Here’s something speculative for all y’all. I’ve taught lots of World Religion classes in the last few years, and I’m always wrestling with the question of what meaning other religions have for Christianity. The Eastern meditative tradition that culminates in Zen has been especially intriguing to me, just because it seems to be talking about something that Christianity just doesn’t address, namely, nothingness as Bliss, nothingness as real (and distinct from both God and Creation). Now I know that there are plenty of theologians of the apophatic ilk that probably do get into this territory, and I should probably read up more before posting. . . .but this is a blog, right? so here goes. . . .
While reading some Bulgakov a while back I was struck by his insistence that there should be a place for “created nothingness”; that is, the created somethingness which we can see around us is dependent on a nihilo that is created. When God creates ex nihilo he is creating out of a nothingness that is, in a way, created. I started to see this nihilo as a mirror (as many a Zen sayings suggest), but not as a mirror that simply inverts what faces it, but a mirror that is somehow permeable, a looking glass that could be tumbled through, like Alice did with hers. And so my heading, 3 plus 1 plus 3, refers to the trinitarian reality on both sides of this looking glass. God, of course, is a perfect trinity which entertains no fall and no sin, and we, being made in his image, are best described in trinitarian ways (like Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Lacan all did). I am also linking this “1″ not only to the nothingness of the Easterns, but also to the Sophia of Bulgakov and his predecessors (including the writers of the Bible). Sophia is similarly hard to explain: Bulgakov claims she is uncreated, but she is not a person in the trinity. She is “God’s home” and the heavenly Jerusalem. I would like to say that she is also a mirror, and an uncanny one at that. Maybe to divine her ways we need to go back to Lewis Carrol, or maybe even get curious about what some Zen folks have said about this mirror. I’ll leave you with a little story from that tradition:
Hui-neng was but a lad when his father died and, forced to forego an education, he provided for his mother and himself by gathering firewood and selling it in the markets of Canton. It was at one of these markets that he heard a verse from the Diamond Sutra – “Let your mind flow freely without dwelling on anything” — that illumined his mind and set his soul afire. Asking where he could learn more, he was referred to the Tung-tsan Monastery, five hundred miles to the north. By unexpected good fortune he was soon able to provide for his mother, and so set out for the monastery. When he arrived, the Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen, came to greet him and inquired: “How can you, an uneducated commoner from the South, possibly hope to attain buddhahood?”
Hui-neng answered him, “Although people are distinguished as Northerners and Southerners, there is neither north nor south in buddha-nature. In physical appearance, barbarians and monks may look different, but what difference is there in their buddha-nature?” By way of response, the Patriarch sent him off to the granary, where he was put to work hulling rice and splitting wood. He labored there for many months, until he heard something that disturbed him. The scholar and head monk Shen-hsiu had written a verse on a corridor wall in response to a request by the aged Patriarch:
Our body is the Bodhi Tree,
And our mind is a bright mirror.
At all times diligently wipe them,
So that they will be free from dust.
What disturbed Hui-neng was the statement that our minds collect dust and need to be continually wiped clean; to him our mind, being part of our spiritual nature, is always pure and above delusion. Putting this thought into verse, he asked a visitor to write on the wall:
The Tree of Perfect Wisdom is originally no tree.
Nor has the bright mirror any frame.
Buddha-nature is forever clear and pure.
Where is there any dust?
When the Patriarch read this, he realized that the illiterate lay-brother Hui-neng had “entered the door of enlightenment” and was worthy of succeeding him.
Like
this is a test.
Maybe I should have put my response here, instead of under “Wonder.”
In summary, then:
3 + 1 + 3 leads to a 1 that might grow into a Harry Potter.
1 + 3 + 1 leads to a 3 that’s likely to collapse into a Voldemort.
Sophia? The nothingness? That’s the 3+…+3 that surrounds the (human) subject — as its “home,” in which it dwells richly — but in its difference from the 1+…+1 that surrounds a human subject and makes it so that heaven is the one place that subject could NEVER be at home.
(OR: Sophia is differance.)
Read any Keiji Nishitani or others of the Kyoto School? The were perhaps the best 20th century representatives of the Zen repproachment with modern philosophy. Been quite a while since I read it, but if I remember right, he says some interesting things about the active nature of nothingness.
Along the same lines, I think that we Westerners tend to misunderstand the “nothing” part of nothingness; active nothingness has a certain malleability to it that allows non-duality to flower into the 8 million things. In support of this, I’d point you to Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo and in particular to the Mountains and Waters Sutra.
Is this ‘nothingness’ a featureless something from which creatures are made? I confess I have a hard time conceptualizing ‘nothing’ that has some features– even indeterminate features. It seems to give something with one hand, and take it away with the other. Nothing isn’t some-thing (however broadly, indeterminately construed). It might have some semantic content — but an extra-mental feature, not sure about that?
