of freedom in both works elucidate the inseparability of contingency and freedom, but Being and Nothingness includes the element of responsibility that allows man to lay personal meaning back over the world. Antoine recognizes that his freedom is radical, but does not consider potential repercussions for his actions. Perhaps it is because nothing he does will disappoint anyone else. Because he lacks meaningful relationships with people, he has no reason to feel the shame that comes as a consequence of a bad decision. Therefore this formulation of enlightenment cannot be what he experiences. Furthermore, because he does not have a view of himself as being responsible for his actions, he cannot lay claim to other decision-based traits, e.g., bravery. Now I will consider the yogic view of enlightenment.

Yoga: A Suffering From Within According to Patangali’s Yoga Sutras, human life is plagued with a suffering that springs from a lack of true knowledge of reality (11.3). This suffering is caused by the inability to discriminate between the two realms that make up the world: Purusha and Prakriti. According to Yoga philosophy, this discovery will eliminate human suffering. Enlightenment is attained through an eight-step procedure that is divided into two stages. The result of this method is a view of the world in its primordial state, one that is not sullied by emotions and desires. This state requires complete control over the mind, and this enlightenment is called Kaivalya. Attainment of this stage may constitute the realization of a fulfilled life. Although, with the complete renouncement of the ego, it is questionable whether there is anything for salvation to be accredited to. For the purposes of this comparison, I will accept the view that completing the steps that lead to yogic enlightenment is coextensive with achieving salvation.

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Human suffering results from a superficial view of the world in which reality is hidden behind the cultural and personal prejudices laid upon it. In order to eliminate suffering, an individual must realize and distinguish the two separate realms of existence. Purusha is the pure, unthinkable consciousness and Prakriti is the phenomenal realm of creative and changing energy. One can think of the former as the seer and the latter the seen. These passages from the Bhagavad Gita (2:60-63) indicate the nature of their existence: Even when a man of wisdom Tries to control them, The bewildering senses Attack his mind with violence. Controlling them all, With discipline he should focus on me; When his senses are under control, His insight is sure. Brooding over sensuous objects Makes the attachment to them grow; From attachment desire arises, From desire anger is born. From anger comes confusion; From confusion memory lapses; From broken memory understanding is lost; From loss of understanding, he is ruined.19

In order to attain pure consciousness, or Purusha, one must become disciplined with the senses. The body and the other objects of the phenomenal realm remain Prakriti. However, this realization does not come in the form of a sudden epiphany, as did Antoine’s discovery, but is the result of a methodical modification of the mind. Briefly, there are five components of the first stage, or the Bahirangas. These steps are Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, and Pratyahara. They constitute the external, preparatory stage of enlightenment. The salvation seeker’s attention is “directed towards inhibiting, controlling, and finally eliminating all disturbances arising from external sources. Our desires, emotions, passions, and sentiments are disturbances caused by objects or people.”20 The mind draws away from the senses in this preparatory stage, and becomes ready for the second, internal stage: the modification of the mind. The components of this stage, the Antarangas, are Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi. They aim to eliminate the information in the mind that is

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modified by memory and imagination, as well as the notion that this information belongs to the self. The last stage is the most difficult; it is the modification that denies the ego sense. As long as the mind considers itself as an object, it remains in the realm of Prakriti. Only when the subject denies this selfhood can enlightenment be attained. This enlightenment also reveals the absolute freedom of an unbound consciousness. But, this freedom is not of the same sort as in Nausea. Enlightenment frees the Yogi from the deterministic influence not only of this life, but also from Karma, broadly construed as a cycle of cause and effect. The achievement of enlightenment signals the completion of the task, and the reward is salvation. With this, the Yogi’s journey is complete. It is clear that this method of enlightenment has little to do with Antoine’s experience, if he can be said to achieve such a status. Malhotra has defended a claim that the use of literary device in Nausea is Sartre’s way of imposing a step-wise measure to achieve enlightenment.21 The four steps of this method are simile, metaphor, humor, and irony. It is clear that these cannot be considered step-wise in the same way as in the Yoga Sutras, because Antoine does not have to master simile to move on to metaphor, like a new student of literature learning about each implementation of figurative language. Sartre uses these devices interchangeably, with the goal of relating to the world in a way that subverts normal, constructed meanings. Also, Antoine’s use of literary device in his diary is not the result of any sort of quest for meaning or journey to the heart of how things are. Sartre is playing with the idea of a Husserlian epoche, or the suspension of judgments about the experience of the external world in order to allow the real to shine through, in this recasting of the meanings of objects. Their part in the novel further illustrates Antoine’s oddness and the distance he inserts between himself and others. This becomes apparent when he writes that the woman in the library had a face that looked like an apple with a knife stuck in it, or how much he used to adore his former girlfriend when she “puts on her superb look of Medusa… all swollen with hate, twisted, venomous.”22 The steps of Patanjanjali’s method lead the Yogi to salvation, but does the obliteration of meaning via the use of literary device lead Antoine to a similar state?

Art for Salvation’s Sake There are two ways in which one can ascribe salvation in the Sartrean paradigm. The first is based on the ontology described in Being and Nothingness, and claims that salvation is impossible because it would

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necessitate the fusion of the for-itself and the in-itself, which is unachievable because one is being and the other a nothingness. Not only is this formulation not present in Nausea, it would destroy any attempt to accomplish a comparison with the yogic method, so will be disregarded in this study. The other type is the Schopenhauerian scenario, where a work of art can replace the unhappiness and worry that plagues the human mind, and fill the entire consciousness with the perception of it. This sort of contemplation, detached from the human ego, was also the centerpiece of Kant’s philosophy of art. In this view, works of art are free of any sort of extrinsic aim or meaning outside of themselves. Furthermore, their production cannot be explained, and the only indication that they are works of art is their power to move the Imagination. This movement is effected by what Kant calls “aesthetical Ideas.” And by aesthetical Idea I understand the representation of the Imagination which occasions much thought, without, however, any definite thought, i.e. any concept, begin capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language.23

Obviously, the last few paragraphs of Nausea present the context for the consideration of an artistic or aesthetic sort of salvation. He intends to write a book of stellar genius that will stir every reader. However, it seems to me that the only thing likening it to true salvation is its placement at the end of the book. According to the Yoga Sutras, salvation is the result of a difficult process of step-wise accomplishments. The final entry in Antoine’s diary is abrupt and confusing. He has discovered that he is free and decides that he is leaving Bouville, but he is anxious about how his life will unfold. He writes, “I must leave, I am vacillating. I dare not make a decision.”24 He has asked the waitress in the café to put on his favorite record, and while listening he imagines the singer and the writer of the song. The singer is a beautiful African American woman and the writer is a Jewish man with black eyebrows. They are saved, he writes, and they are no longer “drowned in existence.” They are not “in the way” or dispensable and together they have created something that distracts others from their contingent existences. While listening to the song, the nausea subsides, and Antoine’s body hardens against the viscosity of contingency. He writes that the music “filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music.”25 But also he is ashamed, because for him, the music is only a temporary respite. When the song ends, his nausea will inevitably return because he is not saved. He writes in his last entry that he will save himself as well by

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writing a novel that would be “beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of themselves.”26 This revelation is so out of place in this novel that it is rather off-putting. Since when does Antoine care about the feelings of others? He interacts with the extraneous people in his life coolly if not cruelly, even with his mistress from the café. With his former girlfriend, Anny, he feels pressured to play his part perfectly only for fear that she will leave him in his solitude. He does this ironically, but not at her expense because she treats him like an object as well. Here is the scene of their parting from Nausea: I haven’t let go of her arms, I tell her gently: “Then I must leave you after finding you again.” I can see her face clearly now. Suddenly it grows pale and drawn. An old woman’s face, absolutely frightful; I’m sure she didn’t put that one on purposely: it is there, unknown to her, or perhaps in spite of her. “No,” she says slowly, “no. You haven’t found me again.” She pulls her arms away. She opens the door. The hall is sparkling with light. Anny begins to laugh. “Poor boy! He never has any luck. The first time he plays his part well, he gets no thanks for it. Get out.” I hear the door close behind me.27

And scene! It would be easy to feel sorry for Antoine if his reader was not well aware of his misanthropic tendencies. More apparent is the feeling that he has found someone who either recognizes his insincerity, or is as artificial as he is. This perception of Antoine colors the way in which the reader regards his wish to be saved. The optimistic reader may claim that because he realizes that he is free, he has decided to change his life and remake its meaning by his own fortitude. And off we and he go, whistling a happy tune, salvation in hand. This scenario, however, is especially difficult to envision in light of the fact that the intended project of his has not yet begun, making it imaginary. Something that is imaginary cannot save something that is real, religious quibbling notwithstanding. Peter Weigel suggests an interesting solution to this incongruity between the imaginary and existent. He reminds us that Antoine does not really exist because he is a fictional character.28 Not only is he fictional, he is rather absurd as well. What Frenchman is a 6’5” redhead? Furthermore, after a bit of research into the history of jazz one will discover that the song so adored by Antoine is an actual song recorded in San Francisco in 1911 by a Jewish singer, Sophie Tucker, and written by a black man, Sheldon Brooks. Even the characters “saved” in the book are purposefully made fictional. Questions of salvation seem far from relevant now. How

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relevant would be the salvation of this fictional character to the nonfictional life of an anxiety-ridden individual? Many fictional characters are written into roles as moral exemplars, but in the case of Roquentin, Sartre writes him to be absurd, opaque, and ultimately unlikeable. Whether the reader believes that enlightenment is a possibility for Antoine depends on his ability to complete the task of writing the book and being saved. Needless to say, his actions throughout the novel contend mightily with this possibility. By my estimation, the meaning of the last passage is most convincingly proposed by Anthony Manser. He believes that Sartre intended Antoine’s “revelation” to be a piece of consummate irony, much like Hume’s direction to treat oneself to a glass of wine and a game of backgammon when philosophical inquiry falls into confusion and skepticism.29 The search for salvation in Nausea is called off due to inclement irrelevancy.

Conclusion In comparative philosophy, it is important to accept works from different traditions on their own terms. The cautionary words of Edward Said rattle around in the heads of many Western philosophers who hope to uncover potential parallels in thought to philosophy of different origins.30 In philosophy, word choice is one of the most important aspects of presenting an idea. Faulty word choice will spawn confusion and distaste in the readership. Here, I have addressed my concern over the usage of the words “enlightenment” and “salvation” in addressing Sartre’s Nausea. While I do believe that there are similarities between Sartre’s ontology as expressed in Being and Nothingness and the ontology of Samkya Yoga, which can be said to be the philosophical justification for the revelations of Yoga, I think that the reference to Antoine’s enlightenment and salvation represent a bias against Sartre’s peculiar treatment of contingency, freedom and redemption.

Notes  1

The study referred to is contained in Sartre and Yoga by Ashok Malhotra. It is unique and groundbreaking, and I owe a great debt of my understanding of Samkya yoga to this work. 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991) 49. 3 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 63. 4 Ibid., 63.

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Solomon, Robert. Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 69. 6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander, (New York: New Directions, 2007) 127. 7 Sartre, Nausea, 126. 8 Ibid., 133. 9 Marcel, Gabriel, The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harari, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949) 39. 10 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 61. 11 Ibid., 66. 12 Ibid., 97. 13 Ibid., 99. 14 That is, unless one considers the entire world to be something that can be brought into focus simultaneously in order to comprise an object suitable for intentionality. To be conscious of “the realm of existence” as one object is impossible, in my view, because there is no prereflective experience that corresponds to it. Only from the reflective viewpoint can consciousness achieve the transcendental breadth necessary to perform the operation. And, as Peter Caws writes, “Such a general modality is, for Sartre, characteristic of emotions.” (“Choosing Emotions: The Late Sartre and the Early Flaubert”) 15 Sartre, Nausea, 157. 16 Ibid., 17 Solomon, Dark Feelings, 84. 18 Ibid., 86. 19 The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller, (New York: Bantam Books, 1986) 37. 20 Malhotra, Ashok, Sartre and Yoga, (Oneonta, NY: The Philosophy Department of the State University of New York Oneonta, 2010) 97. 21 Ibid., 102. 22 Sartre, Nausea, 144. 23 Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard. (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000) 197. 24 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 178. 25 Ibid., 22. 26 Ibid., 178 27 Ibid. 28 Weigel, Peter, “The Aesthetics of Salvation in Sartre’s Nausea,” ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, in Analecta Husserliana LXXXV, 473-489. 29 Manser, Anthony, Sartre: A Philosophic Study, (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1981) 16-17. 30 I do not here intend to arouse concern about the nature of his claims about the “Eurocentricity” of Western culture that comes as a result of their perceived domination over the East. I would rather like to point out that his book Orientalism, whether or not the information in it was strictly true, pointed out that bias exists even in the most unlikely places.

CHAPTER FIVE WHY IS EMPTINESS NOT EMPTY? THE LIMITS OF SCHOPENHAUER’S ONTOLOGY MILES HAMILTON   

A Preliminary—What Brings These Doctrines Together? In this paper, I will consider the doctrine of a 19th century German idealist, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the teachings of an ancient Indian text, the Mulamadhyamakakarika. The purpose of this paper is to investigate different conceptions of emptiness, and how these notions shape ontological positions. What will become clear is that a prima facie similarity between these two philosophies obscures a deeper difference. Moreover, considering the merits of one provides grounds on which to assess the value of the other. With this at the forefront of our attention, it will become clear that investigating the concept of emptiness will allow for a novel evaluation of these philosophical positions. Why bring these philosophies together in the first place? From the outset, Schopenhauer is explicit in his praise for Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. In the preface to his seminal work, The World as Will and Representation, he establishes the atmosphere in which to consider his doctrine, “If, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the divine inspiration of ancient Indian wisdom, then he is best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him.”1 However, mere admiration of Indian philosophy is not grounds for undertaking a project such as this. What are significant are the comparisons Schopenhauer himself makes between his own doctrine and Indian philosophies. Before I consider these comparisons, I should note that questions exist about Indian philosophical sources available to Schopenhauer, and about the extent to which Schopenhauer’s philosophy was in fact influenced by Indian thought.2 Schopenhauer insists that he had developed his doctrine, his “single thought,” prior to any exposure to Indian philosophy: “in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence.”3 However,

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Bryan Magee plausibly suggests that arguments concerning the degree to which Schopenhauer’s philosophy was formed under the influence of Indian philosophy are largely misplaced. Of central importance is the fact that Schopenhauer “threw up conclusions about the nature of reality which are strikingly similar to some of those propounded by the more mystically oriented religions or philosophies of the East, yet arrived at by an entirely different path.”4 A comprehensive examination of both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy is too large an undertaking for this paper. Rather, I will focus on the Madhyamaka school of the MahƗyƗna tradition, as it draws out a particularly illuminating contrast. In his Mulamadhyamakakarika (MMK), NƗgƗrjuna, the founder of Madhyamaka, presents a set of sophisticated and “penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises that represent the foundation [of the Madhyamaka school].”5 Other schools within the MahƗyƗna tradition reject NƗgƗrjuna’s thesis, notably, Yogacara. Nevertheless, the MMK clearly sits within the framework of Buddhist philosophy.6 What particular comparisons does Schopenhauer make? He believes that Buddhism holds pre-eminence over all other religions. It is “a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with [it].”7 At the heart of both Schopenhauerean and Buddhist philosophy is the overcoming of suffering: “the great fundamental truth contained in… Buddhism, the need for salvation from an existence given up to suffering and death, and its attainability through the denial of the will… is beyond all comparison the most important truth there can be.”8 This shared principle underpins the need for salvation, where Schopenhauer explicitly compares the denial of the will to Nirvana: “the inner nature of all living things… is really present only in the state of the denial of the will (Nirvana), as the affirmation of the will (Samsara) has for its form the phenomenal appearance of this in plurality and multiplicity.”9 How we should live our lives depends on our view of the nature of reality—in particular, ultimate reality. Is there an ultimate reality? If so, what is it?

The Emptiness of Emptiness On first reading, it appears that Schopenhauer’s philosophy does indeed share features with Buddhist doctrines: both consider the world of objects to be illusory (arising from a “dual perspective on reality”), they agree that everything exists in dependence on something else, and both stress that life is steeped in suffering, due to craving or willing, but that this suffering can be overcome. It is these broad comparisons that first attract attention.

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On a closer reading, though, this correspondence is not as straightforward as it appears. Scholars have highlighted the problems one encounters when drawing comparisons between the two philosophies. For example, one author maintains that, although the atmosphere may be similar, the content is not.10 It is generally accepted that these philosophies have different ontologies,11 although I believe that a central ontological divergence is yet to be made explicit. I argue that this dissimilarity in ontology is best expressed by their divergent concepts of emptiness. As will become clear, according to Madhyamaka doctrine, emptiness is reflexive (emptiness itself is empty).12 This is not the case for Schopenhauer. In this paper I will first present Schopenhauer’s view of emptiness, which is bound up with his concept of will. Madhyamaka philosophy presents a well-developed conception of emptiness, providing a platform from which to compare these two doctrines. NƗgƗrjuna explicitly sets out to explore the concept of emptiness. The notion of emptiness is not a central focus in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but exploring his conception of emptiness is a very helpful and novel way to understand his ontology and how it relates to the Madhyamaka ontology. Both philosophies provide a path to the liberation from suffering. Should we wish to overcome suffering, we face an important question: which is the best path to follow? To answer this question we must look at the metaphysical foundations that support each path. Coming to understand where Schopenhauer’s doctrine and Madhyamaka philosophy converge and differ presents an opportunity to identify their strengths and weaknesses. I will leave it to readers, armed with this information, to choose a path, if they are so inclined.

