Category Archives: Eastern Philosophy

Draw a Point on the Face of Infinity

(First, let me write that this is simply an exercise in what I term ‘musings’ which matters not about truth or falsity but only possibilities; possibilities flame the mind with openness and fuel the passions of many desires.)

Infinity, Descartes tells us, is an idea which overflows itself. It is one of many avenues which free the spirit as musings rooted in music lights up the mind and rouses our passions.

A point in the face of infinity is one of many particularizations of an abstraction. The face, as a boundary imposed on infinity is nevertheless an abstraction which in our case has been conjured up by a point. A point need not be finite, it may also be infinitesimally small which once again rouses the fabric from whence it is made. It demonstrates a circularity in facing us.

Physics as appearance, as what shows itself; what presents itself, utilizes the ‘point’ quite often to concretize abstractions which cannot be seen except in the presentation of another abstraction; the point as facing us in its stark abstraction.

If we make a series of points into an imaginary line and stretch the line through space, we will find that the shortest distance between two points is not a line because time is space and space is time and they are vastly curved by planets, suns, galaxies, and black holes. It makes no sense to speak of a straight line in time-space without lapsing into an imaginary fantasy world, an abstraction. Even a worm hole, if it exists, would be more like a curvy worm writhing time-space into extremely twisted distortions which could hardly be called a straight line. With this in mind let’s say our line is really a small increment on a non-linear abstraction such as a circle or a sphere. What happens when we shrink our circle into smaller and smaller loops? In a recent article called “The Origins of Space and Time” in Scientific America a stark observation is made:

“Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time—a curlicue dimension, looped back onto itself. Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant. “We’re shrinking a spatial direction,” Paquette says. “But when we try to shrink it past a certain point, a new, large spatial direction emerges instead.”” (Becker, 2022)

The article goes on to state that in two radically different mathematics, one of the extremely small which deals with quantum mechanics called conformal field theory (CFT) and one of the extremely large which deals with gravity called anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, can each equally describe the very large and the very small, gravity and quantum mechanics. AdS has one more dimension in it than CFT. Four dimensional CFT encodes everything in AdS, in five-dimensional space. Two nearby regions of space on the AdS side correspond to two highly entangled quantum components of CFT.

Certainly, as we have mentioned a point can simply revert back to what it always was, an infinitesimal, ideal and not real. However, physics has discovered that infinitesimally small does not rest in infinity in practice but reverts to infinitely large. At some point the singularity, the infinity point, of a black hole may result in a big bang creating time and space, binding into mass and forces of atoms (electro-magnetic, weak and strong force) and gravity which unfold from pure energy into forces which clump as densities and time-space fabrics weighed down by mass, deforming time and space with a force called gravity. In all of this we find a circularity from chaos as massless pure unbound energy, neutrally charged with no attraction or repulsion to anything, simply popping in and out of existence prior to a universe.

Additionally, researchers have note that,

“The researchers’ previous investigation into the early universe replaced the idea of a Big Bang singularity, where the universe emerged from nothing, with the Big Bounce, where the current expanding universe emerged from a super-compressed mass that was created when the universe contracted in its preceding phase. They found that all of the large-scale structures of the universe accounted for by general relativity are equally explained by inflation after this Big Bounce using equations of loop quantum cosmology.

In the new study, the researchers determined that inflation under loop quantum cosmology also resolves two of the major anomalies that appear under general relativity.

“The primordial fluctuations we are talking about occur at the incredibly small Planck scale,” said Brajesh Gupt, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State at the time of the research and currently at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. “A Planck length is about 20 orders of magnitude smaller than the radius of a proton. But corrections to inflation at this unimaginably small scale simultaneously explain two of the anomalies at the largest scales in the universe, in a cosmic tango of the very small and the very large.”” (McCormick, 2020)