I think this nothingness is contrastive — is contrastiveness itself, so to speak. As when we say in the apophatic tradition that God is Not this and God is Not that…. It tells us (as no-thing else can) much about what God “is.”
Or, as in Plato’s Sophist, that “sameness” is “not-different-ness.” To be “hot” is to be “not-cold,” and in a different way from being not-solid and not-a-horse. Not-being is in this dynamic sense a some-thing; it is that space or “khora” in which substantive identities takes place, through complex patterns of difference and kinship.
Hmm– if nothingness is contrastive, then it won’t do any contrasting unless there are some positive features under discussion. “Nothingness” is not equivalent to a negation, which is fairly determinate.
I get the point of e.g., John Scotus Erigena’s affirmation-negation-superaffirmation dialectic. But I don’t know where ‘nothingness’ comes into play. I thought that the thing closest to nothing –’prime matter’ was supposed to be most unlike God (at least according to Aquinas).
Scott says: “if nothingness is contrastive, then it won’t do any contrasting unless there are some positive features under discussion.”
I agree, Scott. There are positive features all over the place, in the world as we know it, positive aspects that are constituting all kinds of positive things. But how do we know when a given contrast is significant; when it needs to be taken into account with reference to the positive thing in question? We do know, because in fact the relative importance of various contrasts is (for the human perceiver) constitutive of the essential identity of the positivity in question.
Take black and white or red and green. All are colors; a fundamental underlying sameness. The first contrastive pair invokes a color spectrum, in terms of which black and white take their identity from being one another’s opposites. That is, they are the SAME (at an extreme end of the spectrum) but obverses of one another. That structure of relationships is not “there” in the same way that a particular black is there on the couch, but it is still there in our perception as a contrastive negativity that helps to constitute the identity of the couch’s color for us. Red and green, however, invoke a different structure of relationships/contrasts; to see how they are opposites or negatives of one another will require the context of the three primary colors. Plato in “Sophist” was getting at something like this: that the forms or essential identities of things intersect with one another or exclude on another, and these very patterns constitute them.
Plato was talking without distinction about physical positivities AND about the words that we use in order to name the formal essentiality of things, because we attempt to know all positivities by a ongoing journey of determining their most relevant and incisive formal structures of similarity and difference. Names are what keep all these heuristic structures distinct from one another for us and keep them in play as we increase our knowing of the essentiality of positivities. The not-being-a-tree or the not-being-a-rose are very important negativities for knowing what a daffodil is, because they are closer to its identity (think relations like genus and species) than its not-being-a-rock. In fact, these not-beings are all contrastive negativities operating on different levels of structural relationship, and the structures themselves can also be viewed as in their own positivity being structures of contrastive negativity with reference to the positivity they are illuminating.
I think Plato and Aristotle were closer intellectually to the structural linguists and the poststructuralists than to the modern analytics, because for the former thinkers a specific difference always requires a similarity (sameness) on a deeper (say, generic) level, and any constitutive relationship, composed as it is of both sameness and difference, is therefore also always a negation at the same time that it is an identity.
When it comes to the law of identity so fundamental to early-modern epistemology, that (f/a), a = a, Aristotle never said that. He said that a cannot be other than a “in the same manner at the same time and with respect to the same context.” In other words, that which is a in some manner at some time with respect to some context cannot be other than THAT kind of a. He invoked a multi-leveled structure of relationships as constituting any a, recognizing that any essential element of that a can shift, depending on the time and situation and even on the goals of the knower. Contemporary physicists are right with us here, when they note that the experimental tests employed will depend upon “which aspect of the phenomenon in question” we wish to examine and evaluate.
We aren’t living in a world of simple positivities anymore, a world of inert objects to which static words merely refer, but of multi-leveled structures of constitutive relationships, i.e. contrastive negativities constituting positivities that actively contrast (or negate) at several different levels of structuring. The world of simple positivities was the world of “solid bodies,” upon which external “impressed forces” impinged, with no glimpse of “energy” yet in sight: the 17th-18th century “clockwork universe” of Newtonian-era physical mechanics.
Are you proposing that there are negative essential properties? A property just is a true feature of something. An essential property is something that a thing cannot exist without. And a negative one — on your proposal — is a negative feature, that is “not-being-its-opposite”? I’ve always wondered whether we are to think of negative features as properties. Is my ‘not-being-an-elephant’ an essential feature of mine? I wouldn’t think so. I could exist without such a negative property. But I couldn’t exist without my humanity, and some might say a sense of humor (risibility).
There are not “essential negative properties” in a heuristic strategy that looks at positivities (as being) in isolation from one another.