Schopenhauer and Emptiness Schopenhauer’s concept of emptiness is bound up with the Kantian concept of the thing-in-itself.13 The thing-in-itself is understood in contrast to the world as representation. In simple terms, the world as representation, the world of phenomena, is the world of objects. Although phenomena, including ordinary objects such as table and chairs, appear to exist independently, Schopenhauer argues that this is not so. For Schopenhauer, the phenomenal world does not exist independently of our minds. “Everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.”14 It does not make sense to talk of an object without it being an object for a subject, as a representation. However, the subject must have knowledge of something, and thus needs objects to exist. As

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Schopenhauer writes, “These halves are inseparable.”15 Subjects make sense of the world as representation through the forms (space, time and causality). The law of causality, which we bring to the world as representation, ensures that the world “hangs together.” The forms also have only relative existence; they require relations to exist, and indeed, exist only as relations. Therefore, phenomena exist in dependence upon something other their own selves. “Everything that exists in space and time... has only a relative existence.”16 In this sense, they are empty. This weak ontological claim— that everything in the phenomenal world exists necessarily in relation to something else—fails to capture the full notion of emptiness, which is tied to the other aspect of the world.17 We want to know that the world is more than just representation, for if it were “nothing more than representation… it would inevitably pass by us like an empty dream, or a ghostly vision not worth our consideration.”18 For objects to have real meaning (not just “empty phantoms”), “they must point to something that exists without such dependence on something that stands over against it as its essential condition, and on its forms, in other words, must point to something that is not a representation, but a thing-in-itself.”19 The world of representation is essential, not only because it is the aspect of the world in which we operate on an everyday basis, but also because something exists beyond or behind it. A different aspect of the world exists. For Schopenhauer, the world as representation is not the only side of the world. It has a different side, which is its innermost being, the thing-initself, for which he uses the term, “will”.20 It is impossible, though, to comprehend the thing-in-itself by understanding and representation. Schopenhauer writes, “All understanding is limited to the phenomenon. Where the thing-in-itself begins, the phenomenon ends and hence also the representation and with this the understanding.”21 According to Schopenhauer, the limit of human knowledge is established by the principle of sufficient reason—it gives us the “prescribed forms of intelligibility.”22 The principle states that the existence of objects is possible only through a necessary relation of theirs to one another.23 Every object is subordinate to the principle. For Schopenhauer, “The inner essence of things is foreign to the principle of sufficient reason; it is the thing-in-itself and this is pure will. It is because it wills, and wills because it is. It is that which is absolutely real in every being.”24 He explains that attempts to describe the thing-in-itself in the same way we explain phenomena necessarily fail, “Thing-in-itself expresses that which exists independently of perception through any of our senses, and so that which really and truly is… for me it is will.”25

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However, if we cannot understand or reason about the will, in what sense are we aware of it? Our knowledge is restricted to knowledge of the phenomenal world, so we cannot have unmediated, “wholly adequate” knowledge of the will (because we cannot have direct consciousness of ourselves—it is always mediated by the subject/object distinction).26 The knowledge of the thing-in-itself we do have “is primarily conditioned by the separation, already contained therein, of a knower and a known and then by the form of time that is inseparable from cerebral selfconsciousness; and therefore such knowledge is not wholly exhaustive and adequate.”27 All beings are both phenomena and things-in-themselves; they are “capable of twofold explanation, a physical and a metaphysical. The physical explanation is always from the cause, the metaphysical always from the will.”28 What is unique for humans is that we have access to our will (through its acts), The act of will and the action of the body… are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite directly, and then in perception for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception… [The] whole body is nothing but objectified will, i.e. will that has become representation.29

Although we cannot have direct knowledge of the will, we do have “defective” knowledge of it, and this sets us apart from other sentient beings.30 “In the actions of such animals the will is obviously at work… but [it is] blind activity.”31 It falls to us to “take the final step” and recognise the will. Schopenhauer declares that, “humanity is the only stage at which the will can deny itself.”32 This truth that stands above all other truths and so he calls it “philosophical truth par excellence.”33 For Schopenhauer, then, although there are two aspects of the world, it is the world as will, that which is absolutely real, which gives meaning to the world. This helps to explain how he conceives of the notion of emptiness. If something is empty it is typically empty of something—here, something is empty if it is not meaningful in the sense outlined above. The world as representation is empty because it lacks will. This is not to say that it is misleading—“It is not on that account falsehood or illusion; it presents itself as what it is, as representation.”34

Madhyamaka and Emptiness Emptiness (sunyata) is fundamental to the MMK. As with Schopenhauer, emptiness is a negative concept, indicating absence. In Madhyamaka, that which is absent is svabhava, best described as inherent existence, or

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essence.35 Svabhava incorporates cognitive and ontological aspects.36 The cognitive aspect refers to our ordinary way of interpreting the world, that is, assuming that ordinary objects are ultimately real. The ontological aspect “refers to the inherent existence of a thing, to what exists in and of itself, or to a substantive being, unchanging and immovable.”37 In order to appreciate the nature of emptiness we must recognise both aspects. We must comprehend the philosophical arguments, as well as striving, intellectually and through meditative practice, to remove the mistaken projection of svabhava onto the world. Although phenomena appear to exist independently, NƗgƗrjuna, like Schopenhauer, argues that this is in fact not the case; nothing exists in and of itself. Rather, phenomena exist in dependence upon something other their own selves. This leads to the concept of dependent arising, but before I considered this, it is necessary to make an additional, critical point on emptiness. NƗgƗrjuna’s interlocutor responds that, in order for phenomena to be empty, there must be some real, discrete phenomena that possess the property of emptiness.38 Something real existing with emptiness implies that not everything is empty. However, emptiness must not be reified. If NƗgƗrjuna were asserting that the essence of phenomena is emptiness, then he would indeed be open to this charge. However, he makes it clear that emptiness as a property is not the correct interpretation. It is not an underlying reality of phenomena.39 Emptiness lacks inherent existence—it, like everything else, is empty!40 Dependent arising dictates that everything exists in dependence on something else. Arising in dependence on something else is not a causal relationship. NƗgƗrjuna explicitly rejects arguments for causation at the start of the MMK: 1

Neither from itself nor from another, Nor from both, Nor without a cause, Does anything whatever, anywhere arise.41

NƗgƗrjuna undermines the four positions one could adopt in respect to the relationship between a cause and its effect.42 He maintains that causal relationships are actually conceptually constructed. Although causation appears to exist independently, it is in fact empty. However, NƗgƗrjuna maintains that we can appeal to conditions to explain events. A condition is an event or phenomenon “whose occurrence or existence is correlated with that of another [event or phenomenon].”43 Conditions help to explain an event without referring to any causal power. Phenomena are empty of essence because they arise dependently:

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Whatever is dependently co-arisen That is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, Is itself the middle way.

19

Something that is not dependently arisen, Such a thing does not exist. Therefore a nonempty thing Does not exist.44

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All phenomena arise according to conditions (dependently) and so can have no inherent nature, for what they are depends on that which conditions them. For example, what appears to be a table with an inherent nature turns out to be dependent on a range of other factors, including its parts, spatial properties, and our perception of it. This holds for all phenomena. NƗgƗrjuna expresses the importance of dependent arising: 36

If dependent arising is denied, Emptiness itself is rejected. This would contradict All of the worldly conventions.45

Although phenomena arise in dependence on other things, and are thus empty of essence, this does not mean that they are non-existent. This is in part possible because of the doctrine of two truths.46 The doctrine of two truths refers to conventional truth and ultimate truth, and the relationship between them. NƗgƗrjuna rejects the distinction between the two truths as an appearance/reality distinction.47 The conventional truth and the ultimate truth are two aspects of the same reality. Conventional truth refers to the everyday world of objects and their properties, such as: the sky is blue, or the table is solid. There is also an ultimate truth about this world: all things are empty of inherent existence.48 In order to attain enlightenment, both truths must be understood. 10

Without a foundation in the conventional truth, The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, Liberation is not achieved.49

The distinction between the two truths provides NƗgƗrjuna the opportunity to respond to the reified view of emptiness presented by his opponents—if the phenomenal world is empty then nothing would exist. For them, the existence of emptiness entails that it is an inherently existing entity.50

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However, this is an incorrect reading. This interpretation sees emptiness as the fundamental, ultimate reality behind the conventional, phenomenal world. Emptiness under this interpretation has substantial existence. The assertion here is that phenomena must exist because they have the property of emptiness.51 Maintaining that emptiness exists behind the phenomenal world is making a positive assertion about the ultimate nature of emptiness, but as we saw above, reading emptiness as substance is problematic and a misrepresentation of NƗgƗrjuna’s thesis. Emptiness depends on other empty, conditionally real things. It too is dependently arisen. It too is empty of essence. Emptiness is in fact only conventionally real! This is the middle way between nihilism and reificationism: 11

“Empty” should not be asserted. “Nonempty” should not be asserted. Neither both nor neither should be asserted. They are only used nominally.52

We find that “Emptiness is hence not different from conventional reality— it is the fact that conventional reality is conventional.”53 Though phenomena are empty it does not mean that they lack existence. They exist conventionally, and this is meaningful in grasping their emptiness. In understanding the emptiness of conventional reality we can come to cease craving, we can progress towards nirvana.

Why They Differ Although Schopenhauer argues that we cannot cognise anything beyond the world as representation, it is the thing-in-itself, will, which gives the world meaning. Schopenhauer is attached to the concept of will and it is essential to his notion of emptiness. He is attached because, strictly speaking, in order to discuss ultimate reality we must refer to the will—it is necessary for his metaphysics. “The thing-in-itself... is pure will. It is because it wills, and wills because it is. It is that which is absolutely real in every being.”54 Schopenhauer expresses his position further: Aseity must also belong to such a [free] will, for as free, in other words, as thing-in-itself and thus not subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason, it can no more depend on another thing in its being and essence than it can in its doing and acting… [We must recognise] free will as the world’s essence-in-itself, whose manifestation is not directly in action, but primarily the existence and essence of things.55

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Schopenhauer explicitly states here that will is self-existent. In being of and by itself, will does not depend on anything else for self-existence.56 In other words, Schopenhauer’s will has svabhava. Without will the world is meaningless, and Schopenhauer is not prepared to give this up. His emptiness is not empty. For Madhyamaka, the notion of ultimate reality is empty—it is only conventionally real. NƗgƗrjuna is not attached to the notion of ultimate reality—he can let it pass by. Emptiness is empty. This is the fundamental difference; where NƗgƗrjuna’s notion of emptiness is self-reflexive, Schopenhauer’s notion of emptiness is not. This divergence is explicable in terms of their ontologies. For Schopenhauer, ultimate reality is not empty. “The will, as the thing-initself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man.”57 In fact, the will, the “universal fundamental essence of all phenomena… must be no less indestructible.”58 Schopenhauer maintains then that the will is enduring. For something to be enduring, it must exist in and of itself, that is, have substantial existence. NƗgƗrjuna, on the other hand, explicitly rejects any substance ontology. By using reductio ad absurdum, he argues that the concept of inherently existent phenomena is misleading—arguments for nondependently arisen phenomena, things that exist with svabhava (substance), are incoherent.59 Something with substance must exist independently and permanently.60 However, nothing meets these conditions. As NƗgƗrjuna illustrates, all phenomena are transient and exist dependently. As mentioned above, although things are empty of essence, or inherent existence, this is not to say that they are non-existent. NƗgƗrjuna is not denying the conventional existence of objects; rather, he is denying that objects exist ultimately. It appears then that Schopenhauer’s position requires the nonemptiness of emptiness for the world to have meaning—ultimate reality is tied to the thing-in-itself. However, NƗgƗrjuna’s world also has meaning, so why is Schopenhauer’s emptiness also not empty? For NƗgƗrjuna, ultimate reality is only conventionally real—it too is empty of svabhava. He or she who truly understands the emptiness of all phenomena, understands the middle way, and can make progress on the path of nirvana.

A Response This divergence in the concept of emptiness is most apparent in Schopenhauer and NƗgƗrjuna’s conceptions of overcoming the self. A

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critic may counter that Schopenhauer is not attached to the will in the way I have suggested. The ascetic—one who successfully denies the will—has a deep understanding of the illusory nature of his own life in the world as representation, which liberates him from the will-to-live: “Individuality is inherent in the will only in its affirmation, not in its denial.”61 By disappearance of the world as representation for the individual, by denial of the will, the ascetic overcomes the will-to-live as phenomenon, thereby transcending the phenomenal form. Overcoming the world of representation, the manifestation of the objectified will, equates with the disappearance of the phenomenal world. Although the ascetic’s phenomenal self remains firmly in the world of representation, in denying his will, he removes his willing self. Thus, Schopenhauer is not actually attached to the will as I suggest, and it is not as central to his notion of emptiness as I have indicated.

A Rejoinder Schopenhauer does indeed suggest that the willing self can be denied, indicating that the world as representation can be overcome. He also maintains that we cannot seek the denial of the will, as this would be selfdefeating; we must allow it to come to us by living a life of the ascetic. However, in even positing that we have a will to deny, he is committed to the existence of will—there exists something to deny. In this sense the will exists ultimately. Schopenhauer is attached to the concept of will and it is essential to his notion of emptiness. NƗgƗrjuna rejects such beliefs. The common view that we are permanent subjective selves that are ultimately real is mistaken. Although phenomena are empty of essence, or inherent existence, this is not to say that they are non-existent. NƗgƗrjuna is not denying that the self exists; rather he is denying that the self exists ultimately. As such he does not place any ontological significance on the self—it is just like any other phenomenon.

Conclusion Although Schopenhauer and NƗgƗrjuna appear to have a similar conception of emptiness, they have divergent views about what it means for something to be empty and how emptiness accords with the nature of reality. As we have seen, for NƗgƗrjuna, nothing exists with svabhava. Schopenhauer’s characterisation of will is therefore incompatible with Madhyamaka philosophy. This emerges clearly when one considers the path to salvation. For Schopenhauer we must deny something (the will).

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Denial of the will requires substantivism, for if the will did not have substantial existence, for Schopenhauer, there would be nothing to deny. For Madhyamaka, we must understand the emptiness of the self (and all other phenomena). These arise from their fundamentally disparate ontological foundations. Where Schopenhauer is bound by substance ontology, NƗgƗrjuna challenges and undermines all substantivism. Although Schopenhauer does not set out to explicate the notion of emptiness, a comparative analysis of this concept clearly illustrates how these two philosophical systems diverge. This project has highlighted the soteriological significance of how we conceive the notion of emptiness. If we accept NƗgƗrjuna’s conception of emptiness, then those who follow Schopenhauer’s path to salvation will necessarily fail—they will be bound to live a life of suffering. Conversely, if we follow Schopenhauer’s advice and achieve liberation, then NƗgƗrjuna has erred. The next step then is to examine how each arrives at his position with the greatest scrutiny, to determine which is surer, for until we do, we may best sit on our hands, waiting for salvation.

Notes  1

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volumes One and Two, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Press, 1966), xv. 2 See, for example, Moira Nicholls, “The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 171. Although Schopenhauer was familiar with the distinction between the MahƗyƗna and Theravada traditions, it is unlikely that he was aware of the Madhyamaka School. 3 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Press, 1966), 169. 4 Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Revised Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1997), 340. 5 Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: NƗgƗrjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 87. 6 Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 91. 7 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 169. 8 Ibid., 628. 9 Ibid., 609-610. 10 Peter Abelson, “Schopenhauer and Buddhism,” Philosophy East and West 43 (1993): 255, 274. 11 See, for example, Nicholls, “The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself,” 193 and Abelson, “Schopenhauer and Buddhism,” 265-266.

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12 I will argue that Schopenhauer’s concept of emptiness differs in important ways from the concept of emptiness in one prominent school of Buddhist thought. Other accounts of emptiness in Buddhist philosophy, such as that of the Yogacara school, may be closer to Schopenhauer. The importance of this point will become apparent below. 13 The thing-in-itself is that which cannot have space, time and causality as its properties. A subject cannot gain knowledge of it. The thing-in-itself is in a sense more real as it is that which exists independently of being perceived. 14 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume One, 3. In the Kantian tradition, it is a substantive conclusion that the world of objects is the world as representation (after all, objects do not normally seem like representations). Hence, it is important to acknowledge that this is an idealist view. 15 Ibid., 5. This statement in not merely analytic; it reflects Schopenhauer’s position that it is pure consciousness is not possible. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 202. 16 Ibid., 7. 17 I am adopting the preferred “two aspects” reading of Schopenhauer, rather than the “two worlds” reading. In addition, this claim, that the concept of emptiness refers exclusively to the necessary dependence on other objects for existence, shares closer ties with the Yogacara school. 18 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume One, 99. 19 Ibid., 119. In other words, for objects to have meaning they must be the expression of something that exists that is not merely relative, that is, object for subject. 20 Some scholars argue that Schopenhauer considered “will” to be only one aspect of the thing-in-itself. See, for example, Nicholls, “The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself.” However, this is not the majority view, and I will set it aside. 21 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume Two, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 92. 22 Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 29. 23 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume One, 6. 24 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume Two, 94-95. 25 Ibid., 90. 26 To be consistent with the principle of sufficient reason (our knowledge is restricted to knowledge of phenomena), Schopenhauer must argue that knowledge of the will cannot be separated from phenomena; we have restricted, or limited, knowledge of the will. However, there are passages that suggest that Schopenhauer wants to argue that we can have direct knowledge of the will through unmediated self-consciousness. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 195-197. Nicholls argues that Schopenhauer’s view on how well we can know the will shifted as his knowledge of Buddhist philosophy developed. See Nicholls, “The Influences of Eastern Thought on Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-Itself.” 27 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume Two, 92-93.

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 28

Ibid., 91. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume One, 100. 30 Ibid., 153-154. Schopenhauer maintains that there are grades of the will’s expression in phenomena. The objectification of the will in humans is at the top of the gradation; animals and plants falls further down. 31 Ibid., 114. 32 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 637. 33 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume One, 102. 34 Ibid., 15. 35 Jay Garfield, whose translation of the MMK I will be referring to, translates svabhava as “essence”. See Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 89. It is worth noting that there are some potentially important translation issues, as translation also requires interpretation, but this is not the focus of this paper. For example, where Garfield approaches the MMK from the Indo-Tibetan tradition, Kalupahana’s 1986 translation reflects his position on NƗgƗrjuna as a commentator on the Buddha’s Kaccayanagotta sutra [see David Kalupahana, Mulamadhyamakakarika of NƗgƗrjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (Albany: State University of New York Press 1986)]. I will hereafter refer to the text of the Mulamadhyamakakarika itself as “MMK”, followed by the chapter number. 36 Jan Westerhoff, NƗgƗrjuna’s Madhyamaka: A philosophical introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12. 37 Gajin Nagao, Madhyamika and Yogacara: A Study of MahƗyƗna Philosophies, ed. and trans. Leslie Kawamura (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 175. 38 It was likely that NƗgƗrjuna had several interlocutors. He represented these interlocutors in the MMK to present challenges to his position, before arguing that they were invalid or had absurd consequences. For example, see MMK, Ch 24. According to the Yogacara School, ultimate reality is an ineffable suchness. See Candrakirti’s criticism of the Yogacara School for maintaining that ultimate reality has self-existence. In addition, I use the word “phenomena” here to retain consistency in this paper and it also captures the sentiment of Buddhist philosophy in describing the objects of conventional reality. 39 R. J. E. Tsong Khapa, An Ocean of Reasoning: A great commentary on the Mulamadhyamakakarika, trans. Geshe Ngawang Samten and Jay Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13-14. 40 Huntington translates “the emptiness of emptiness” as “sunyatasunyata.” See C. W. Huntington, The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Madhyamika (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 132. This concept, the emptiness of emptiness, is reflected both conventionally and ultimately. Emptiness in terms of conventional reality is from the conventional viewpoint existent and from the ultimate viewpoint empty. Emptiness in terms of ultimate reality is empty, that is, it is neither conventionally real nor ultimately real. See Jay Garfield, Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 60-66. 29

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41 MMK, Ch 1. The rejection of arguments for causation itself is also closely linked to the rejection of causal arguments for dependent arising. 42 By “cause”, NƗgƗrjuna is referring to an event that has as part of its essence a power to bring about its effect. See Garfield, Empty Words, 27. See also Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 191-199 for a useful section on the distinction between causes and conditions. 43 Garfield, Empty Words, 71. 44 MMK, Ch 24. Another point that must be made about dependent arising is that that which comes into being is transient. Nothing exists permanently. Phenomena come into being, exist for a moment and go out of existence. 45 MMK, Ch 24. 46 Truth is translated from the Sanskrit, satya, which has two meanings; “truth”’ and “reality”. Although this complex term deserves deeper analysis, it falls outside the scope of this paper. 47 See Garfield, Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 297n. 48 An additional word needs to be made regarding ultimate truth. As stated, the ultimate truth is that everything is empty. However, in other terms, there is no ultimate truth, as nothing has ultimate existence. Ultimate truth is, in fact, only conventionally real. This idea is expressed clearly in Jay Garfield and Graham Priest, “NƗgƗrjuna and the Limits of thought,” Philosophy East and West 53 (2003): 13. 49 MMK, Ch 14. 50 Garfield, Empty Words, 36-37. 51 See MMK, Ch 24, verse 7. 52 MMK, Ch 22. 53 Garfield, Empty Words, 39. 54 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume One, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 94-95. My italics. 55 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 320. Aseity = ‘Being by and of itself’ [Tr.] 56 John Atwell, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23. 57 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 201. My italics. 58 Ibid, 318, 486. My italics. 59 See MMK, Ch 4 and Ch 15. 60 Westerhoff, NƗgƗrjuna’s Madhyamaka, 12. 61 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, 609.