Pure energy is unbound energy. It is a cacophony, chaotic and unable to clump together as atoms. Heavier atom nuclei are created in the fusion of the sun. Protons and neutrons are held together in the nucleus by the strong force and are millions of times more bonded together than electrons that are bonded to an atom, especially in the outer shells. Atoms are waves which bind to each other. The Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle which is responsible for this harmony of wave-like bonds. The atom brings harmony to the world. Quantum mechanics comes from the word quanta which means discrete or digital as opposed to analog which has infinitesimally small ‘points’ which get ever closer together. The nuclei of atoms pull in free electrons from free ranging radiation, unbound energy such as photons and impose structure and order on them in the form of particles or bound energy. The closest cloud shell to the nucleus has a resonant frequency depending on the type of element. All the further shells are octaves of the first shell. Actually, electron particles are described mathematically as standing waves. These standing waves are harmonic octaves of energy ‘shells’ around the nuclei. When an orchestra resolves notes into octaves, we hear the sound as an agreement of sorts. Parmenides saw harmony as a balancing of opposites which gave illumination to the muses, to music. It was pleasing and created form from chaos. In physics we call this phenomenon standing waves.

Standing waves are a moment when waves combine perfectly to create their highest moment or amplitude. Instead of fighting each other the waves unite as a collectivity, a whole moment of their highest goal, culmination or perhaps, telos in Greek thought. This is the discrete octaves of quantum mechanics. The nuclei pull in chaotic radiation and photons to create an electron and an excess amount of energy which is called kinetic or in Aristotle’s terms ‘actual’ energy. The kinetic energy is spent keeping the electron in its quanta shell with angular momentum. The cool thing about an atom is the way it absorbs and radiates energy. When it is bombarded with energetic radiation, to a degree, it maintains its structural nucleus and spends and absorbs energy by binding or releasing electrons and using the energy produced in this creation to fuel its quanta shells. It is important to remember that these bounded electrons and the nuclei itself are waves. Electrons around the nucleus are more like waves in the ocean on a calm day. Atoms can maintain their nature, in Latin terms, without transitioning to another kind of nature, another kind of element. When radiation energy is too high atoms can lose or gain protons and neutrons in radioactive decay called fission or fusion. After this kind of storm of radiation atoms become something other than what they were, they transform to another element, a transposition of a musical key. Chemical bonds called molecules which make up cells are able to withstand a certain amount of abuse before they break down. This is due to the way atoms can absorb or radiate energy without changing their nature. Cells can maintain themselves with a certain amount of abuse before cancer sets in and changes their atomic nature.

What is important to understand in the previous discussion is that chaos, unbound energy, can harmonize, transform chaotic void to form. The atomic, harmonic moment is harmony in and from chaos, unbound radiation and free energy. They can also share electrons with other elements to become molecules, a symphony of octaves. String theory utilizes musical metaphors to capture how multidimensional time-space can bring sub-atomic particles into our universe. Form and order are not absolutes, they are momentary mirages in a desert of chaotic nothingness we call the universe. Form and order are not absolutes. They are a moment of a movement in the orchestration of existence. We are the audience of the music of the gods. We are serenaded by reality. It is our choice if we let the muses move us into the fleeting light or we harden our ears and become deaf to beauty, wonder and awe. Mass is the reality of a harmonic song. It is the clumping of energy into an orchestral symphony of standing waves, of harmonizing unity.

Space/time emerges from chaos. Without the clumping of wave/masses, the speed limit of light may not exist as the fabric of time-space could not emerge. For those of us in the light, we perceive sub-atomic particles of quantum mechanics chaotically existing and not existing since our universe is bound by light thrown through the prism of time-space abstractly at the speed of light in a perfect vacuum. Physics loves to isolate to see what happens to a phenomenon when it is alone and unaffected by externality. The problem is that a perfect vacuum does not exist except as an abstraction like a point. In reality, nothing exists alone, without an externality, at least in our universe. Physicists want to explore in localities. They want a compromise from a perfect vacuum to a delineated region they call a locality. They know that a locality is yet another abstraction because the universe defies localities on smaller and smaller scales. However, to greater or lesser degrees, the abstraction of localities can aid understanding. Macro phenomenon disappears into micro phenomenon which do not seem to care much about the macro and the rules of macro physics as smaller looms larger and larger. As the macro environment disappears into the micro-environment, the macro rules of physics become an abstraction. There is a radical divide between the macro and the micro. On the micro scale, we get Einstein’s, “spooky action at a distance” – entanglement. A particle is yet another abstraction like a point. Phenomena is wave-like. Waves in the ocean are created by gravity undulations. Particles focus the peaks of their waves to greater or lesser degrees. Particles can be thought as culminations or more visible, closely spaced, energy-wise, peaks. Particles are foci of energy waves. However, particles do not exist as some kind of Latin ‘substance’. What is more, these waves seem to be haunted by entanglement.