In a wholistic and more contextual model or strategy, the negative being is actually constitutively within the positive essential feature making it the positivity it is.
And I’m not interested in what “exists.” I’m interested in knowing, as a human mode of being, myself, all the other modes of being, insofar as they make themselves available to me for being known.
I guess we are at an impasse. I don’t see how something positive requires that it have a nothing-property. You suggest that “the negative being is actually constitutive within the positive essential feature making it the positivity it is”. I don’t believe that ‘nothingness’ constitutes anything. I believe we’ve got positivity all the way down. But if we are talking about knowledge, how we come to know something — especially in dialectic — then I concede that ‘not-being-x’ is helpful for understanding things. But I restrict this to epistemology or phil. of mind, and don’t suppose it commits me to an ontology of nothingness. Metaphysically speaking, nothingness does no work.
When it comes to human knowing, how can we reasonably continue to detach the object of our knowing from our attempts to know it, as though they were not intricately interrelated and mutually constituted? We can posit the ontology of the to-be-known only as our own provisional extrapolation from our most rigorous (and always ongoing) efforts to glean evidence and test and interpret it; this is how we refine our understandings of that to which the evidence refers.
This is how the scientific method now works, and the sciences are more productive than ever; their discovery-procedures are of course brilliant and still exceedingly well-warranted, even though they are now always provisional and subject to radical reinterpretation in the future, in anticipation of paradigm shifts as yet unimaginable. At any given point in time we never as yet have enough evidence and enough theorization of the evidence to know how to ask the next testable questions of the to-be-known, the questions capable of bringing further experimental evidence to light.
Every kind of phenomenon is so many-faceted and multi-layered that we must always be selecting certain aspects and combining them according to a heuristic theory of their relevance, their significance. What the Newtonian era called “knowledge” we call the current heuristic model and recognize that the reality can be so complex that we need to employ complementarity, the strategic use of incommensurate models in order to get at different aspects of the reality in question.
This means we are always engaged in trying to separate the essential features from the incidental or peripheral, with respect to a given enterprise of knowing. But what is incidental to one endeavor may be quite central to another. We are constantly interacting with the external world and with genuine physical reality (or with whatever sort of reality our discipline is concerned with seeking through its own characteristic kinds of evidence, with theology attempting to interpret the biblical materials by building and testing heuristic models just as physics attempts to interpret physical phenomena).
The classical Newtonian empiricists believed in “positivity all the way down.” But cutting edge physicists today do not call themselves empiricists for this very reason. Nature’s stubborn complexities have rebuked them; they realize that they do not base physical theory upon empirical reality, but upon empirical evidence, which is quite a different state of affairs. So today they call themselves positivists rather than empiricists, by which they mean to acknowledge the gap between their models and whatever it is that they are attempting to model. (That gap is all about the negativity that makes any progress possible. As C. S. Lewis said, “We can only make progress into a resisting material.” The to-be-known manifests itself to us in large part by eventually saying NO to our best interpretations and models; “No, that’s not good enough.”)
Stephen Hawking speaks for the positivists (because he is one) when he says, “I don’t care about reality, because i don’t know what the word means. I’m happy as long as the experimental evidence agrees with the theory.” When it doesn’t, he changes the theory and does more experiments. But he doesn’t claim that it’s a positivity that’s “out there.” It’s a vast unknown — the quantum world — into which we journey by foregrounding some features while backgrounding others… and seeking a formal patterning through one heuristic strategy, while knowing that with other approaches and for other purposes, other valid strategic patterns will emerge.
Does this make any sense, Scott? Why it’s not so feasible today to make ontology and epistemology mutually exclusive domains tas it was in the heyday of Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian matter-mind dualism?
(1) Perhaps a picky technical point, but “Eastern meditative tradition” does not “culminates in Zen” no more that Christianity “culminates” in Pentecostalism. Zen is one of many sects of Buddhism with its own special package of assumptions and borrowed notions.
(2) Though some traditions of Buddhism see the “emptiness” as ontological, others, I feel, see it in a deep apophatic sense which does not even lead to being.
Wow, fascinating.
maybe it has to do with that occasioanal terrifying part of meditative experience?
or how in your view do they see that apophatic emptiness that does not lead to being? you notice i just assumed that the “other” of being would be terrifying.
I say “culminates” as a matter of personal opinion, for it seems to me that Zen renews much of what is original in the tradition and gives it a huge shot of energy. Thats my opinion though.For me the Eastern meditative traditions are precisely about meditation, Zen, sitting. As far as ontology goes. . . I’m not sure how helpful this term is in this context (i realize you’re addressing more the comments here) so, just a note: for Bulgakov, God is better defined as “not existing” in the sense that Lacan, I think, tackled it. Existence is tied up with Symbolic representing.