CHAPTER SIX EMPTINESS AND COMPASSION: CREATING THE APPROPRIATE CONTEXT FOR ĝNjNYATƖ-YOGA1 WILL BARNES   

Being-in-the-world, exists essentially as Being-with-others.2 We are in it together, this ferry to the other shore… we’ll get there as an organic community.3

Transformative experiences of “emptiness,” or existential groundlessness, are encouraged in the wisdom traditions of existentialism and MahƗyƗna Buddhism, constituting the diverse range of practices what we will refer to as ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga.4 Despite their liberative potential, there are considerable risks associated with these experiences. The specific dangers of agendadriven ethical relativism, evoking terror, and the abuses of power potentially associated with encouraging ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga, are abated by a supportive community of wisdom seeking practitioners guided by a lineage of qualified teachers and the ethical discipline of compassion. This is the appropriately non-harmful context for transformative philosophy that utilizes ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga. To use Robert Aitken’s typically humble phrase, this “think piece” defends such a vision in light of criticisms and contributions from both traditions. Perhaps the best image to capture existential terror is the desperately clutched at malformed gape of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, with translucent flesh stretched taught over a ghoulish skull, reflecting the fiery glow of an ominous sky, the nameless everybody reels in horror at the revelation of radical contingency and nature’s cold indifference. It is a portrait of a soul stripped bare, with nothing but the fear of nothing remaining; a vision by and of modern man, an answer to Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetic challenge, an echo of the madman’s cry of the

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death of God, and as a visceral image of Martin Heidegger and SǛren Kierkegaard’s angst. It is an invitation to look into one of our darkest fears, the non-being at the heart of human-being—an experience no better articulated than in Munch’s own description of the mood caught and branded into the collective imaginary by The Scream: I went along the road with two friends. The sun set. Suddenly the sky became blood, I felt the breath of sadness and a tearing pain beneath my heart. I stopped, and leaned against the fence, deathly tired. The clouds over the fjord became blood and dripped, reeking of it. My friends went on but I just stood with an open wound in my breast. Trembling with anxiety, I heard a terrifying scream run through the universe.5

While the power of psychological conflict has always captured the imagination, applications of anxiety and fear have also been used to contribute to positive spiritual transformation in both the religious and philosophical cultures of Asia and Europe. Munch himself spoke at length about the liberative freedom and creative drive that emerged from his existential terror,6 and philosophers in the tradition of dialectics, existentialism, and beyond have recognized that crises of consciousness contain valuable transformative potential. In MahƗyƗna contexts, such crises have been encouraged and utilized for millennia, where inducing even terrifying experiences of emptiness is considered a legitimate means of transmitting transformative insight. With this as the purpose, the guru will stir up in the student the terror of death, self-loathing, and guilt so as to hurl us headlong, nauseous and alienated, desperate and homeless, into the sanctum of the three jewels.7 The intention is to bring about the realization of certain life possibilities, so as to facilitate the practitioner’s independent emancipation from delimiting and spiritually degrading habitual patterns of life. To this end, the tradition prescribes meditative and contemplative practices designed to induce an experience of an infinitely abysmal potent void as the truth/solution to our deepest fears. Through such experiences our attachments to, and reification of, transient phenomena may be cut off, leaving us absolutely free of their negative influence. These methods include challenging the very cogency of reality as it is conventionally experienced, from metaphysics and religion to common sense, and revealing apparent certainties to be largely the product of a collective imagination, an expression of deep-seated false beliefs inherited from a timeless shifting conditioned conceptual culture that both can—and because it is the means by which we perpetuate suffering—should be removed. In Buddhist pedagogy, ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga is a tried and tested means to

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address the futility of, and eventually remove, the desire to ground our existence in impermanent phenomena, a tendency unavoidably accompanied by a subliminal sense of futility that we repress through habitual denial. By appealing to the fear of death and the experiences of anxiety, guilt, shame, and other shocking and moving moods, the guru seeks to wake the student out of behavioral and cognitive routines, to reveal these damaging insecurities bubbling just under the surface of everyday consciousness, a process that can deepen anxiety regarding our mortality, moral fallibility and cosmic insignificance. What is supposed to justify such actions is that these initial responses, if used in certain ways, can be particularly effective in pushing a student towards liberation from the core false beliefs upon which they rest: Self, Reality, God, Truth or anything taken in an absolute sense, or as a source of permanent salvation. The intention of ĞnjnyatƗyoga is to bring these deeper core delusions—latent in the subconscious mechanisms and predilections that motivate and manifest as everyday comportment—to the surface of consciousness, which, when deconstructed under the guidance of emptiness philosophy, appear in their true form: lacking in independent essence and dependent for their existence on Indra’s infinite bejeweled matrix of mutually reflective co-dependent phenomena. In light of such deconstructive analysis, certain absolute views would be exposed as both fundamentally constitutive of the agent’s pre-theoretical comportmental attunement and ultimately spurious; an exposition that would render a fortiori all derivatives redundant. The goal is that this will leave addiction or attachment to this or that illusion impossible, and that thus, over time, our remaining obsessive tendencies will dissipate like particles in a glass of water left to rest, until what remains is empty of defilements, perfectly clear and infinitely refreshing; an immeasurably expansive and infinitely inspired awareness and the overwhelming ambition to help all beings that naturally accompanies it. A figure in the academy arguably sympathetic with ĞnjnyatƗ and its liberative potency is Martin Heidegger, for whom the recognition of profound existential contingency is a paralyzing trauma that both radically individuates and invites a heightened awareness of the groundlessness of human being: “[existential] death lays claim to it as an individual Dasein.”8 By “death,” Heidegger means a total breakdown of our absorption into our everyday goal-oriented practices, an experience wherein all our local commitments, projects, and valuations suddenly lose their footing, and along with them our regular sense of who we are. This experience presupposes the essential possibility of conscious being as a “project-less projecting”; an empty, temporally structured awareness journeying in a nightmarish landscape of unavailable possibilities.

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While Heideggerian death refers to an experience that terrifies, if it is appropriated under the guidance of phenomenological attestation, then it may also simultaneously liberate, by uncovering a range of available alternative destinies, in turn widening the horizons that hitherto encaged. This profound experience of self as pure potentiality enables a revaluation and reappropriation of the everyday, or “ontic” experience of anxiety and guilt to serve in the project of discovering and going some way towards owning the meaning of our being in the world. Heidegger writes: Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-being of that entity whose kind of being is anticipation itself. In the anticipatory revealing of this potentiality-for-being, Dasein discloses itself to itself as regards its uttermost possibility.9

Importantly, and as is recognized in both traditions, this insight into the lack of essence, is generally shrouded by a comparatively un-reflective conformity to everyday life, which, in virtue of delimiting the bounds of intelligibility, serves to conceal true freedom under a mask of existential necessity. This is because the dynamic processes of project-oriented comportment must draw from the range of culturally “approved” modalities of self-constitution, modalities that tend to perpetuate the delusion of a fixed identity, essence or purpose, which, while more often than not experienced as necessary, are in fact the means by which we flee this dynamic emptiness that conscious being presupposes. This fleeing form of life is the archetype of Heideggerian inauthenticity; for, as a response to a repressed recognition of existential groundlessness, it manifests itself as a base level anxiety, an anxiety that we fail to pacify through immersion in our everyday roles, and most importantly, that serves as an obstacle to achieving the awareness of existential openness as the truth of the human condition. It is for this reason that Heidegger encourages us to dwell in experiences like anxiety and guilt, so as to let these deeper truths show up. It is clear then that both traditions regard the challenging experiences that rock our habitual modalities of identification and projection—our conventional practices of absorption into the routine conformity to preordained life roles, a rote capitulation to “what one does”; the job, the house, the family—that may reveal the emptiness of these conventions as effective, if not necessary, for liberative transformation. But, in addition to their positive potential, these experiences carry with them significant risks, risks which the existentialists, starting with their reluctant father-figure Kierkegaard, are only too aware of:

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The mirror of possibility is no ordinary mirror; it must be used with extreme caution.10

To understand Kierkegaard here is to perceive the profound sense of lack that both motivated the emergence of existentialism, and also permeates its teachings. In rejecting the twin pillars of its cultural inheritance, existentialism left itself bereft of orthodox religion and incapable of taking epistemic comfort in science, as if newly orphaned and cast out into an unwelcoming environment. Consequently, while finding in the annuls of existentialist literature any prolonged phenomenology of joy or exaltations at liberation requires considerable exegetical effort, you are sure to find talk of frustration at the mundaneness of the everyday, of desperation at the absence of any trustworthy means to enchant it, and nausea and terror in the face of these burdens of consciousness. Indeed, in many of its forms, existentialism is a philosophy inseparable from loneliness, melancholy and fear, having disengaged from its ontotheological inheritance the evil stepmothers of idle conformism, dogmatism in both everyday religion and rational theology, and the dominance of dispassionate formal abstraction in the over-intellectualized scholastics of the academy, the tradition found little by way of existential consolation. The result is that the individual, apparently designated as the sole survivor of the dialectically realized deconstruction of European thought, is thrust into a position of absolute authority. Deconstructing existentialism’s preoccupation with the macabre and melancholy, so as to reveal veneration of the individual as metaphysical consolation, is more than just an exercise in genealogical curiosity. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s caution is a welcome one for our look at trans-cultural ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga, because, even while Buddhism regards guilt and anxiety as stepping stones in the opening up of existential possibilities to be transformed in a manner which allows for the emergence of a natural serenity and grace, the perfection of the human condition and the suffering induced can be the overriding and lasting response. For this reason—that a committed engagement with emptiness can have serious and even harmful results—there arises the concern that encouraging such engagement risks committing a form of violence. Furthermore, while Buddhism is naturally less intuitively associated with the dangers of emptiness experience, its history is littered with cases of mass and personal abuses that can be traced to central teachings. For example, the doctrine of emptiness has been used to sanction agenda driven ethical relativism in the service of an elite, where the alleged freedom from delimiting “moral” considerations conveniently permits the use of real violence. A case in point would be the Zen monks in World

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War II who spread the code of Bushido to “justify” the killing of civilians and prisoners and convinced admirably reluctant Kamikaze pilots that their concern for their victims was a psychological weakness to be overcome.11 The very same dangers extend to other Buddhisms: Ashin Wirathu’s worrying, absurd, and violently Islamaphobic 969 movement, the Sinhalese’s genocide of the Tamils,12 or the warring nationalism of medieval Korea and the long history of Sino-Tibetan conflicts, all of which evidenced a liberal interpretation of ahimsa.13 On a more individual level, the sexual abuses and emotional violence employed in monasteries and sanghas worldwide pointed to by the “crazy wisdom,” or upƗya, of Chogyam Trungpa’s over-emphasized eccentricities14 are indicative of a perennial and distasteful undercurrent that plagues all creative, critical, and deconstructive wisdom-seeking communities.15 These concerns can be expressed in a simple question: How and why should we seek to engender transformative experiences of emptiness in others? Before attempting to answer this question, we should first explain its significance in light of a doubt. One may regard the concern with avoiding violence as over-emphasizing negative varieties of emptiness experience, for many attunements that open the expanse of existential possibility are truly joyous (for example love, awe at the vastness of the universe and consciousness, or narrative-breaking encounters with the sublime or divine). Granting the immediately life affirming quality of many emptiness experiences, since they are one variety among those including the genuinely terrifying, thinking about how they may be assessed and controlled is a legitimate concern. A further important consideration at the outset of such a project is that the question itself may seem to rest on the rather naive assumption that emptiness experience is only occasioned by teachers and teachings, when in fact such experiences, taken in the wider sense, are inevitable. For example, we are living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty and facing immanent environmental disaster; we will all see loved ones leave us and loved ones die; at some point many of us will cast an agitated mind to the inevitability of our own death, or more superficially to the anti-climax of achievement or the frustration of failure. In short, very few if any of us will avoid experiencing profound existential anxiety at some point in our lives, be it professional, romantic, spiritual or otherwise. If we recognize this inevitability, then encouraging controlled emptiness experiences can be seen as equipping a transformed attitudinal response to their future occurrence, a similar role to Heidegger’s being-unto-death as anticipatory resoluteness, albeit not necessarily as theatrical.16 If we accept this, our question then becomes; what are the conditions that render these

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experiences “controlled”? Robert Aitken is an excellent resource for providing an answer, primarily because of his sensitivity to the aforementioned dangers, as is shown when quoting and responding to D.T. Suzuki’s infamous declaration that Zen Buddhist teachings are in essence ideologically malleable and almost arbitrarily destructive: [Zen] may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, and any political or economic dogmatism… and when we are overloaded with conventionalism, formalism, and other cognate isms—Zen asserts itself and proves to be a destructive force.17

Aitken is clearly concerned that this vision of Zen as radically neutral allows for a wide range of ethically dubious actions to take place under its name. That is, if emptiness entails that there is no ultimate ground for morality, we run the danger of implicitly endorsing universal ethical permissibility, and more immediately, that in the absence of ethical foundation we have no legitimate grounds from which to condemn crude abuses of power. Aitken’s response to Takuan Soho Zenji’s classic misuse of ĞnjnyatƗ is an inspiring starting point for voicing these deep concerns: The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness… The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, as is the one who wields the sword. Emptiness indeed! What about the blood? What about the wails of the widow and her children? Empty too I suppose?18

Aitken is concerned with both the socio-political and personal dangers of encouraging ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga, and his response amounts to a reiteration and re-appropriation, for a Western audience, of the necessity of certain constraints that enable safe and effective applications of transformation philosophy, so as to avoid the dangers of a spiritual experience unfettered by tried and tested discipline. The first structural necessity for meaningful and non-harmful dissemination of ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga is the guru. The guru, or deeply invested teacher, is crucial because they should deny the novice practitioner the complacency of a plateau—that sense of self-righteousness that accompanies the absolutist’s arrogant assumption of total understanding—so as to avoid the spiritual obscurations and material dangers that can accompany an unguided glimpse of the abysmal (for example, the experience that Duhkha is inescapable, or that conventional ethical discipline is an obstacle to freedom). Furthermore, devotion to the teacher is important for maintaining an emotional and passionate connection with the philosophy, and a source of trust in the face of the

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inevitable obstacle of losing one's experience of ĞnjnyatƗ and falling back into everyday patterns of behavior, now even more likely to appear as unsatisfying. While the guru may be rare in the contemporary university context, the idea of a teacher worthy of worship and devotion is not so alien in an academic culture indebted to the Greek and Medieval educational model of master and apprentice. The presence of such a cultural precedent in the West suggests that developing the idea of the teacher from a wellpublished, technically gifted argumentative writer, forced into limiting their teaching and interactions with students so as to secure professional stability through repeated publications, towards the ideal of a deeply emotionally invested, practically engaged guru figure, who manifests person-specific applications of genuine insight, does not demand too great a stretch of the Western imagination, and in certain universities already exists, albeit battling under growing pressure to convert education into mere vocational training.19 Concerning the sangha—Aitken’s second suggested structural necessity—while devotion to the right teachers prevents us from resting on milestones and maintains the lineage and its specific forms of practice such that the appropriately disposed have increased access to a stable resource, taking separate refuge in the sangha provides, through its institutional independence and dynamism, the ability to change with every human tide, and thus meet the unique needs of a spiritual community by promoting active safe engagement with the teachings, challenging authority when necessary, and providing a refuge from the disappointment and shock at, and even the failure of, our teachers and teachings. The fundamental discipline that holds this all together is compassion, the cohesive force required for an inclusive project of positive transformation to higher degrees of awareness and greater intimacy with the human condition. Again, the Western student population is not so far from this ideal, and in fact often embodies it, despite currently being threatened by the homogenizing, distancing, and at worst annihilating forces of commercialization.20 There are undoubtedly going to be many in our academic community entertaining doubts about this typically Indian model of guru, sangha and compassion; it is to these we now turn. One can almost hear the cry from some quarters in the existentialist camp “why compassion?”, expressing the concern that genuine, authentic ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga, for the sake of opening the parameters of conscious being, requires that we are willing to criticize our ethical intuitions, otherwise we risk unnecessarily restricting our freedom to the parameters of our socio-historical situation by assuming

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dominant themes in our inherited conceptual culture to be absolute. In response to those unconvinced by the testimony of spiritual beings throughout human history that insight and compassion are complementary phenomena, there are three things we may say. First, a suspicious hermeneutic genealogy of morality presupposes a value standard from which morals are to be judged, and cannot, therefore, be characterized as meta-ethical. Second, since the inextricable connections between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics are at last generally appreciated,21 we can simply reiterate that those narratives, which have succeeded in capturing collective imaginations while simultaneously casting aside compassion, at best risk limiting liberative transformation to an arbitrarily delineated elite, and at worst risk inflicting spiritual annihilation and instilling a legacy of violence and guilt of insurmountable social and political complexity. Both possible consequences would rule out the possibility of engendering a culture capable, let alone willing, to undertake transformative philosophy. Third, in response to those unimpressed with the many lessons from history showing us how easily communities with utopian aspirations can fall into a life negating fascism, we could instead value compassion for its results in the practice of transformative philosophy. On this kind of pragmatic justification, the commitment to compassion could be regarded as provisional for those who retain a fear of prioritizing ethics. Furthermore, a willingness to interrogate even the most human of intuitions need not serve as an obstacle for those skillfully mastering the art of love as the measure of spirituality, because even if it is the last worldly attachment to be abandoned at the final gate of enlightenment, very few of us need worry about that! Other obvious doubts include the fear of selfless abandonment that submission and devotion to a guru or sangha can entail. This concern may be simply due to cultural unfamiliarity. The typical modern European or American cannot imagine bowing and sitting at their teacher’s feet, following them wherever they are permitted to, and living with them, so as to learn not just what they say but what they are. While there is some truth to this, to conclude cultural incommensurability overlooks the aforementioned importance of the guru and the sangha in European culture, such that we may suggest it is the legacy of Protestantism, indeed Lutheranism, and the enlightenment—with its criticism of religious authority—rather than a uniquely “Western” condition, that motivates the fear of losing the subject or the self.22 Tracing the lineage of this intuition should not devalue the individualism of self-reliance, and particularly what the courageous independent critical thinking that grew alongside it allows us to see; that the awakening sought

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finds its apotheosis in the capitulation to the demands of the guru or sangha, for to do so may be to miss the opportunity for greater awakening and instead reinforce a sheepish slavery to the herd under the pseudojustification of appropriate affiliation to truth. That is, the emancipation of the individual from the chains of authority that marked the enlightenment, while rendering submission to the guru problematic, does so partly for good reason: that we should find out for ourselves the value of what the guru teaches, no matter how popular or respected they may be. Heidegger’s Being and Time is a particularly useful resource for addressing these concerns. This is because in addition to the individualism and spiritual isolationism emphasized in his vision of liberation (authenticity), in uniquely crystallizing both sides of this perennial tension between a radically separable self and a radically constitutive collective consciousness, Being and Time provides a genuine resource for going beyond it, and even for grounding an authentic sangha: Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free.23

So, while Heidegger’s existentialism is concerned with engendering authenticity in the individual, it nevertheless takes inter-subjectivity as ontologically primordial, the foundation of experience as resting firmly on the ground of the public world, and the essence of meaning as correlative. We also have in Heidegger the call to take a collective commitment to personally utilize death, to maintain an awareness of what it reveals, and to collectively project in light of this inexhaustible range of existential possibility. In this way, then, while prioritizing community may well appear inimical to individualistic interpretations of authenticity, such readings are not necessary, for we have a robust sense in Being and Time, perhaps the most profound expression of existentialist thought, of the community as necessary for transformative philosophy, and in Aitken, when committed to the discipline of compassion, how important it is in avoiding personal, local and wide-scale misuses of ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga. In conclusion, while the vast range of existential potentialities rarely appear available to human beings determined by, and attuned through, a primordial trust in the local structures used to navigate reality, they can and will be opened up by certain experiences. It is because of this inevitability that we can sanction the application of stirring, nauseating