Entanglement is at the heart of quantum physics and future quantum technologies. Like other aspects of quantum science, the phenomenon of entanglement reveals itself at very tiny, subatomic scales. When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons, become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances. In the same way that a ballet or tango emerges from individual dancers, entanglement arises from the connection between particles. It is what scientists call an emergent property.

Entanglement can also occur among hundreds, millions, and even more particles. The phenomenon is thought to take place throughout nature, among the atoms and molecules in living species and within metals and other materials. When hundreds of particles become entangled, they still act as one unified object. Like a flock of birds, the particles become a whole entity unto itself without being in direct contact with one another. Caltech scientists focus on the study of these so-called many-body entangled systems, both to understand the fundamental physics and to create and develop new quantum technologies. As John Preskill, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair, and director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, says, “We are making investments in and betting on entanglement being one of the most important themes of 21st-century science.” (Article, What Is Entanglement and Why Is It Important?)

Entanglement is not a phenomenon of particles. In quantum mechanics it is a result of a mathematics which takes place in something called Hilbert space. Hilbert space can have infinite dimensions or a minimum of 2 dimensions (called qubits). While mathematics is certainly an abstraction, there is a physical component which would more properly be called waves than particles. Photons are commonly used to observe entanglement. Entanglement binds two waves and even networks, for the merely illustrative example of a tree given below. Entanglement occurs when the quantum wave functions collapse. Does it happen faster than the speed of light? No one knows for sure, but N. Gisin published a paper in 2001 suggesting that the wave function collapse happens somewhere between two-third the speed of light and 1.6 times the speed of light. see (H. Zbinden, 2001)

Whether it is truly instantaneous is still up for debate. However, interesting to note that identical behavior dependent on observation has no dependence on distance. Distance is space and space is time. So, it appears plausible to me that this phenomenon could be pre-emergent to time-space. As I mentioned in a previous post, the block universe tells us that the universe is static and time is emergent. The Wheeler-Dewitt equations predict this. For those of us in the universe it seems quite apparent that time has an arrow, from a past to a future. However, an external observer would see a painting rather than a symphony according to current physicists. Actually, the big bang or big bounce is an emergent theory of the universe. It describes how the three forces, strong, weak and electromagnetic forces evolved from a single force. If quantum gravity is correct, that also would be an emergent force. see (Ekaterina Moreva)

Entanglement appears to be highly volatile to certain types of noisy environments. It can have very short lifespans. It can also have sudden deaths and re-births for unknown reasons. see (A. Kowalewska-Kudlaszyk, 2010)

Entanglement may happen much more often than is commonly believed but so far it has been produced more in laboratory settings where disruptive variables can be controlled. Entanglement appears to defy time-space causal relations. However, the tale of entanglement is much more bizarre than that as this analogy tries to illustrate:

Suppose we have two entangled trees.

From one angle we can see the tree has three branches.

From another angle we can see the tree has four branches.

The entangled trees are on opposite sides of the universe, and no one is looking at them (the quantum wave function has not collapsed which means the trees have both three branches and four branches).

An observer is posted on each side of the universe to watch the trees.

One observer sees the tree has three branches.

Now, the other observer looks at the tree from the same angle as the first observer (the quantum wave function has collapsed).

Both observers see the tree has three branches.

Now, the second observer changes their angle, so the second observer sees four branches (the quantum wave function has not collapsed).