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and even terrifying, experiences as vehicles for breaking through the equilibrium of these relatively unified, temporary, local, and grand narrative arcs, to open up this rich resource, to break out from the spiritually delimiting bounds of existential comportment and to skilfully appropriate the inevitable collapses of personal and socio-political life, to free oneself, to escape life’s apparent necessities and instead be enchanted by its possibilities. The appropriately non-harmful context for transformative philosophy, tailored to avoid the dangers of agenda driven ethical relativism, unduly evoking terror, and the abuse of power potentially associated with encouraging emptiness experiences requires a supportive community of wisdom practitioners guided by a lineage of qualified teachers, combining the methodologies of perpetual deconstructive philosophical analysis and ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga with the discipline of compassion.24 In all vehicles of liberation, then, we should undertake Aitken’s call to collectively practice “a religion of infinite compassion” under the watchful eye of the teacher and the warm welcome of the wisdom-seeking community.25

Notes  1

I am using the term ĝnjnyata-yoga in this essay to refer to the plethora of visceral and cerebral techniques of meditation emptiness in the Buddhist tradition, which include insight meditation and the non-affirmative philosophical deconstruction known as Prasanga, and also the applications of certain moods in the tradition of European existentialism in the pursuit of authenticity. There are other uses of this term that differ from my own. This comparison claims no more than that both traditions feel that an encounter with reality as it is—without foundation, substratum, ground, or Arche of any kind—can motivate desirable, or at least admirable, transformations, and therefore should be regarded as valuable, and are encouraged. There are more subtle connections to be made between the notion of ĝnjnyatƗ in Kyoto Zen Buddhism and Being in Heidegger, and there is a great deal of scholarship on this very issue, for example Nothingness and ĝnjnyatƗ: A Comparison of Heidegger and Nishitani by Fred Dallmayr in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan., 1992), pp. 37-48. 2 Heidegger, Martin. Being & Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 72, from hereon B&T. 3 Aitken, Robert. Original Dwelling Place, (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint 1996), 114. The following brief biography is largely taken from the liner notes of Dwelling Place (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint 1996): “Robert Baker Dairyu Chotan Aitken Rǀshi (June 19, 1917—August 5, 2010) was introduced to Zen Buddhism during World War II as an internee in a camp for enemy civilians in Kobe. He there took up haiku and met R.H. Blythe, author of Zen in English Literature. From 1959 until his death, Aitken practiced and taught in Hawai’i at

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 the Diamond sa৆gha established with his wife. Original Dwelling Place is his ninth book out of a life times work including The Mind of Clover, The Gateless barrier, and The Dragon who Never Sleeps. Aitken was a committed human rights campaigner his entire life and received full dharma transmission in the HaradaYasutani lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism in 1985.” 4 MahƗyƗna Buddhism, literally the great vehicle (means to bring one to liberation), is a term used to refer to developments concerning the philosophy, psychology, soteriology and ontology of Indian Buddhism that began shortly after the beginning of the Christian era. Concerning metaphysics, pre-MahƗyƗna Buddhism, or at least the two Indian schools about which we know most—the SarvƗstivƗdin and SautrƗntika—drew a taxonomical and constructive divide between appearance and reality, with the latter constituting a positive ontology of actually existing primitive dharmas. The crucial concept of SvabhƗva—own being/essence/nature—is what allows the attribution of dravysat to a dharma, denoting that by which something exists-in-itself; the essential properties of primitive entities. Although denoting the self-essence of the primary existent, these primitive entities do not accord with familiar ontological categories, as they bear the common characteristics instantiated by all phenomena: impermanence, suffering, and non-substantiality. Nevertheless, the philosophical developments of the two great MahƗyƗna schools criticized the early Buddhist notion of SvabhƗva. The Madhyamaka School argued that SvabhƗva was a logically incoherent and experientially unverifiable classification that served as a conceptual obstacle in the radical detachment of the bodhisattva, and the YogƗcƗra School regarded qualified notions of svabhƗva as fundamental heuristic tools to make sense of the Buddha’s teaching. These philosophical ideas were elaborations of the PrajñƗparamitƗ snjtras, a collection of spiritual texts communicating the experiences and teachings of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The snjtras taught emptiness—ĞnjnyatƗ—and compassion—Karuna—as the lifeblood of enlightened reality. Manifesting a combination of the two became the definitive aspiration for MahƗyƗna Buddhists, the bodhisattva ideal. Concerning Buddhist practice, then, the bodhisattva vow, taken by all MahƗyƗna Buddhists, includes the promise to pursue Buddha-hood for the sake of all sentient beings. ĝƗntideva’s BodhicaryƗvatƗra, the most important text in the history of MahƗyƗna ethics, contains some of the simplest and most beautiful expressions of the practical implications of emptiness philosophy and a bodhisattva’s compassion: When neither existence nor non-existence stands in front of the mind, since there is no other path to take, free from a point of reference, it becomes pacified (chapter 9 verse 34). As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the suffering of the world (chapter 10 verse 55). 5 This passage is from a Munch Museum manuscript, dated January 22,1892. 6 For Munch, existential terror is a fundamental starting point for the creative artist. It is the panic-chaos that is the source and necessity of all creative inspiration. As well as dealing with the terrifying Scream in a series of paintings, in his later work The Sun, Munch deals with the joyous possibilities of his visionary realizations and

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 wrote of many “spiritual experiences.” Even though widely underemphasized, Munch was deeply interested in the transformative quality of existential terror, as well as capturing the horror of the experience. 7 ĝƗntideva’s BodhicaryƗvatƗra contains the application of death terror and other moving delusions in a skillful attempt to motivate an entrance into the practice of ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga. (The BodhicaryƗvatƗra ĝƗntideva A Guide to the Buddhist Path to Awakening Birmingham: Windhorse publications, 2002), Verses 40-44. 8 B&T, 348. 9 B&T, 306. 10 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 36. 11 For a detailed study of the startling uses and misuses of MahƗyƗna Buddhist philosophy in the Zen tradition for militaristic ends, see Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War. Pages 116-129 deal specifically with the connections between Zen, Bushido, and Kamikaze in Colonel Sugimoto Gorǀ’s attempt to pair extremist nationalism with MahƗyƗna snjtras and MahƗvairocana worship, with the philosophy of Dǀgen and Ekijnj, and unsurprisingly, with the writings of D.T. Suzuki. 12 The Sinhalese Buddhist government was expelled from the UN Human Rights Council in May 2008, due to its appalling human rights record. 13 It should be mentioned that ahimsa means non-harm rather than non-violence and has, since its inception within Buddhist culture, been considered compatible with self-defense. We owe more to the holiness of this Dalai Lama than Buddhist philosophy or history for the remarkably heroic example the Tibetan people continue to show under Chinese Occupation. 14 For an excellent treatment of the dangers of guru worship and abuse see Geoffrey D. Falk’s Stripping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment, (Million Monkeys Press, 2006). Chapter 17 has a good brief account of Trungpa’s exploits at Naropa. 15 The plague of such abuses has even spread to my home of New Mexico, where the University has been forced to sever all ties with the Bodhi Manda Zen Centre for its Roshi, Joshu Sasaki, has been ousted as a serial sexual abuser of women “under the guise of Zen teachings” as an independent commission of Buddhist leaders, the “Bearing Witness Council,” has concluded. See SweepingZen.com for insightful and measured personal testimony concerning the numerous cases of abuse carried out as allegedly ego-shattering applications of emptiness philosophy. 16 At times, I cannot but help locate a sense of armchair martyrdom in the tradition of existentialism, that megalomania by which Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and even Freud, sought their Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid ending, the running out of the trenches into machine-gun fire ending, but from the position of pen on paper at desk. 17 D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 63. 18 Aitken, 155.

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19 I would like to include as an example, and thank deeply, Mr. Peter Hughes, Dr. Mattia Salvini, Dr. Tadeusz Skorupski, Prof. Richard Hayes, Prof. John Taber, Prof Iain Thomson and Associate Prof. Ann Murphy for being excellent scholars and both actively and effectively interested in the well-being and practice of their students. 20 For one small example of the effects of the commercialization of the university, more specific than the increasingly dominant and destructive view of education merely as a means to a financial goal, how is a teacher supposed to deal with the possible traumatic effects of teaching existentially challenging and transformative philosophy in an online class? 21 With the publication of the “black books.” 22 This recent development serves as a key factor determining the Western preference for the current standard professor-as-service provider, student-as-client relationship over that of the Guru and devotee. 23 B&T, 436. 24 The classic example would be one of the discoveries that greatly impressed the 6th century Chinese pilgrims to India, the great monastic university of NƗlandƗ, a university in which it seems the harmonious cohabitation of philosophers, monks, and scholars of all the Indian religious-philosophical schools practicing in the fields of alchemy and medicine, as well as philosophy and yoga, was open to a wide range of religious sentiments and practical dispositions restricted only by the rules of VinƗya. Whether or not it would be a wish-fulfilling anachronism to recreate NƗlandƗ (the project is allegedly underway) it stands as an ideal model of religious and philosophical freedom that captures the original vision of the university as a philosophically heterogeneous institution, paid for by the voluntary contributions of rulers and their public, therefore more intimately related to the general populace than any commercial university, working for that public as much as for itself by providing open and economically non-exclusive interactions with that monk-hood, inviting and encouraging its compassionately disciplined intellectually free monastic and lay communities to reassess the potential of humanity through enlightening experiential transformations, be it through scripture, philosophy or the panoply of conducive spiritual practices. This is the ideal context for a wide, inclusive, and accessible application of ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga. Accordingly, any school of thought arbitrarily defining any particular strand or theme as ultimate Truth, fighting the inevitability of re-appropriation, should not dissuade us from this mission—not out of pig-headedness or a similarly dogmatic tribalism—but simply because whatever is encountered in the breakdown of habitual life, and therefore whatever can serve as the subject matter of spiritual learning, is necessarily embedded in conditioned contexts or horizons, and the further we can reach within these horizons the more likely we are to harvest something of real liberative force. 25 Aitken, 155.

PART III ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO THE WORLD

Part three brings the conversation away from the self and further into the world. Here the interest ranges from how we can understand the world better, if not from a self-centered perspective, to how we can assess the world, both in terms of human-centric categories such as aesthetic value and in terms of universal conditions of space and time. This chapter thus completes the picture of the human being within a complex, and everchanging, environment. The first essay, “Pragmatic Belief Formation and Upaya” by Louise Williams, compares William James’ idea of pragmatic belief formation, in which belief formation seems to be dependent on an individual’s belief set, with the MahƗyƗna Buddhist concept of upaya, which recognizes the importance of an individual’s belief set while also allowing for the possibility of reaching objective truth. By supplementing Jamesian pragmatic belief formation with upaya, Williams aims to show that objective truth is indeed possible within the pragmatist world-view (although this possibility was not recognized by James himself). Williams’ argument is an important contribution to modern pragmatist theories that seek to extend the pragmatist worldview to include the views of other cultural traditions, and thus to expand its possibilities as a comprehensive theory of our relationship with the world. The second essay, “Aesthetic Attitude: Full Attention Not Needed” by Leland Harper, shifts the conversation away from our knowledge of the world to the issue of our assessment of the world according to human categories and values. Harper takes on the theory of the “aesthetic attitude” and the idea that aesthetic appreciation requires giving one’s full attention to a work of art. He argues that one can have an aesthetic experience of a work of art through merely a glancing look alone, and indeed that such a glance may allow a richer aesthetic experience than one of full concentration. Through this argument, Harper seeks to make the theory of the aesthetic attitude more comprehensive, by including experiences that would be excluded from the stricter and more canonical theory.

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The third essay, “Evanescence and Persistence: Towards a Buddhist Theory of Persistence over Time” by Itsuki Hayashi, fully removes the self from the equation and asks how we can understand a thing as the same thing over time despite changes in quality. He argues that while most responses would appeal to numerical identity, that is, existing as one and the same thing over time, the Buddhist response allows for existence in multiple forms through stages, which themselves enable persistence over time. After presenting some problems with the Buddhist version of stage theory, Hayashi proposes that a type of fusion theory may be the best way for the Buddhist theory to move forward. Hayashi’s examination in this paper expands our understanding not only of what it means for something to persist in time, but also how qualities may be related through temporal changes. Finally, in “The Holographic Universe and the Logic of Place,” Jeff Hoyt counters our normal understand of space by presenting Nishida Kitarǀ’s “Logic of Place” as a supplement to contemporary theories of the Holographic Universe. Hoyt uses Nishida’s “Logic of Place” in order to account for highly technical physical theories, such as the Holographic Universe, in more readily understandable philosophical terms, thus rendering it more intuitively acceptable. In doing so, Hoyt not only makes the Holographic Universe theory more comprehensible to the nonspecialist, but also relates Nishida’s philosophy to our contemporary understanding of the physical world. Furthermore, by emphasizing that our view of the universe is both a view from our perspective alone, and a reflection of the universe itself, Hoyt’s essay provides a fitting close to this volume. While it may be the case that our view of the world is only a view from our own particular standpoint, this need not preclude our being related to, and deeply understanding, the world in which we live. Indeed, describing the relationships and movements between the two is at the very core of the philosophical endeavor.



CHAPTER SEVEN PRAGMATIC BELIEF FORMATION AND UPAYA LOUISE WILLIAMS

William James provides a pragmatic explanation of how humans form their beliefs, arguing that the belief formation process is dependent on each individual’s set of ideas.1 If this is true, it seems that it is impossible for humans to fully understand objective truth. Instead, we are limited to understanding what is true within our own set of ideas. This appears to be a difficulty for James’ theory; however, the MahƗyƗna Buddhist concept of upaya works with a very similar understanding of belief formation, while maintaining that it is possible for us to fully understand objective truth. In this paper, I will refer to upaya as presented by the MahƗyƗna school of Buddhism. Upaya, or skillful means, refers to a teaching method tailored to a specific student. A wise teacher uses this individualized method in order to communicate some greater truth to the student. The tailored method itself is known as upaya. Here, upaya seems to acknowledge the importance of each individual’s set of ideas in belief formation, much like the pragmatic explanation. However, within the context of MahƗyƗna Buddhist philosophy, upaya’s final goal is to help the individual understand the objectively true nature of reality.

Pragmatic Belief Formation In Pragmatism, A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking; The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism, James articulates a particular method of belief formation. When an individual is presented with a new idea, several things happen. Each human has a given set of ideas that have developed throughout his or her life. This context is very important in the formation of new beliefs. We evaluate new ideas in relation to these older ideas. When we are trying to decide the truth-value of a new idea, we compare the new idea with our older ideas. If we determine that this new

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idea is radically incompatible with our older ideas, then we deem it false. However, if the new idea is compatible, or compatible with some minor adjustment to our old set of ideas, then we will accept the new idea as true. James does not explain in depth what he means by “compatible.” However, he seems to mean something that is not overtly contradictory. When we deem an idea to be false, we see that the new idea cannot logically fit with our old set of ideas. The old set of ideas, or some part of our old set of ideas, will overtly contradict this new idea. In cases of minor adjustment, we may be able to locate where the tension of contradiction is located in our old set of ideas, and tweak this part of our old set of ideas to remove the tension. James describes this process as such: “New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”2 James goes on to emphasize the important role of our older ideas. He claims that “The part played by the older truth… their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle—in most cases it is the only principle.”3 Any new idea that contradicts our old set of ideas will be dismissed as false. It is critical that we maintain the integrity of our older ideas, and we only accept new ideas with this in mind. Let us look at an example of this process. Rozy is carrying with her an old set of ideas that has been constructed over the entirety of her life. One day she is presented with a new idea: God exists. She is now assessing the truth-value of this statement. In this process, particular elements from her old set of ideas become relevant. Some examples, although far from a conclusive list, of these relevant elements may include: evil exists in the world; Suzy, a friend from high school, believes God exists; religion is bad for humanity. These elements from Rozy’s old set of ideas will be used in the comparison process. Rozy will examine these and compare them with the new idea: God exists. She will determine the truth-value of this new idea based on the compatibility of the new idea with the old set of ideas. God exists may be deemed true or false. There is only one way this new idea will be deemed false. Rozy will conclude that her old set of ideas is incompatible with this new idea. One way she may identify this incompatibility is by recognizing that God and evil may not both exist. Rozy may also decide that the new idea’s truth-value is true. She can come to this through two different ways: Rozy may decide that the new idea is true through a slight modification of her old set of ideas, or she may see her old set of ideas as easily compatible with the new idea. In the first case, she may determine that God can exist with a slight modification of

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her old set of ideas: i.e., alter the definition of evil. If Rozy perceives no conflict between her old set of ideas and the new idea, then she will easily identify that God exists is true. There is no problem recognizing that evil exists and God too exists. This is importantly different from the typical explanation of belief formation. The traditional story told about belief formation is that we hold certain beliefs as true until we are presented with new ideas that have been substantiated. If we understand these new ideas to be superior to our old ones, we will let go of the old ones in favor of the new belief. This is thought to be a process in which we objectively compare facts and draw conclusions based on this comparison. However, James thinks that this is not how belief formation works. Even when an individual claims to be proceeding in this manner, their ultimate loyalty is still to their old ideas. James states, “When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition it is for subjective reasons.”4 In pragmatic belief formation, belief in something is based on our old set of ideas. When we come to hold ideas to be true, it is not because of any objective comparison of facts. James goes so far as to claim, “Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found.”5 Here, James seems to be saying that there really is no such thing as objective truth. It follows that there is no such thing as objective truth, since there is no way to conduct an objective comparison of ideas. Because we are all subject to understanding things to be true in the context of our old set of ideas, it seems that we will be unable to find any truths which stand independent of our individual ideas. By claiming that our beliefs are formed strictly within the context of our old set of ideas, James maintains that there is no such thing as objective truth. However, it is unclear whether it is actually impossible for objective truth to exist, or whether it is just impossible for humans to ever come to understand objective truth. Since the practical difference of these two propositions is equivalent, it is consistent with James’ broader philosophical standpoint that he would not address this distinction. We will now take a look at the potential existence of objective truth in terms of consistency with pragmatic belief formation. It could be the case that objective truth exists. An individual may even by chance believe something that corresponds to objective truth. However, given the way we come to believe things, we have no way of understanding that this truth corresponds to objective truth. There will be no indication that the individual’s belief lines up with the objective truth. This lack of indication is an important point, which we will return to later.

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This may sound like an extremely pessimistic understanding of truth. However, in the following sections, I will explain how MahƗyƗna Buddhism works with a similar understanding of belief formation, while maintaining the existence of objective truth that humans can fully understand.

Upaya Upaya is a Sanskrit word that is often translated into skillful means. Upaya refers to a teaching method tailored to a specific student. A wise teacher may use this provisional method in order to present some greater truth. The purpose of using this particular method is so that the student will be inclined to see it as true. Importantly, this method is provisional. As the student advances to a deeper understanding of this greater truth, the student will recognize that this method was provided so that the student could begin to learn. In other words, the deeper the understanding of this presented truth becomes, the more the student recognizes that the method in which it was presented was just a provisional tool.6 Imagine you are talking to your six-year-old niece. She wants to know why she cannot hit Billy and steal his candy. As her wise teacher, you could attempt to explain some complex ethical system that would ultimately result in the conclusion that she can should not hit Billy and steal his candy. However, this will probably not appeal to her six-year-old mindset. So, recognizing her mindset, you instead explain this by telling her to imagine she was Billy, and someone hit her and took her candy. If this doesn’t feel nice to her, then she should not do this to Billy. Your niece can understand this presentation of your greater truth, i.e. don’t hit people to steal their candy, and goes merrily on her way. As she gets older and begins to have a deeper understanding of ethics, she will recognize that the way you presented this truth may not have really been sufficient for capturing the complexity of the situation. She will eventually recognize that your skillful means helped her understand some element of this greater truth. Ultimately it was this first glimpse that led her to her current deeper understanding.7

How Exactly Does Upaya Work? Let us start by looking closely at what upaya requires. First, we need a wise teacher.8 This wise teacher must know a lot about the ideas that he or she desires to present to the student. He or she must also know something about the student, and the student’s relationship to this new idea. Since the

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teacher is working to help this student understand, it seems reasonable to say that the teacher believes this greater truth will benefit the student. Given that the teacher wants the student to benefit from this greater truth, the teacher will proceed to present the new ideas in such a way that the relationship between the student and the new ideas will be amenable to the student absorbing the greater truth. As we can see, the teacher plays a very important role in upaya. The teacher knows some greater truth, as well as the student’s relationship to this idea and how to best present this truth for the benefit of the student. The student’s ability to receive this greater truth depends to a great extent on the abilities of the teacher.

Belief Formation I want to argue that upaya works with a conception of belief formation similar to that of Pragmatism. The pragmatic picture of belief formation is essentially this: at any given moment we have a set of old ideas in our minds. When a new idea is presented to us, we will look to our old ideas and analyze the relationship between the two. If the new idea is incompatible with our old ideas, or requires too much radical change to be absorbed, we dismiss it as false. Pragmatic belief formation explains in detail the relationship between the student and the student’s acceptance of new ideas. Now we can say that the wise teacher will have some knowledge of the student’s old set of ideas. The teacher may then present the new ideas in such a way that the new ideas will not appear radically incompatible or require any drastic change to the student’s old set of ideas. It is important to note that pragmatic belief formation, unlike upaya, does not require a teacher. I am not arguing that these two concepts require the same elements or function in the same way. I am arguing that these two concepts, pragmatic belief formation and upaya, are consistent. My goal here has been to clarify how, when brought together, they offer a more complete understanding of human belief formation. In the following sections I will show the implications this has for our understanding of objective truth.

Upaya, Ultimate Reality, and Pragmatism Pragmatic belief formation and the MahƗyƗna Buddhist concept of upaya, as I have described them, agree on the process of belief formation. I will now turn to the issue of fully understanding objective truth. James

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holds that objective truth simply does not exist. Even if it does exist, it seems that pragmatic belief formation presents a serious threat to the possibility of fully understanding objective truth. However, MahƗyƗna Buddhism holds that this is a real possibility for all humans. I will now explain the overall picture I want to present. In the following sections I will closely examine the components of this picture. Upaya is used by a wise teacher with a specific final goal in mind. The final goal of upaya is to help the individual eventually understand the objective nature of reality. This is known as Ultimate Reality. Ultimate Reality is not dependent on a particular individual’s set of ideas. It is described as the true nature of reality. Since the final goal of upaya is to convey Ultimate Reality, it must be possible for an individual to obtain an understanding of Ultimate Reality. Within Buddhism, obtaining a complete understanding of Ultimate Reality is equivalent to Enlightenment. Reaching Enlightenment is a significant experience, such that anyone who experiences it will recognize it. The MahƗyƗna Buddhist concept of upaya works with the pragmatic theory of belief formation, with the final goal of helping individuals to fully understand objective truth or Ultimate Reality.9

Upaya’s Final Goal In MahƗyƗna Buddhism all sentient beings have the potential to escape samsara. Wise teachers within MahƗyƗna Buddhism vow to work for the benefit of all sentient beings. Since it is beneficial for sentient beings to escape samsara, the teacher will do what they can to help individuals escape. The way one escapes samsara is through understanding Ultimate Reality. The wise teacher may not yet have a complete understanding of Ultimate Reality, but can still share what knowledge they have with other sentient beings. Upaya is the method by which the wise teacher may convey this knowledge. This is done for the benefit of all sentient beings. Upon initially learning of upaya, one may think it rather manipulative. One can view upaya as a teacher manipulating the student to simply agree with the teacher. It looks as though the teacher can somewhat underhandedly present the information in such a way to make the student come to agree with it. Although the concept of upaya taken in isolation may look somewhat manipulative it is important to note that the concept of upaya does not stand alone. Andrew Mcgarrity notes this point, “there are certain dangers in over-emphasizing the concept of upaya in isolation.”10 Michael Pye argues that “It is beyond argument that insight and skilful means are

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most intimately related.”11 Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine what it means to say that skilful means and insight are related, it is important to note that upaya does not exist in isolation in MahƗyƗna Buddhist philosophy.

Ultimate Reality as Objective Truth William James captures the problem of pragmatic belief formation and the existence of objective truth in this sentiment, “Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts placed no role whatever, is nowhere to be found.”12 In the Buddhist system, beings who have reached Enlightenment have discovered purely objective truth. To reach Enlightenment means to understand the true nature of reality. Ultimate Reality is a truth irrespective of human satisfaction in marrying old ideas with new ones.13 In other words, Ultimate Reality is not dependent on any individual’s set of ideas. Ultimate Reality is the true nature of reality independently of how well any particular individual understands or agrees that this is true. This point is quite clear when one considers how difficult it is to fully understand Ultimate Reality. It is an extremely long and complex process to reach full understanding. In MahƗyƗna Buddhism, there are many different ways one can pursue this full understanding. In tantric practice an individual may reach this full understanding within one lifetime; however, most forms of practice require one to work diligently for lifetimes. Nevertheless, within MahƗyƗna philosophy, no matter what level of understanding a particular individual has achieved, the current nature of reality is the same. In Buddhism, one is striving to fully understand Ultimate Reality. Through this complicated process an individual may know the phrase “Ultimate Reality is the true nature of reality,” but this is not the same as fully understanding this idea. One may even recognize that the nature of reality is always Ultimate Reality, but not fully understand what that means. Ultimate Reality is always the true nature of reality. Therefore, it is impossible for a particular individual’s set of ideas to influence this claim. No matter how much or how little a particular individual understands Ultimate Reality, it is still true. Therefore, one can describe Ultimate Reality as objective truth.

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The Importance of Full Understanding One of the main struggles with pragmatic belief formation is the lack of ability to recognize when, if ever, an individual believes something that is objectively true. Due to the way in which we form beliefs, it seems impossible to gain any knowledge of our beliefs in relation to anything “objective,” if it were to exist. However, this is not a problem for Buddhist philosophy. So far in this essay I have been using the phrase “full understanding” of Ultimate Reality. I would like to clarify what exactly I mean by this, and why it is important. Along the path to Enlightenment, an individual will gain little insights into Ultimate Reality. However, one has not actually reached Enlightenment until one has a full understanding of Ultimate Reality. The only beings who have full understanding of Ultimate Reality are Buddhas. The moment one achieves this full understanding is the moment one becomes a Buddha. Full understanding consists of two things. First, one must hold some set of beliefs. Second, one must know that this set of beliefs is objectively true. In Buddhism, when one has a full understanding of Ultimate Reality, that individual becomes a Buddha. When one becomes a Buddha, it is a momentous occasion. Although I am not qualified to explain the experience of becoming a Buddha, I surmise that one will not fail to recognize the moment of Buddhahood. In other words, one will not become a Buddha and not notice the change. This is an important point. In pragmatic belief formation it seems impossible for an individual to reach full understanding, i.e. hold a belief and know that this belief is the objective truth. In Buddhist philosophy, it seems that, while using the same kind of view of belief formation as pragmatism, an individual may reach full understanding. Through upaya an individual may reach full understanding of Ultimate Reality. Previously in this paper I have argued that one can describe Ultimate Reality as objective truth. In the following section I will summarize the relationship between Ultimate Reality, Buddhahood, Pragmatic Belief Formation, and objective truth.

Implications Upaya is a tool that helps sentient beings begin to gain some understanding of Ultimate Reality. As I have argued, it functions by taking a student’s old set of ideas and presenting new ideas such that the student will be inclined to recognize the new idea as true. This is consistent with

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pragmatic belief formation. Pragmatic belief formation states that when presented with a new idea, we will look to our old set of ideas. We will embrace new ideas that are not radically incompatible, or cause too much adjustment to the old ideas as true. New ideas only become a part of our set of true beliefs if they stand in the proper relationship to our old ideas. Upaya recognizes this, and uses it to help sentient beings start the process of understanding Ultimate Reality. Due to the role of Upaya in MahƗyƗna Buddhism, it is possible that the tradition holds the pragmatic system of belief formation. Unlike William James, this system has the additional component of each individual having the potential to fully understand Ultimate Reality. In this paper, I have claimed that Ultimate Reality does not depend on a particular individual’s set of ideas. Ultimate Reality can be described as objective truth. One of the difficulties of pragmatic belief formation is that it seems impossible for an individual to believe any kind of objective truth, and if an individual did believe something that happened to match with objective truth, he or she would not know it. However, MahƗyƗna Buddhism is a system that maintains the existence and potential for humans to fully understand objective truth. The MahƗyƗna concept of upaya sheds some light on William James’ pessimism about objective truth. If my argument is successful, one can maintain the pragmatic theory of belief formation without necessarily claiming that there is no objective truth, or that if objective truth does exist, human beings cannot understand it. Although one does not fully understand objective truth until something as radical as becoming a Buddha, it is important to recognize that this is held as a real possibility for all sentient beings. It may take lifetimes, but it is possible for humans to fully understand objective truth.

Notes  1

James, William, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis, and William James. Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking; The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3537. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Pye, Michael. Skilful Means: A Concept in MahƗyƗna Buddhism. (London: Duckworth 1978), 1.

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7 This situation is slightly different than what is typically thought of when discussing upaya. A six-year-old is still developing cognitively, so there are many different things affecting her mindset; however, this example illustrates how the exchange between teacher and student works. 8 Upaya is most frequently associated with Bodhisattvas. For the purposes of this essay, I have avoided any metaphysical complications that Bodhisattvas may introduce. One does not necessarily need to be as advanced as a Bodhisattva to use upaya, so I have set this issue aside. 9 In Buddhist philosophy, when one is working to fully understand objective truth, one must first gain a full understanding of conventional reality. It seems that upaya is using some of the elements of conventional reality to help us achieve a full understanding of ultimate reality. 10 Mcgarrity, Andrew. "Using Skillful Means Skilfully: The Buddhist Doctrine of Upaya and Its Methodological Implications" in Journal of Religious History, 33(2) (2009), 198-214. 11 Pye, Skilful Means, 1. 12 James, Pragmatism, 37. 13 I make no attempt in this paper to define Ultimate Reality. I am by no means qualified to explain what, even vaguely, Ultimate Reality is. The important point for this paper is that within MahƗyƗna Buddhism, Ultimate Reality is not dependent on a particular individual’s set of ideas. That is why I rely on the phrase “Ultimate Reality is the true nature of reality,” which shows that Ultimate Reality is always the true nature of reality.

CHAPTER EIGHT AESTHETIC ATTITUDE: FULL ATTENTION NOT NEEDED LELAND HARPER

Jerome Stolnitz understands that, as a branch of philosophy, any particular view within aesthetics is not necessarily going to provide an objectively true set of answers. Rather, he recognizes that the discipline is a competitive exchange of ideas, each of which can serve to advance our understanding of the concepts at play.1 In light of this, in his book Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism, Stolnitz puts forth his own unique account of how we ought to position ourselves with regard to background knowledge and external information, in order to truly grasp the aesthetic value of any piece of art. This view can serve as one important voice in the discussion of what kind of information, and how much of that same information, ought to be taken into account when evaluating the aesthetic value of a piece of art. That is to say, does the fact that the Mona Lisa was painted in the 16th century rather than in the 18th century have any bearing on the aesthetic value of the painting? Or does the fact that Jay-Z was raised in New York give his music more aesthetic value than if he had been raised in Miami? If there is a difference, and if these differences are relevant or irrelevant, then why is that the case? Stolnitz attempts to shed some light on these kinds of questions, differentiating the types of information that are relevant or irrelevant in making such judgements. Stolnitz aims to describe our aesthetic perception of the world by means of our aesthetic attitude towards it. That is to say, we can only take in the aesthetic value of an object if our attitude toward it is in the appropriate state. The version of the aesthetic attitude that Stolnitz presents has not been received without its share of criticisms and comparisons. Often tied in with other accounts of the aesthetic attitude that seem to take direction from Immanuel Kant’s account of reflective judgment,2 including Edward Bullough’s account of physical distance and Vincent Thomas’ distinction

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between appearance and reality, Stolnitz’s account of the aesthetic attitude is the focus of George Dickie’s article “All Aesthetic Attitude Theories Fail: The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.”3 In this particular article, Dickie refers to the entire concept of the aesthetic attitude as a “myth... [that] is no longer useful and in fact misleads aesthetic theory.”4 The aesthetic attitude, as the name suggests, is an approach to the way that we look at things when we want to do so from an aesthetic standpoint. It differs from our general, passive, non-aesthetic observation and awareness of the world in that, as Stolnitz claims, we generally see objects of the world in terms of their potential or actual usefulness.5 When examining objects aesthetically, however, we must do so with an aesthetic attitude, which Stolnitz defines as “disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of the object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone.”6 The aim of taking on this attitude is to be able to separate ourselves from our previous knowledge or preconceived notions regarding the object of our attention. That is to say, we ought to focus on the object itself, rather than the information regarding it. Creating such a separation between our selves and our background knowledge will allow us to appreciate the object, not in terms of its use from a practical standpoint, but in terms of its aesthetic merit. We must be open to receiving the qualities of the object in an aesthetic manner, and not simply dwell on the emotions that it evokes within us, the memories that it conjures up, or some other characteristics that are not directly contained within the object itself, for all of these things will only serve to alter and ultimately inhibit us from enjoying the object aesthetically. Included within Stolnitz’s account of aesthetic attention is the notion that in order to appreciate an object aesthetically, we must give it our full attention. I will go on to discuss this portion of Stolnitz’s view in more detail throughout this essay, as I explain why I do not think that we ought necessarily to give our full attention to some object in order to appreciate it on aesthetic terms, and that there are certain cases in which it is precisely our lack of attention that allows us to recognize the aesthetic merits of particular objects. Stolnitz begins by providing an account of how we perceive the world through our senses, discussing the importance of aesthetic value itself, as well as offering an account of why he feels that aesthetic awareness is significant and worthy of discussion and further thought. For the purposes of this paper, none of the above will be addressed at great length. This paper will focus on one important aspect of Stolnitz’s account of aesthetic attitude, which he refers to as aesthetic relevance. The notion of aesthetic relevance ties in very closely with the aspect of Stolnitz’s view, mentioned earlier, that the object of our attention needs to be given our full attention,

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in that it sets out for us exactly what it is that we can direct our attention towards if we hope to appreciate an object aesthetically, or perhaps more importantly, what we cannot direct our attention towards if we hope to appreciate an object aesthetically. Aesthetic relevance refers to the relevance of all of the ideas, emotions and knowledge about or pertaining to the object of our aesthetic attention. This is not to be confused with knowledge that can be gained through the object. Rather, it is knowledge that is already within us before we ever come in contact with the object in question. That is to say, this knowledge exists completely independently of, and prior to, the subject’s encounter with the object of aesthetic attention. Some examples of this kind of historical knowledge, if we limit our discussion to works of art, include the nationality of the artist, the cost of the material used to produce the object, what influenced the production of this particular piece or work, how this piece of work has influenced other artists in the past, and so on. Often, it is the case that our perception and overall attitude towards a particular object will be largely determined by our background knowledge and experiences of the past, and this is precisely that from which Stolnitz wants us to disconnect when we attempt to engage with something aesthetically. These ideas will hinder our ability to view the object in itself, and prevent us from viewing the aesthetic value of the object, since we will be more focused on things related to the ideas that we already had within us, and perhaps cause us to slip back into our natural tendency of viewing the object in terms of practical use. If we are not able to create some distance between our selves and our background knowledge, then our engagement with the object will always reflect some shades of judgement based on factors that have been imported by us, which are irrelevant to the piece itself. That is to say, our focus will be, at least partially, drawn to aspects of the piece that are not necessarily intended to be part of the piece. Bits of knowledge or assumptions that are not inherent to the piece, but rather are imported by us, will detract from our ability to view the piece as it is. Stolnitz, however, does acknowledge that not all background knowledge is necessarily detrimental to the aesthetic process, and recognizes that there are cases in which our attention to this background knowledge can be valuable. Stolnitz notes three cases in which knowledge is not necessarily aesthetically irrelevant, and may actually enhance the aesthetic value of the object of our attention. Background knowledge can prove to be aesthetically relevant under the conditions that (1) this knowledge does not damage the aesthetic attention toward the object, if (2) it has to do with the overall meaning of the work of art, and (3) when it enhances the overall aesthetic experience of the object.7,8

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Stolnitz demonstrates that external factors can enhance the aesthetic value of certain objects by citing a psychological study performed by Edward Bullough. This study sought to investigate the ways in which people respond aesthetically when exposed to different colors that are accompanied by certain emotions or memories that are linked to the observer’s past.9 Furthermore, the study sought to determine whether or not all associations could reasonably be deemed illegitimate with regard to aesthetic experience.10 The results of the study showed that, while some external factors drew attention away from the object itself, resulting in the subject’s inability to aesthetically perceive the color, there were also a series of external factors that, if given the observer’s attention, complimented the aesthetic value of the object itself. These findings make the case that, as Stolnitz argues, not all external factors to the object are necessarily disruptive of its aesthetic value.11 Complimentary to the point that not all external objects are necessarily disruptive to the aesthetic perception of another object, the study was able to show that there are cases (though they may be rare) in which external factors could be used in conjunction with a particular object in order to aid in the perception of the aesthetic value of the object being viewed. In other words, it is possible to have a secondary object that does not completely draw the attention of the observer to the extent that it detracts from another object, but compliments whatever aesthetic features happen to be of concern in its counterpart. If it is the case that our background knowledge does not fall within one of the three categories discussed by Stolnitz that would allow it to be deemed aesthetically relevant and consequently render it something to which we are able to give our attention, then it is predictably determined to be irrelevant information. If the information is irrelevant, in that it does not contribute to the aesthetic value of the object in question, then the object of our attention must be admired independently from that background knowledge and from all other imported characteristics, physical and nonphysical, internal and external. In order to view the work aesthetically, we must become totally engaged with the object, and disregard any external thoughts pertaining to use, explanation, potential, or any other sort of criterion by which we may be tempted to judge it. Stolnitz points out that many, if not all, of the facts regarding the object that we possess are not embodied within the aesthetic object itself.12 As such, if we are trying to view a work aesthetically, we cannot import and apply anything, or more specifically, give attention to anything, that is not in the nature of the object already. Importing such external characteristics that are not already within the work of art simply results in focus being drawn away from the piece of art itself and onto the external, imported characteristics. This, in

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turn, may result in drawing attention away from the intended aesthetic characteristics of the piece. A central problem with Stolnitz’s accounts of aesthetic attention and aesthetic relevance is that, in most cases, it is necessary that we focus our attention exclusively and fully on the object in question in order to appreciate its aesthetic value. It does not seem to me that it would be entirely implausible to view an object peripherally and still appreciate its aesthetic value, if not fully, at least partially. Furthermore, it seems as if Stolnitz thinks that every object, or at least every work of art, holds a certain level of aesthetic value. This raises the question of whether aesthetic value is merely something that is either possessed or lacked by an object, or if it can be perceived as on a continuum, with some objects more aesthetically valuable than others. If the latter were true, then it would not be absurd to think that we would be able to appreciate the aesthetic value of a particular object without giving it our full attention. We can imagine a situation in which a very highly respected art critic is spending the day in an art gallery with his family, enjoying the many paintings around him, when out of the corner of his eye he catches a glimpse of the most amazing painting he has ever seen. He pauses for a moment without movement, to simply take in the aesthetic value of the painting from his current position. To him, this painting, in this moment, holds a very high degree of aesthetic value, and while he is not able to identify all of the minute details of the painting, such as a wide variety of the fine lines, some of the subtle changes in color, or the overall theme of what is being depicted in the painting, he is able to have a general sense of how the bold shapes and lines interact with each other, and how some of the vivid colors complement one another. Following that moment, he turns to fully give his acute, critical attention to the painting in hopes of truly uncovering what it is about this painting that makes it so radiant and alluring, and to dissect the more subtle aspects of the painting that he had surely missed from his previous position, but finds that it is no longer as aesthetically pleasing as it was when it was merely in his peripheral vision. Given all of his attention, recognizing the fine lines and subtle uses of color, the painting is still a wonderful piece, but it now seems to be missing something, as if something has been lost in the simple addition of attention. For fear that he has lost the aesthetic value that was once there, the critic turns back to his previous position so that the painting is once again in his peripheral vision and presented to him in a more general sense, and once again, he is in awe of the aesthetic value of the painting, as all of the aesthetic value that he had previously enjoyed from that same position comes rushing back.

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In the case of this critic in the art gallery, it does not appear to be the case that the observer is missing something, or that a focus on irrelevant background knowledge has rendered him incapable of truly seeing that aesthetic value in the painting. Rather, it is through the deliberate act of not giving the piece his total attention that the aesthetic value of it becomes clear, or even present. We can further imagine that it is not the case that he is focusing on some other painting, or perhaps that there is lighting that somehow compliments the painting in question, but rather that it simply appears to him to hold more aesthetic value when it is not given his full attention than when it is. To be absolutely sure that it is not the case that there are complimentary factors present within the environment of the painting in question, we can further imagine that there is no surrounding environment to focus on; it is simply darkness, or whiteness, or some arbitrary color and nothing else. Stolnitz could of course argue that whatever color happens to be in the surrounding environment still serves as a compliment to the painting in question, in that now the scope of the work of art is simply broader than was initially thought. That is to say, the aesthetic value is not solely within the painting, but within the entire environment of the background color of the walls that the painting is sitting on, the bench slightly to the left of the painting, the other people in the gallery, and so on. Stolnitz could argue that all of these things immediately surrounding the painting combine to comprise the object of our aesthetic attention, and that attributing the aesthetic value solely to the painting would be a mistake. On this account, the aesthetic value would be held within the entire perceptual range of the observer rather than in one individual piece, and what we are really finding aesthetically valuable is the entirety of the area, rather than just one aspect of the room that we mistakenly think ought to hold the aesthetic value. We may be able to address this possible objection from Stolnitz by adding several more details to the situation in which our fictional art critic happens to find himself. Now, not only is he in the same room in the same art gallery experiencing the aesthetic value of one particular work of art while giving it only a minute portion of his attention, just as before, but now we can also imagine that the environment in which the painting is kept is constantly changing. Everything in the room is changing, not only instantaneously, but arbitrarily as well. The furniture, the color of the paint on the walls, the people coming and going, the soft music playing, the pieces of art surrounding the painting in question; all of it is constantly changing. The only things that remain static are the art critic and the painting in question. In this case would it still be plausible for Stolnitz to say that the aesthetic value that we perceive is really the sum total of all of

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the things around us, rather than in the painting, which itself only warrants a minimal degree of our attention? I think that this proves to be a case in which the explanation that Stolnitz gives, of the aesthetic value being held within our entire perceptual field rather than contained in a single painting that happens to fall within that perceptual field, does not hold. This is largely due to the arbitrary nature of the variations taking place within the room, for there seems to be something counterintuitive to ascribing aesthetic value to a work of art that has been composed in an arbitrary manner. It could be plausible that some of the instantiations of the everchanging background carry with them some level of aesthetic value, but it surely could not be said that all of them do. It could be the case that, at certain times, the art critic is mistakenly attributing aesthetic value of the entire situation solely to the painting, but this too would provide a problem for Stolnitz and his requirement for full attention in order to appreciate aesthetic value. If it is the case that there happens to be an instance of aesthetic value that is held within one of the randomly and arbitrarily changing environments, it would seem that Stolnitz could argue that this aesthetic value found within the perceptual field could be mistakenly attributed solely to the unchanging painting. But again, this reply from Stolnitz would not hold, because this situation would just be a case in which the aesthetic value of an object would be perceived by the observer without giving that object his full attention, in that the environment (which is the object in this case) is so rapidly changing that it does not allow for one to fully focus attention on it. With the speed of the changes of the environment, it would simply be impossible to be able to give it our full attention so as to fully appreciate the aesthetic value, as prescribed by Stolnitz. What the critic would be experiencing is a fleeting sense of aesthetic value, one upon which he cannot really reflect, because just as soon as it was there, it has now vanished. In the event that there is any aesthetic value that the critic feels he has with regard to the room, it would be the aesthetic value of the idea of the room in his mind, or the memory of a past composition. Either of these two would be largely fabricated by or held within himself, in that there was not nearly enough time to construct a complete and accurate rendering of the room. Having come and gone so quickly, it does not seem as if this particular instance of aesthetic value could be expanded to cover one particular static painting within that ever-changing environment. Perhaps this could be the reason why we would not generally be able to claim that the backgrounds in various scenes of various movies carry with them any level of aesthetic value, since the focus on them is often just made in passing, not giving us

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enough time to adequately appreciate it. Of course, this is a question best saved for another occasion. So, if Stolnitz is to claim, in this situation, that the aesthetic value of the entire situation has been wrongly attributed to the peripheral painting, then this would commit him to the idea that full attention is not necessary to perceive aesthetic value, because there is no way that an adequate amount of attention could have been paid to the rapidly-changing environment so as to justify Stolnitz’s requirement for full attention. A second way to address the amended example with regard to the possible objection from Stolnitz is to say that, while it is possible that there are certain instances in which the environment as a whole serves as an object with aesthetic value, if the environment is constantly changing, then it cannot be the case that every variation of the environment holds aesthetic value. There seems to be no reason that Stolnitz would refute this point, because it is very plausible that there would be cases in which the environment of the painting could be viewed altogether as aesthetically valuable in itself, or complimentary to the painting, but there would certainly be even a minimal number of cases in which the environment would contribute absolutely no aesthetic value. Again, in this paper I am not concerned with what features constitute the presence or degree of aesthetic value, as I am solely concerned with whether or not it is present in these different hypothetical situations. If Stolnitz does accept that there will be certain environments that have a high level of aesthetic value, some environments that have a low level of aesthetic value, and some environments that have absolutely no aesthetic value, then it would have to follow that our art critic’s perception of the aesthetic value within the painting would have to be in constant flux, in tune with the constant flux of the aesthetic value of each different environment. If the aesthetic value of the environment was incorrectly attributed to the painting, then the critic would have to know or feel the difference in aesthetic value of the painting, but he does not. The aesthetic value of the painting remains constant despite the changes of everything else around it. Because of that, it cannot possibly be the case that the critic is confusing the aesthetic value of the room with the aesthetic value of the painting, because while the room is constantly being arbitrarily changed, the only things that remain static are the painting, the critic, and the level of aesthetic value that is being perceived by the critic. As such, Stolnitz still does not seem to be able to account for the case described in our hypothetical situation. On Stolnitz’s account of how we ought to recognize aesthetic value, it does not seem that we are able to take into account works of art that are intended to serve as “background art,” or those that simply appear to

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maintain their highest degree of aesthetic value when not given full attention. Perhaps at this point, the scope of the artwork would simply broaden to include anything and everything that takes our attention away from the piece in question, ultimately creating one large piece containing many other pieces within it, all helping to enhance the aesthetic value of one. However, I am not sure that this is a common vision that artists set out to achieve when creating their works, or that it is even plausible, especially if we import it into an example such as the one we have been discussing. In the case of the ever-changing room, it would be possible to claim that it is not solely the painting that is the work of art, but rather it is the whole environment in which the painting is found that is the work of art (I have touched on something very close to this idea in the previous paragraph). While we could reasonably say that each variation of the room is its own individual exemplification of a work of art, it would not be reasonable to say that each variation would be equally as aesthetically valuable as the last. As such, if we are to return to our discussion of the single painting again, the aesthetic value of that painting would too have to fluctuate just as the aesthetic value of the overall perceptual field changes, but this is not the case in the thought experiment. And if it is the case that each variant holds the same level of aesthetic value, and the only thing common in each variant is the painting, then could we not say that it is the painting that determines the aesthetic value? And if so, can we just essentially eliminate everything else, and simply view the aesthetic value as contained wholly within that painting? In order to maintain a portion of his account of aesthetic attention, perhaps Stolnitz needs to re-examine how he describes the need to devote our full attention to a given piece of work in order to appreciate its true aesthetic value. As we have seen, there do seem to be cases in which an individual can appreciate the aesthetic value of a piece of art without giving it his full attention. Furthermore, as we have seen, there may be cases in which the lack of full attention enhances the aesthetic value of a certain work of art. As such, there is a key flaw in Stolnitz’s requirement of full attention that is included within his overall account of aesthetic attention.

Notes  1

Jerome Stolnitz, “Introduction,” in Aesthetics, ed. Jerome Stolnitz (New York, NY: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), 1-20. 2 “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified February 13, 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/

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 3

George Dickie, “All Aesthetic Attitude Theories Fail: The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani and Ronald Roblin (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 342-55. 4 Dickie, “All Aesthetic Attitude Theories,” 342. 5 Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticisms: A Critical Introduction (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 33. 6 Ibid., 35. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 This is another aspect where the Kant’s influence of distinguishing between judgments of taste and judgements of beauty can be seen. This is a distinction between an object’s aesthetic value and that same object’s instrumental value. “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology.” 9 Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy, 54. 10 Ibid., 54. 11 Ibid., 54. 12 Ibid., 53.

CHAPTER NINE EVANESCENCE AND PERSISTENCE: TOWARDS A BUDDHIST THEORY OF PERSISTENCE OVER TIME ITSUKI HAYASHI

If we are asked how things persist over time, most of us would say that they persist by being numerically identical to themselves over time. Numerical identity is significant because many things persist over changes of quality. This table might have a few more scratches than it did yesterday, so this table today and the table yesterday are qualitatively distinct. But we can still say that it nevertheless has persisted, because it has remained numerically identical to itself, has been one and the same thing over time. In contemporary metaphysics, there are a few philosophers who claim that things do not remain numerically identical over time, but still manage to persist over time. This view is called the stage theory of persistence or exdurantism.1 According to stage theory, every existing thing is a stage— existing for a very short time—but stages can be said to persist by being in some persistence-constitutive relation with other stages. So, this table is an evanescent entity, and is not numerically identical with the table yesterday, but can be said to have persisted since yesterday insofar as it is suitably related to yesterday’s table-stage. Among Indian philosophers of the past, there were Buddhists who denied numerical identity over time.2 According to them, the nature of existence is to perish immediately (k‫܈‬a۬abha۪ga) after its conception; but each momentary thing produces its replica into the next moment so as to make for a kind of succession or “stream” (santƗna). Therefore, the Buddhists can be construed as upholding a version of stage theory, where the persistence-constitutive relation among momentary entities is some special causal relation. However, the Buddhist doctrine contains one serious internal problem, which must be resolved before we can engage in

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a robust comparative discussion of Eastern and contemporary Western theories of persistence without numerical identity. The problem is that momentary entities do not endure long enough to interact with other entities. Many qualitative changes that occur in the world are outcomes of interaction among multiple entities. But the Buddhist doctrine seems to preclude this kind of possibility. Buddhists have offered answers to this problem, but they are not satisfactory. The goal of this paper is to provide a better answer, so that we can begin to consider the Buddhist stage theory as a viable theory of persistence. I will do this by determining the main flaw in two Buddhist answers to the problem of interaction, ĝƗntarak̎ita’s answer in his Tattvasaۨgraha and RatnakƯrti’s in AnvayƗtmika, and suggest a different account that does not contain that flaw. The upshot will be a revised notion of causal efficacy (arthakriyƗkƗritva) as the persistence-constitutive, or stream-forming, relation.

Buddhist Stage Theory K̎ăikavƗdins claim momentariness of all things by demonstrating that non-momentary things (i.e. things that remain identical to themselves over time) cannot consistently have causal efficacy (arthakriyƗkƗritva), which according to the Buddhist is definitive of existence. So, only momentary things can have causal efficacy, and therefore only momentary things can exist.3 In normal cases, momentary entities are said to be causally efficacious of producing their replicas in the next moment; that is why we do not normally see things instantaneously vanishing or undergoing radical changes.4 From this, we can extrapolate to say that a persisting thing is a causal nexus of causes and effects, which make up something like a stream (santƗna), as of a river whose water is replaced at each moment, yet appears to undergo no significant changes. So, this table is numerically distinct from the table yesterday, but there is persistence insofar as the table today is causally related to the table yesterday. Here we have the Buddhist version of stage theory: things persist by being stages (i.e. momentary entities) that are causally related to each other, and thereby constitute a stream. Two important remarks need to be made in this connection. First, strictly speaking we cannot say that things persist; instead we should say there is persistence, or several things are persistently related. As long as the above point is acknowledged, we can loosely speak of things persisting. In this paper I will not enumerate every reason to explain why we may use the loose way of speaking at all, but

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here is one reason: we speak loosely about persistence because it is convenient. It is more convenient to regard persistence as facts about singular subjects rather than either lacking a definite subject (as in “there is persistence”), or as a relational concept involving multiple subjects. Second, strictly speaking, streams do not exist. Only momentary stages can have causal efficacy, hence be real existents. The streams are like family trees. If we position family members vertically, with our ancestors and predecessors above and below, then we will come to have a family tree, but in this family tree there is no such thing as a tree existing alongside the family members that make it up. But it is useful to refer to family trees or lineage in appropriate circumstances. Likewise, the streams are unreal, but can be useful referents in certain circumstances; talking about the world in terms of persistence is one such circumstance. Hence we can loosely speak of streams as if they are persistent things.5 An immediate problem with the above formulation is that the causal relation criterion may be too wide. It might be the case that nicotine in lungs causes lung cancer, but we would not thereby say that nicotine persists as cancer cells. Perhaps this problem can be avoided through reference to what might be called “immanent causation,”6 as distinguished from non-immanent causation. Immanent causation would be the kind of causation that involves reproduction, or something like it. Non-immanent causation, on the other hand, would include causation that holds between nicotine and cancer. It can then be held that persistence obtains where stages are immanently causally related, while others do not constitute persistence. What, though, might be the basis of distinction between immanent and non-immanent causation? Katherine Hawley suggests that some nonsupervenient relation can be referred to. Mark Siderits suggests that the distinction can be made on the basis of the number of causal connections among the constituents of aggregate entities.7 If an aggregate in a moment is maximally causally connected to an aggregate in a succeeding moment, then it can count as a persistence-preserving causation, or in our current appellation, immanent causation. A nicotine compound is maximally causally related to a succeeding nicotine compound, so there is persistence. But the nicotine compound is not maximally causally related to the succeeding cancer cell, even though the latter is the proper effect of the former; in this case, there is no immanent causal relation, hence no persistence. Therefore, there are ways to distinguish between causal relations that are conducive to persistence and causal relations that are not. We will address this issue again later.

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A related problem concerns immanent causation that involves reproduction and qualitative change. The question of how some qualitative changes can come to be identified as involving immanent causation can be answered in the same way as in the previous paragraph. However, the question of how immanent causation can involve qualitative change poses a threatening problem for the Buddhist. If we are going to have a robust theory of persistence, our conclusion cannot be that persistence holds only when there is reproduction; we should be able to allow that persistence can involve qualitative change. Not many things, if any, remain qualitatively identical in every respect over time. Thus, it is important to allow logical room for immanent causation with qualitative change. Below, I will address this problem.

The Problem of Qualitative Change The following is a summary of the challenge posed by a TheravƗda Buddhist called Bhadanta Yogasena.8 He argues that it is empirically evident that many changes take place through interaction of multiple causal factors. For example, a seed would not produce a sprout unless various external conditions were met: sunlight, soil, water, etc. But if the Buddhist momentariness thesis is true, nothing exists long enough to interact with anything: a seed would fail to receive necessary nutrition from soil because it perishes immediately, and the soil would fail to provide nutrition to the seed during its meager lifetime. Therefore, if the momentariness thesis is true, then an unacceptable conclusion follows: there cannot be any qualitative change.9 Preclusion of qualitative change is already grave enough, but there is also the corollary that immanent change with qualitative change would also be impossible. Thus the Buddhist must give a satisfactory response to Yogasena’s criticism.

ĝƗntarakৢita’s Answer ĝƗntarak̎ita admits that momentary entities do not and cannot interact with other entities, so qualitative changes must occur in an entirely independent way. However, ĝƗntarak̎ita asserts that there still can be cooperation (sahakƗritva) among several entities in producing emergent effects. By “cooperation,” he means not mutual interaction but “production of efficacy for one effect” (ekƗrthakriyƗkƗritvam). To illustrate, this means that several entities independently produce their successors that are efficacious of producing one entity, so while in normal cases, causal series are such that A produces A’, B produces B’, etc., in

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cooperation, it is the case that A produces X, B produces X, etc., so that in the following moment, X emerges from each of the cooperating entities A, B, etc. By cooperation, it is said, multiple entities can independently coproduce one effect.10 What occasions cooperation? ĝƗntarak̎ita maintains that it happens in light of the principle of “proximity” (sannidhi) or of “approaching together” (upasarpa۬a).11 Entities that “approach together” cooperate so as to bring about some qualitative difference, and otherwise continue to reproduce themselves. So to take, for example, the production of a sprout, each seed-stage is only reproductively efficacious if all other relevant factors are present in proximity; but when they are proximately situated, the last stage of the seed-series produces a seed-stage that is efficacious of a sprout-stage instead of another seed-stage. The simultaneous soil-stage also produces a successor that is efficacious of sprout-stage, and similarly with water and other factors. In the following moment, the relevant causal factors all co-produce a single effect, namely the sprout. Accordingly, only proximate (and of course simultaneous) entities cooperate with each other. Therefore, ĝƗntarak̎ita’s position is that cooperation results in each relevant causal factor’s producing a new entity that is efficacious of one and the same result. There is an empirical problem with this answer. It is often the case that there is a clear distinction between main cause (upƗdƗna hetu) and cooperative causes (sahakƗrin) in qualitative change. In the sprout case, we want to say that the seed is the main cause of the sprout, while other relevant causes are cooperative. ĝƗntarak̎ita’s position is that the direct cause of the sprout is the collection of all relevant factors, thus the seed is no more central to the production of the sprout than any other causal factor. RatnakƯrti offers an account that accommodates the distinction.

RatnakƯrti’s Answer RatnakƯrti agrees with ĝƗntarak̎ita on the points that, although each momentary entity is productive independently, there is nevertheless cooperation that is occasioned in accordance with the principle of proximity. According to RatnakƯrti, however, a stage within a given stream is modified so as to acquire some causal power (ati‫܈‬aya) from proximate entities. The process is cumulative, such that each member of the stream gradually becomes modified. For instance, a seed-stage in proximity to a simultaneously occurent water-stage gives rise to a succeeding seed-stage that possesses some water-related power. In some later moment, the seedstage with water-power in proximity to a concurrent soil-stage gives rise to

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a seed-stage equipped with water-power and soil-power, and so forth until all necessary efficacies to produce a sprout are possessed by a single entity. Upon the acquisition of all relevant efficacies, the last seed-stage yields an emergent sprout-stage in the following moment. RatnakƯrti’s answer makes a clear distinction between main cause and cooperative causes. It is the seed that possesses the power to produce the sprout, and all other relevant entities function only to give occasion for the seed-stream to develop the required powers.12

The Similar Move and Its Implausibility Both ĝƗntarak̎ita and RatnakƯrti claim that causal efficacy is independently but cooperatively modified when relevant entities stand in proximity. Momentary entities are reproductively efficacious in normal cases, that is, when no cooperation takes place. On the other hand, momentary entities are non-reproductively efficacious in cooperation cases. Thus modification consists in a momentary entity’s being reproductively efficacious to its successor having efficacy for qualitative difference. However, both answers beg the question: why do causal efficacies undergo modification only when relevant entities are proximate? Moreover, it is unclear in both of them how reproductively efficacious entities may give rise to another entity that has different causal efficacy. In response to this, ĝƗntarak̎ita and RatnakƯrti say that that is the mystery of causation, and we should just accept it.13 I agree that causation cannot become entirely transparent, but it seems to me that the call for blind acceptance here is a concession that, after all, the notions of independent causation, cooperation, and modification are just not coherent. Moreover, in fact, the Buddhist cannot legitimately resort to mystery in causation, since there really is no room for mystery. If a given entity has modified causal efficacy (i.e. efficacy for qualitative difference) then its cause is either reproductively efficacious or has modified causal efficacy; there is no room for a mysterious third possibility. If the cause is reproductively efficacious, then because the replica has modified causal efficacy, it also has the modified causal efficacy, in which case its effect should not be its replica, but a qualitatively different entity. Thus, this option should be dropped. If the cause has modified causal efficacy, then it has modified causal efficacy by virtue of the modified causal efficacy of its own causal precedent. In this way, the explanation of modified causal efficacy can be had by tracing down the causal chain, though if it turns out that the causal chain is without beginning, we would not reach a final

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explanation. Regardless, an important point is that the explanation has nothing to do with proximate entities at any time. That certain qualitative change occurs at a given time and place is entirely determined by direct causes and is predetermined from the beginning of the particular chain of entities, and the fact that the same type of change occurs only with certain other entities in proximity is completely fortuitous. Simply put, the Buddhist positions thus far considered commit the Buddhist to hard determinism, which is incompatible with mystery. What can we do? I think that by getting rid of the idea of modification, we can have a better answer to the present problem. Instead of modification, we can have fusion.

Fusion Theory Instead of trying to explain how causal efficacies might get modified from one momentary entity to its causal successor in an independent yet cooperative way, I want to propose that causal efficacies never get modified, so that each momentary entity is always only reproductively efficacious. How, then, can qualitative changes occur? The answer is that they occur through fusion. Proximate causal efficacies fuse with each other such that there emerges a new quality, which is not directly caused by either of the causes, just as when colors like blue and red are mixed to give rise to purple. To take the example of the sprout, the seed series does not generate a seed-stage that is efficacious of the sprout—each seed-stage is always only reproductively efficacious. However, this reproductive efficacy of the seed fuses with other efficacies in proximity, such as the reproductive efficacy of the soil, water and others, so that there emerges a mixture that is a qualitatively different entity—the sprout. The previous theories include a phase in which one of the causes, or all of them, acquire efficacy for qualitative change; the present theory skips this phase because it is deeply problematic. It does not need to explain how reproductive entities might independently but cooperatively generate entities with some innovative productivity; everything is always only reproductively efficacious, yet innovation is possible. An entity is efficacious with respect to its replica. However, when other entities are proximate, the reproduction is mutually misdirected so that something other than an exact replica of each result. This is how qualitative difference emerges. From the side of the emergent effect, the mutual misdirection among the causes can be called cooperation.

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Proximity and Fusion Here is an important problem for fusion theory. It holds that proximity occasions the generation of novelty. If persistence is held to obtain between stages that are causally related to each other, we must accept that, for instance, a parcel of air situated next to a table in one moment persists into a subsequent table. By virtue of spatial proximity, the causal efficacies of the air and the table undergo fusion, so as to give rise to the subsequent table. So we should say that the air persists as a table. Similarly, we should say that the table persists as air, since spatial proximity is a symmetrical relation. But tables do not persist as air, so fusion theory is a bad theory of persistence. It is too wide. Moreover, there is this other problem: we normally say that a rock persists until it is, for instance, pulverized; after that the rock is no more. However, on fusion theory we should say that the rock persists, because the last rock-stage produces something, and to that extent persistence is continued. So, on fusion theory, everything persists eternally, which would render persistence an empty concept. Fusion theory makes persistence too long. To add to all of this, we may recall why RatnakƯrti advanced his explanation of qualitative difference in place of ĝƗntarak̎ita’s. We needed to distinguish between main cause and cooperative causes. So there is also the problem of no priority. In sum, fusion theory faces multiple grave problems: problems of “too long”, “too wide”, and “no priority.”

First Attempt to Save Fusion Theory: Homogeneity Causally related stages make up streams. There are innumerable streams, sometimes merging with others, sometimes branching off. Some streams are relatively homogeneous; stages constituting those streams appear more or less the same. On the other hand, some streams are relatively heterogeneous; members of those streams appear quite different from each other. Homogeneity of streams comes in degrees, and there is no clear boundary between homogeneity and heterogeneity. Still, we can conventionally draw a line somewhere and call some streams persistenceconstitutive, and others not (this makes me an egalitarian about which continuous things are persistent).14 Very homogeneous streams are likely to be deemed persistence-constitutive, like this watch I have, which is causally continuous and has remained more or less the same in terms of appearance since the time that I bought it. Very heterogeneous streams are unlikely to be deemed persistence-constitutive, like this bottle of water,

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which is causally continuous with the blood that was shed by a dinosaur some 5 million years ago. So we can have persistence and non-persistence, based on the degree of homogeneity of streams. In the same way, we can make a conventional distinction between main cause and cooperative causes. A table is causally continuous with a proximate air-parcel in the next moment, but is to be deemed only as a cooperative cause with respect to the air-stream because they are too dissimilar. We can also say that the last seed-stage is the main cause of the subsequent sprout-stage on the grounds that there is an adequate degree of similarity between the two, as opposed to other causal factors, such as the soil. The distinction is ultimately empty, but conventionally true. I have selected the homogeneity principle as the criterion of conventional persistence for two reasons. First, Buddhists often say that, among many factors, one of the central reasons why we tend to mistake different things as one identical thing is because of similitude. So, my choice is not a deviation from the general Buddhist position. Second, homogeneity is imprecise, and corresponds with the imprecision that is characteristic of the judgments we regularly make. For example, we are not quite sure exactly when a person dies, though we can usually distinguish between a living person and a dead person. From the standpoint of unrestricted fusion, everything is indefinitely persistent. I think this readily conforms to some Buddhist worldviews and is philosophically instructive, but is very different from how we normally take persistence to be. From the standpoint of homogeneous streams, some things persist but some things do not persist. Here is the criterion of conventional persistence which we have extracted and analyzed: there is persistence if and only if the stages are causally related to each other, and there is adequate degree of homogeneity among the stages such as to incline us to consider them persistent. However, there is another problem that fusion theory still fails to explain: since fusion involves emergence of one effect from multiple causes, it commits us to the view of the diminishing universe, wherein each occurrence of fusion subtracts the number of total inhabitants of the universe by at least one.15 Moreover, it also fails to account for the simple fact that not all causal interactions are mixtures: green and blue mix to produce yellow, but fire and smoke do not mix to produce some singular entity. The principle of homogeneity only lets us decide which of the causes the effect is the most closely continuous with; it does not show how multiple effects can arise from multiple causes.

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Second Attempt to Save Fusion Theory: Catalysis The problem of diminishing universe seems to be an evitable consequence of the view that each momentary entity is reproductively efficacious. Insofar as qualitative novelty is a kind of failure of each ingredient of fusion to reproduce itself, there just cannot be any remnants that retain themselves after the fusion. It seems that the only remaining option is to postulate that each momentary entity is not reproductively efficacious, and yet in standard cases is reproduced. Let us call this the catalytic fusion view of causation. Catalysis is a chemical process in which “certain chemical reactions are caused, or accelerated, by substances which do not appear to take part in the reactions.”16 For instance, mineral acids in hot water solution change starch into dextrine and sugar, without themselves being altered.17 Catalysis can be distinguished into homogeneous catalysis in which there is “an intimate mixing of the various constituents, or at least between one of them and the catalyst that causes or accelerates the reaction,” and heterogeneous catalysis in which the catalyst is solid and reacts with liquid or gaseous systems capable of reacting.18 In principle, catalysts are not indispensable for the occurrence of target reactions, though in many cases they are practically necessary due to the requirement of very high temperature to effectuate reactions without catalysts. Most important for our purpose is that the apparent lack of alteration in the catalyst is a result of the catalyst’s first being consumed and then regenerated in phases of reaction, where consumption consists in being an ingredient in the reactants that facilitate the target reaction, and regeneration consists in recombining residues of the reaction. Similarly, according to the catalytic fusion view, some momentary entities fusing with others are regenerated while contributing to the generation of an emergent fusion entity. In this way, we can say that although the causal efficacy of each momentary entity is aimed at something other than its replica, in the majority of cases it is regenerated through fusion with appropriate co-producers. This analogy with catalysis in chemistry holds in respects of 1) the fact that catalytic fusion processes regenerate catalysts as well as generate emergent entities, 2) catalysts are not regenerated independently by their own efficacy but contingently upon the causal nature of other entities participating in fusion, 3) regeneration occurs by re-composition through substitution of materials, and 4) the mechanism of catalysis can be regarded as rule-governed, so that we can discover catalytic fusion laws in accordance with which we can predict what types of entities function catalytically and what types do not, as well as predict the natures of fusion products from the natures of ingredients of

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fusion. These analogies constitute the motivation for invoking catalysis in the revised notion of causal efficacy. There are also important disanalogies. First, catalytic fusion theory posits no constraints on the number of catalysts, reactants or products of fusion. It thus allows for cases in which no participants of fusion regenerate, such as in the case of color mixture, or where all participants of fusion retain structural constitution; in other words, all participants function as catalysts for the regeneration of other catalysts. Second, catalytic fusion completely does away with the idea of acceleration and the idea that catalysts are in principle dispensable. What catalytic fusion picks up from the chemical theory is just the aspect of regeneration through reaction. The first analogy helps us solve the problem of the diminishing universe: the ingredients of catalytic fusion do not simply disappear, hence are not lost, in the generation of a novel fusion product. Instead, they are regenerated along with the emergence of a qualitatively novelty. Consequently, catalytic fusion supports the view of the growing universe rather than the diminishing one. The third analogy explains how qualitative change may occur within a stream. Since each catalytic regeneration involves re-composition with different materials, there will be structural similarity with room for variation, and therewith the possibility of gradual change of appearance. The becoming of a seed into a sprout can be explained as a gradual process wherein momentary seeds regenerate themselves with the assistance of soil, water, etc., in such a way that, eventually, the seeds come to adopt the form of sprouts. This is not to say that in the absence of soil and water the seed would fail to regenerate itself, hence disappear. It is a known fact that seeds generally do not simply disappear in the absence of water; this phenomenon is explained in catalytic fusion theory as successful regeneration in association with normal atmospheric surroundings, though they might not promote regeneration in the direction towardx a sprout. We can thus make the distinction between main cause and cooperative cause. On catalytic fusion theory, main cause with respect to the generation of a sprout is a seed, which regenerates itself as a sprout in mediation of the causal efficacies of other relevant ingredients of fusion; cooperative causes are those other ingredients that participate in fusion, which either regenerate themselves as things other than a sprout, or do not regenerate at all. Thus, all of the problems for the traditional Buddhist view, as well as the initial formulation of fusion theory, are adequately addressed by invoking the catalytic fusion view. Additionally, the catalytic fusion view allows us to account for both the phenomena of genuine fusion and mere interaction. Mixture of colors

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can be regarded as a case of fusion where no ingredient regenerates itself. On the other hand, destruction of a pot by a hammer can be regarded as a case of fusion where the hammer regenerates itself with no significant alteration of its defining character, while the pot regenerates itself as shards. Also, we can accommodate the intuitive sense of causation, such as in the case of “fire is the cause of smoke.” With respect to immanent causation (causal phenomenon of becoming), we can distinguish between main cause and cooperative cause by referring to catalytic regeneration. With respect to efficient causation (e.g. fire causes smoke) we refer to the primary causal efficacies of things. Here we have an interesting ambiguity. On the one hand, we might be inclined to say that a continuously occurrent fire is a persistent fire; on the other hand, we might say that each momentary fire becomes smoke. I do not want to make a decision as to which one the fire really becomes, but I can at least say that catalytic fusion can give a consistent explanation for either view. If fire persists as fire, the first fire efficiently produces smoke while regenerating itself as fire with the assistance of oxygen, wick, etc.; if fire persists as smoke, the fire regenerates itself as smoke as a result of causal mixture with the given atmospheric factors, while it becomes a cooperative ingredient for the production of a succeeding fire.

Conclusions To account for persistence without using the idea of numerical identity over time, we needed a good account of persistence-constitutive relations that binds numerically distinct objects to form a kind of continuity, which we can call persistence. Following the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness, we began to consider the idea that it is causal relations that constitutes persistence. Some serious qualifications were necessary because in its simple form, the Buddhist doctrine was deeply problematic. We observed that the solutions provided in Buddhist texts were unsatisfactory, and we identified the main cause of failure to be in their attempt to make sense of how reproductively efficacious things could give rise to their successors with modified causal efficacies. So, I suggested fusion theory, which could account for the occurrence of qualitative change without modification of efficacy. I suggested that the causal criterion of persistence would need to be in accordance with the fusion account. There was a serious problem with the fusion theory: it did not quite overlap with what we normally take persistence to be. Sure, the body fluid of an ancient creature is in a sense persistent as this soup I was enjoying a couple of hours ago, but that is not the sense in which we use persistence

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when talking about this cup of soup: we say that the soup did not exist before it was prepared in the kitchen. To accommodate this normal—i.e. conventional—sense in which we think and talk about persistence, we shifted from the unrestricted causal relation talk to the conventional, homogeneous streams talk. This allowed us to distinguish between persistence and non-persistence on the basis of homogeneity and heterogeneity of streams. As we saw, however, the homogeneity principle did not help us avoid the conclusion that the universe was constantly diminishing. Our final solution was to introduce the idea of catalytic fusion. Through catalytic fusion, we could explain the integrity of the universe, the distinction between main and cooperative causes, as well as interaction, continuity of streams over time, and change. By adopting this view, we made some drastic changes to the idea of causal efficacy. The assumption of default reproductive efficacy was replaced by the opposite position that nothing is intrinsically capable of reproduction. Persistence is essentially a highly dependent phenomenon, although commonplace. The persistence-constitutive relation for the Buddhist theory of persistence can be defined thus: momentary entities form a persistence or stream if and only if the later one is a catalytic regeneration of the earlier one. As for how exactly the resultant reconstitution must work in order to count as a catalytic regeneration, we must invoke the principle of homogeneity. We now have a Buddhist theory of persistence that is free of internal problems. We can henceforth take this theory in light of recent developments in the philosophy of persistence to examine whether it can offer responses to the objections posed against stage theory, or more fundamentally, whether the Buddhist theory really is a version of stage theory.19

Notes  1

There are two proponents of stage theory or exdurantism: Theodore Sider and Katherine Hawley. Hawley is more explicit about the numerical distinctness of any two stages, while Sider seems to hold that identity relation can hold among stages. See Theodore Sider, “All the World’s a Stage”, Australian Journal of Philosophy, 74:3 (1996), and Katherine Hawley, How Things Persist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2 The proponents of momentariness (k‫܈‬a۬ikavƗdin or k‫܈‬a۬abha۪gavƗdin) are: Vasubandhu, DharmakƯrti, ĝƗntarakৢita, KamalaĞƯla, Dharmottara, JñƗnaĞrƯmitra, RatnƗkaraĞƗnti, RatnakƯrti, MokৢƗkaragupta, and some Chinese and Tibetan followers of Vasubandhu’s philosophy.

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As far as the discussion of momentariness goes, by “existing things” I mean those things that are normally regarded as persisting over time and whose persistence matters. As such, I take it that the Buddhist proponents of momentariness and their adversaries are not concerned with dharma, which Charles Goodman interprets as “tropes” and Jonardon Ganeri interprets as “qualiton-clusters”, but with things like tables, chairs, and persons. It is a serious matter whether persons persist with or without numerical identity, but it does not matter much whether tropes or qualia persist. For Goodman and Ganeri’s renditions of dharma, see Charles Goodman, “The treasure of Metaphysics and the Physical World”, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 216, July 2004, pg. 393, and Jonardon Ganeri, The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, & the First-Person Stance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 128. 4 Satkari Mookerjee calls this “reduplication”: Satkari Mookerjee, The Buddhist Philosophy of Universal Flux, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2006), 39. The production of replica, or reproduction, can be expressed also as transference of defining characteristic (svalak‫܈‬a۬a) from one entity to its inheritor. For the latter point, see Roger R. Jackson, Is Enlightenment Possible?: DharmakƯrti and rGyal tshab rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No-Self and Liberation, (New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1993), 120. 5 For a criticism of Hawley’s account of loose persistence, see Crawford L. Elder, “Persistence, Stage Theory and Speaking Loosely,” Annales Philosophici, Issue 1, 2010. 6 Hawley, 85. 7 Mark Siderits, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), 45. 8 For the original objection, see ĝƗntarakৢita’s Tattvasaۨgraha. In Tattvasaۨgraha, translated by K.N. Chatterjee (Calcutta: Vijaya-veeৢƗ, 1988),. 7783. 9 Mookerjee identifies this as the most damaging objection against the Buddhist doctrine. He adds that the solutions offered by the Buddhists are not quite satisfactory but perhaps the only possible solutions. It is my goal to suggest a better solution. For his comments, see Mookerjee, 42. 10 Chatterjee, 83-84. 11 See Rita Gupta, “The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness and Its Presuppositions”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 8, no. 1, March 1980, 61. The idea of approaching together appears also in RatnakƯrti’s AnvayƗtmika. See Jeson Woo, The "Ksanabhan.gasiddhi-Anvayatmika": An Eleventh-Century Buddhist work on Existence and Causal Theory. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999, 20. 12 Woo, 27; Mookerjee, 2. 13 To quote ĝƗntarakৢita: “Every moment, things exclusive but indefinable potencies appear; these cannot be questioned like the potency of burning in fire.” Chatterjee, 89. 14 For a discussion of egalitarianism, inegalitarianism and elitist inegalitarianism, see Eli Hirsch, Dividing Reality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 89-90.

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15 This is analogous to the problem of “basal loss” in Paul Humphreys’s fusion emergentism. For the formulation of fusion emergence, see Paul Humphreys, “How Properties Emerge”, in Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys, Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008). For its problems, see Hong Yu Wong, “Emergents from Fusion,” Philosophy of Science, 73 (2006). 16 Paul Sabatier, Catalysis in Organic Chemistry, translated by E. Emmet Reid, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1922), 1. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 2. 19 In my dissertation, “Rehabilitating Momentariness: A Critical Revision of Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness” (unpublished), I argue that the Buddhist theory of persistence is ultimately to be considered as a version of perdurantism, in spite of apparent affinity to stage theory.

CHAPTER TEN THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE AND THE LOGIC OF PLACE JEFF HOYT

Introduction Take a look around the room you are in right now. See the furniture and artifacts and the way the room’s light source illuminates them. Feel the most immediate “solid” object. In fact, give that object a whack, one that lets it know you mean business. Hear the sound it makes. Feel the sensation of having whacked the object. Notice how you still feel that sensation now, and now, and now. Imagine next that none of those sensations and perceptions occurred here—or, from your perspective, there—but rather at an infinitely abstracted, yet ultimately equivalent, and infinitely removed, yet intimately connected, location. This is not to say simply that the feeling or sound of having whacked an object is “felt” or “heard” in the brain rather than the hand or the ear; this is to say that nothing, not the feeling, the hand, the brain, nor even the object, the room, you—none of it is here. Leonard Susskind, theoretical physicist and proponent of both superstring theory and the theory of the holographic universe, claims just such a thing. He posits that all the things contained in your room, your world, the universe, are comprised of information, and that “all information is stored on the boundary of space.”1 Susskind posits further that all those things in your room, your world, the universe, are actually holograms projected from that outer edge. The holographic universe theory is quite new to mainstream physics, but has gained recent footing since Susskind laid to rest a thirty-some year battle with Stephen Hawking about what happens to information at the event horizon of a black hole. Susskind’s 2008 book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, aims to make accessible to the advanced general public the concepts entailed in the holographic principle. While engaging, Susskind’s

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work is often quite baffling. In order to explore the theories contained within and upon which the holographic universe theory is based, we will look to the later work of Nishida Kitaro, specifically, his “Logic of Place.” It is in the writings of Nishida that we discover additional terminological and theoretical means by which we might come to understand Susskind’s holographic universe.

The Holographic Principle Where quantum mechanics challenged the notion that the physical universe is “matter” separate from but convertible to “energy,” the holographic universe theory shakes the notion that our universe is a “physical” universe at all. Susskind writes, “the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface.”2 But the holographic universe is no ordinary hologram. Susskind continues, “everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of information restricted to the boundary.”3 We will see that the key question here is: what boundary, and what space? Suskind’s answer is, remarkably: pick one. Take, for example, a box in the center of the room. According to the holographic principle, the interior walls of the box are encoded in Planckian bits, fundamental units of measurement of spacetime, where the maximum number of bits is, at most, one per square Planck unit. These bits are single pieces of information scrambled across the two-dimensional walls of the box. When the information is decoded, we are presented with the box’s contents as a hologram of the information contained within the box’s boundary. This encoding and decoding further applies to the interior walls of the room that contains the box, which are also encoded in these Planckian bits. Decoding the walls of the room presents us with the room’s contents— tables, chairs, people, and the box, which itself also contains a holograph—as a holograph of the information contained within the room’s boundary. By extension, the walls of the building that contains the room that contains the box are encoded in bits that present one with contents— the room, other rooms, their contents—as a hologram of the building’s boundary, and so on and so forth. Susskind argues that this principle continues till the edge of the universe, or infinity, whichever comes first. An invisible Planckian shell encodes each of these levels, and everything taking place in the interior of a given space would in turn present us with a

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convincing three-dimensional hologram of the information encoded at respective two-dimensional boundary. Hence, the holographic universe. This description of our universe may bring an immediate question to mind: WHAT!?!? And second: are we to take the universe and the relationships between the things within it to be illusions within illusions within illusions to infinity, or, at least, just short of it? Such an explanation, to many—including many theoreticians and physicists—is so far removed from that which is presented via subjective and objective experience that they cannot—or will not—accept it. Perhaps, this has much to do with the fact that Susskind does not discuss in detail the “secret code for translating the scrambled patterns into coherent threedimensional images.”4 However, if we turn now to the philosophy of Nishida, we can, perhaps, surmise some insight into such a secret code.

The Principle of Place In his writings on the logic of place (basho), Nishida posits, “everything that is, is in something else.”5 Wherever things exist, there exists a relationship between things. And, wherever there exists a relationship between things, there also exists a relationship between those things and the thing or things within and by which we are able to distinguish those things as things. It is thus, Nishida claims, that two distinct types of relationships emerge; there exists a form of organization that allows us to distinguish “between that which holds a relationship together and that in which the relationship is located.”6 He often refers to this organizing and distinguishing as reflecting or enveloping, and to that which is organized or distinguished as reflected or enveloped. Take again the example that each of us is in our respective room. According to Nishida, there exist various relationships between each of us and the objects in the room—we seem to be separate from, and have acted upon, that object that we struck—as well as relationships between each of us and the objects and the room—we and the object that we struck seem to be contained within and being acted upon by the room. Per the logic of place, each of these relationships is organized such that the former sort is being reflected by or enveloped by the latter, while at the same time the later is reflecting or enveloping the former. As we saw in the holographic principle, the room provides a boundary, or, as Nishida might say, a place against which each of us establishes a relationship between it and the objects in the room. However, Nishida tells us that that which provides a boundary, or place against which each of us may establish a relationship between the room and the objects and us is

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much more complicated—yes, more complicated than the holographic principle. And yet, such a concept of a provider of place might make intuitive an otherwise non-intuitive concept of a holographic universe. Nishida describes this provider of place as something of a place itself, as a relationship between the two types of relationships, all the while maintaining that this provider of place and place itself “cannot be called identical or different.”7 And, he holds that each of us is a provider of such a place, as well as that each of us is such a place itself: each of us is conscious.

The Universe as a Place of Holograms In order to explore the significance of consciousness in a holographic universe, let us first take a look at a classic example from the base premise of the holographic principle, quantum mechanics, made famous by the physicist, Erwin Schrodinger. Let us return to the box in the center of the room, and place in it Schrodinger’s cat. Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment often used to describe the perplexing notion of what is known as, among other terms, quantum entanglement. The experiment goes roughly as follows. Into a box are placed a radioactive atom with a halflife of one hour, a Geiger counter, an apparatus containing a vial of poison, and a cat. The box is then closed for one hour. The Geiger counter will detect the radiation emitted if the material does indeed decay, which then triggers the apparatus to release the poison, instantly killing the cat. If the material does not decay, the Geiger counter and thus the apparatus remain inactive, and the cat lives on. According to quantum theory, after a period of one hour, it is not just that we do not yet know whether or not the cat is alive or dead, it is that the cat is in a state of quantum entanglement, or in multiple states at once. Until the box is opened, the cat is both alive and not alive, both dead and not dead. Once the box is opened, the act of measuring the cat’s state—our looking at it—will collapse the multiple states into a single state. The entangled states of Schrodinger’s cat can be further applied to what is called black hole complementarity. Susskind writes, “depending on the state of motion of the observer, an atom might remain a tiny microscopic object, or it might spread out over the entire horizon of an enormous black hole.”8 Let us consider now another thought experiment where we effectively take the place of Schrodinger’s cat. In this thought experiment, let us say that we travel toward a black hole with an atom and a friend. Let us say next that we reach the event horizon along with the atom; our friend, however, remains at a safe distance away from the

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inescapable gravity of the horizon. From the perspective of our friend, we will proceed through a process that theoretical physicists fittingly call “spaghettification.” So as to understand this process—and so that our friend may avoid witnessing our being “spaghettified”—let us focus our attention on the atom. From our friend’s perspective, the atom shifts from appearing to be a point particle to a vibrating, rubber band-like string. As time passes, this newly visible structure next appears as fluctuating loops and squiggles. Then, finally, the string is revealed as stretched across the entire horizon of the black hole. Setting aside for a moment that our friend would perceive these shifts as taking a near infinite amount of time to transpire, they would observe the atom—along with us—as being stretched and added to the surface area of the black hole. To our friend, the horizon of the black hole emerges as a previously tangled arrangement of strings that have been flattened out on the horizon by the object’s incredible gravity. But, this is very different from what we would observe as we passed through the event horizon with the atom. From our own perspective, the horizon remains nearly infinitely uneventful. We would observe our body, as well as that of our friend, to appear to float forever in place; we would observe the atom as nearly forever appearing to be the same point particle that it has always appeared to us to be. As we pass through the event horizon, we would not experience a state of nearly infinite “spaghettification,” but rather one of nearly infinite boredom. We would remain in this state until we—and, importantly, our information— eventually reach the black hole’s singularity. In short, according to an external observer, anyone/anything that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is dismantled down to the atom and stretched across the horizon. According to the in-falling observer, nothing much happens. As was the case with Schrodinger’s cat—assuming for the sake of the example that the cat counts as an observer—both states are confirmed. This is Susskind’s black hole complementarity as Schrodinger’s quantum entanglement, on a larger scale. The move to a holographic universe is much like the one we have just seen. After coordinating general relativity with quantum mechanics, deriving ten dimensions and brane layers, and providing proofs in the form of mathematical equations—each of which I will omit here—Susskind concludes that an observer outside our universe would see that quantum field theory operates at the boundary of spacetime, while an observer on the inside would see simultaneously that string theory applies to the hologram that is the interior of a given spacetime. In short, black holes are gigantic Schrodinger’s cat boxes, and our universe is a gigantic black hole.

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As these principles suggest, perhaps in ways that Nishida may have never imagined, each entanglement, complementarity, and the holographic principle certainly view “the subject as destroying the objectivity of the object.”9

The Universe as a Place of Consciousness In each of the principles that underlie the theory of the holographic universe, as well as in the holographic principle itself, Susskind implicitly identifies consciousness as having a role in a holographic universe. Nishida discusses consciousness in such a way that he can, perhaps, provide some insight into what this role may be. He writes, If the object were completely unrelated to consciousness, we could not speak of consciousness reflecting an object or of an object being located in consciousness. For this reason we can posit the act of judgment as connecting the ‘space’ between them… [W]e can think of the act of judgment as reflecting these objects in positions and relations.10

Within the Logic of Place, we see that the act of judgment is accomplished by the reflecting and enveloping capabilities of consciousness. Within the holographic universe, we see that the translation of the so-called “secret code” is accomplished by the act of judgment. Notice with Schrodinger’s cat that it is not until an observation is made by a conscious observer that one state or another takes hold; until that observation takes place, the reality of the matter is entangled between all possibilities. Nishida might say that our judging the cat to be either alive or dead is due to our consciousness reflecting or enveloping within our consciousness the cat as being either alive or as being dead. Notice also with black hole complementarity that it is not only an observation by a conscious observer that allows one state or another to take hold, but also that it is the place from which an observation is made that allows for one state or another to take hold. Though these observations seem utterly contrary to one another, the reality of the matter is that they are altogether complementary to one another. Nishida might say that, depending upon our relative place, our judging ourselves to be just beyond the event horizon while our friend judges us as having been added to it is due to each of our respective consciousnesses reflecting or enveloping within our consciousness our selves as being either perfectly whole or as being spaghettified. Notice finally that in the theory of the holographic universe an observation is being made by a conscious observer, only here entire sets of

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laws are viewed as being or as not being at play. We on the interior see strings as being varied three-dimensional reconstructions of information contained at the boundary of our universe, while those beyond the boundary see waves as being information scattered across a vibrating twodimensional surface. From such a perspective, we might see clearly, as Nishida does, “that the significance of the subject-object/opposition is lost… Indeed, the very meaning of a ‘subject’ would disappear.”11 Quantum entanglement might be seen as reflected or enveloped within black hole complementarity; black hole complementarity might be seen as reflected or enveloped within a larger reflecting or enveloping form—call it a holographic universe. However, even if it were physically possible to travel beyond the boundary of our universe, we cannot escape our relative perspective; as Nishida puts it, “no matter how far we pursue form, we cannot get ‘beyond form.’”12 Our views of the universe are restricted not only by our relative positions within the universe, but also by our relative consciousnesses within our relative positions. Our consciousness is but a reflection being reflected by a reflecting layer, or an envelope being enveloped within an enveloping layer. At the same time, our consciousness is equally enabling. Our consciousness is additionally a reflecting layer upon which reflections are reflected, or an enveloping layer within which envelopes are enveloped. It is through consciousness that we can come to understand that our universe is truly nothing more than bits of information arranged in such and such ways that objects from one conscious perspective are confirmed as being one way, and it is via consciousness that we can come to appreciate that those same bits of information from another conscious perspective are confirmed as being a complete other.

Notes 

1 Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, (New York/Boston/London: Little Brown and Company, 2008), 299. 2 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 298. 3 Ibid., 298. 4 Ibid., 300-301. 5 Kitaro Nishida, "The Logic of Place," in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, eds. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis and John C. Maraldo. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011), 649. 6 Nishida, "The Logic of Place," 649. 7 Ibid., 652. 8 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 354.

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Nishida, "The Logic of Place," 653. Ibid., 652. 11 Ibid., 653-4. 12 Ibid., 649. 10

CONTRIBUTORS

Will Barnes is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of New Mexico with Masters degrees in philosophy and Buddhist studies. His research interests include transformative philosophy, irony, cynicism, narrativity, self-constitution and playfulness, primarily in the traditions of European and Buddhist philosophy and culture. His professional presentations include: The Rise of Cynical Irony—a study of cynicism associated with forms of irony increasingly prevalent in intellectual circles, popular media and fashion, and the socio-political implications of the Bodhisattva ideal—a study of the contemporary political implications of ĝƗntideva’s BodhicaryƗvatƗra. He is also editor of the Planetary Collective’s online philosophical content. Miles Hamilton completed his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Melbourne. His publication topics and research interests include metaphysics, the concept of self and salvation. He believes we must remember that philosophy is far more than an academic pursuit. Leland Harper is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include the epistemic status of miracles and divine intervention, mysticism, exploring alternative conceptions of the JudeoChristian God, and issues regarding race-related self-identity. His publications also include “A Deistic Discussion of Murphy and Tracy’s Accounts of God’s Limited Activity in the Natural World” in Forum Philosophicum. Itsuki Hayashi is a PhD student at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa. His research interests include Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, and personal identity. His publications include “Ontology of Discontinuity: Buddhism and Descartes” in Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming. Jeff Hoyt is an undergraduate student at Drake University. His research interests include the extraction of speech sounds from environmental sounds, the extraction of phonemes from strings of speech sounds, and the extraction of a single meaning from many possible meanings.

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Contributors

Matthew Izor is a PhD student at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa. His research interests include the work of Nishida Kitarǀ, biosemiotics, aesthetics, and environmental philosophy in America and Japan. Sydney Morrow is a PhD candidate at The University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa. Her research interests include Metaphysics, Chinese Philosophy, and French Philosophy. Her publications include "Ethical Responsibility in Modern Islamic Banking: MurƗbahaand RibƗ" in CrossCurrents: Comparative Responses to Global Interdependence, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013. Sumaya Noush is a J.D. Candidate at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. In 2013 she received her BA magna cum laude in philosophy and BS magna cum laude in psychology with special departmental honors from Loyola University Chicago. While an undergraduate student, she served as Philosophy Club President, a member of the Ethics and BioEthics Bowl teams, and earned a first place prize in Loyola University’s Philosophy Essay Contest for her essay, The Perennial Dialogue: Evidential Elements of Evil vs. Titleholder’s Agape. Her interests at present include care ethics, developing a bioethical literacy that inspects the rights of individuals within domestic and international health initiatives, and using the law to address ambitious, but necessary, bioethical projects. Kyle Peters is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the intersection of modern and contemporary Japanese film, literature, and aesthetic philosophy as it is socio-historically situated in local, national, and global frameworks. Louise Williams is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Notre Dame. She graduated with her BA in Philosophy from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Buddhist Philosophy.

EDITORS

Laura Specker Sullivan is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa and a visiting researcher at the Kokoro Research Center, Kyoto University. Her research interests include Japanese philosophy, cross-cultural bioethics, metaethics, and aesthetics. Masato Ishida teaches at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa as Associate Professor of Philosophy. He specializes in classical American philosophy, traditional Japanese philosophy, and the history and philosophy of logic.

INDEX

A aesthetic attitude, 109 Aitken, Robert, 95, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108 anxiety, 57, 71, 72, 78, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100 apperception, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41 B Beauvoir, Simone de, 6, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61 Bhagavad Gita, 74, 79 body schema, 6, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 Buddhism, 4, 63, 64, 82, 92, 94, 95, 99, 105, 106, 111, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 155 Buddhist, 3, 63, 64, 81, 82, 92, 93, 94, 96, 101, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 155, 156 C Cartesian, 9 Catalysis, 140, 145 catalytic fusion, 140, 141, 143 Chalmers, David, 18, 26 consciousness, 18, 19, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 44, 45, 50, 56, 59, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, 85, 92, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104, 150, 152, 153 Critchley, Simon, 9, 24, 25

D Dependent arising, 86 Descartes, Rene, 9, 16, 46, 60, 155 doctrine of two truths, 87 Dǀgen, 3, 107 E emptiness, 1, 3, 63, 64, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107 enlightenment, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 87, 103, 104 epoche, 75 ethics, 1, 24, 44, 53, 103, 106, 114, 156 existentialism, 95, 96, 99, 104, 105, 107 F freedom, 57, 71 fusion theory, 110, 138, 139, 141, 142 G gender, 52, 58 H Hawking, Stephen, 147, 153 Hawley, Katherine, 133, 143 Heidegger, Martin, 24, 96, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 105, 107 Hobbes, Thomas, 46, 47, 60

Index

160 holographic principle, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152 holographic universe, 4, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152 Husserl, Edmund, 55, 61, 66 I immanence, 6, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58 intuition, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 103

N NƗgƗrjuna, 3, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94 nausea, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 99 Nirvana, 66, 82 Nishida, Kitarǀ, 4, 110, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154 P

Kaivalya, 73 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 6, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 66, 76, 79, 121, 129, 130 Kierkegaard, Sǀren, 96, 98, 99, 107

Patanjali, 63, 65 perception, 4, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 63, 76, 77, 83, 84, 85, 87, 121, 123, 124 personal freedom, 11, 24, 49, 53 pragmatic belief formation, 109, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119 Pragmatism, 111, 115, 119 Prakriti, 73, 74, 75 Purusha, 73, 74

L

R

Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 liberation, 83 Logic of Place, 110, 147, 148, 152, 153, 154

RatnakƯrti, 132, 135, 136, 138, 143, 144

J James, William, 109, 111, 117, 119 K

M Madhyamaka, 82, 83, 85, 89, 91, 93, 94, 106 MahƗyƗna, 82, 91, 93, 95, 96, 106, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3, 6, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61 Munch, Edvard, 95

S Said, Edward, 78 salvation, 1, 63, 64, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 91, 97, 155 sangha, 102, 103, 104 ĝƗntarakৢita, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 143, 144 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12, 25, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 78, 79 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 64, 81, 91, 92, 94 Schrodinger’s cat, 150, 151, 152 self-awareness, 1, 31, 36 self-consciousness, 5, 6, 27, 28, 29, 33, 36, 38, 40, 63, 85, 92 self-detachment, 63 self-knowledge, 5, 6, 27, 32, 36

Locating and Losing the Self in the World self-transcendence, 1 Siderits, Mark, 94, 133, 144 Stolnitz, Jerome, 121, 129, 130 Strawson, Peter, 33, 34, 42 subjectivity, 28, 34, 36, 40, 42, 56, 104 suffering, 83 ĞnjnyatƗ-yoga, 64, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108 Susskind, Leonard, 147, 153 Suzuki, D.T., 101, 107 svabhava, 85, 89, 91, 93 T Totality, 7, 8, 9, 15, 20, 24, 25, 26, 49

161

transcendence, 6, 9, 15, 16, 17, 21, 24, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57 transcendental ego, 35 U Ultimate Reality, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120 V visual field, 37 Y Yogacara, 82, 92, 93 Yogasena, 134 Young, Iris Marion, 58