The first observer now has a 50% chance of seeing three branches and a 50% chance of seeing four branches.

However, if the first observer changes their angle of perception to match the second observer’s angle, both observers will see four branches (the quantum wave function has collapsed).

In some mysterious way the connection between the two is dependent on perception. This phenomenon is called uncertainty in quantum physics. Somehow what is entangled involves perception on the part of the observer and memory in the entangled objects. In this way, entanglement embodies memory. This is how quantum computers may be the future of artificial intelligence. Entanglement has been proven to absolutely defy locality. Einstein pushed the idea of locality so far as to hypothesize hidden, perhaps multi-dimensional variables, which were later conclusively disproven. Entangled particles could possibly occur all the time, whenever particle/wave collisions occur creating new particles and new anti-particles.

Entanglement lies at the heart of quantum mechanics, and in recent years has been identified as an essential resource for quantum information processing and computation. The experimentally challenging production of highly entangled multi-particle states is therefore important for investigating both fundamental physics and practical applications. Here we report the creation of highly entangled states of neutral atoms trapped in the periodic potential of an optical lattice. Controlled collisions between individual neighbouring atoms are used to realize an array of quantum gates, with massively parallel operation. We observe a coherent entangling-disentangling evolution in the many-body system, depending on the phase shift acquired during the collision between neighbouring atoms. Such dynamics are indicative of highly entangled many-body states; moreover, these are formed in a single operational step, independent of the size of the system. (Mandel, et al., 2003)

Under certain conditions entangled particles demonstrate non-causal relationships. This alone seriously jeopardizes the metaphysics of a mechanical universe which was prevalent in the 19th century. Physics and philosophy after this period have taken seriously the implications of a non-deterministic universe.

Could it be that everything that has ever happened in the universe from the infinitesimally small to infinitely large has been copied and retained by entanglement? That would be quite a leap from what we know now. However, if entangled particles can survive, the question of where the wandering entangled particle goes when it is created may not be absurd? If entanglement is pre-emergent of time-space, this would imply that entanglement is much more important to the emergence of time-space. And, since entanglement has two fundamental components: the observer and memory, it may be that information is not created and destroyed with the big bang and the heat death of the universe. Some believe, we may exist in a black hole. Could it be that information, even observation and memory, is stored on the boundary, the event horizon of the black hole in the form of ‘hairs’? Physicists have analogized this information as ‘hairs’ on the event horizon of the black hole. Could this be the face of our universe? Others, think of this information as a two-dimensional hologram on the surface of the universe. Could it be that everything that has ever happened, including reactions from our brain neurons to galaxies and worlds has been retained as memory somewhere such that no information is lost by the universe?

In this case, the memory of the universe is the score of the symphony. A score is static as a painting but why keep a score if there is no repeat performance? Form as the Greeks thought it has been meticulously recorded so that perhaps it will yet find another performance. There may be a reason the universe remembers but perhaps we will not be in the audience next time it is performed. Or perhaps, we will become better listeners next time. In any case, we certainly see a circularity in whatever reality is, not only in terms of creation and destruction, large and small, wave and particle but also in terms of temperature. We have the tendency to think in terms of linearity which inevitably brings on such questions as, what is outside the edge, the face of the universe? What is after this life? What was before the big bang? Linearity has evolved into metaphysics – the haunting question of how is nothing possible? If nothingness is impossible there must be a God. If nothingness is possible, it must be regardless of its perceived impossibility. All of these questions are spawned by the foreboding question of nothingness pro and con. Is nothingness spawned by the perception of linearity?

Linearity is the standing wave of our existence. It is the moment when the universe gathers itself, rouses itself, from the slumber of chaos and declares, “I am that I am” or tat tvam asi (Buddhism: thou art that; the union of Atman (individual, self, soul) and Brahman (universal consciousness, Absolute) as plurality/one, wave/particle uncertainty(?)…). Whatever we call reality, it is not an unchanging permeance otherwise it would be mechanical, the dead metaphysics of mechanism. The beauty of existence is the standing moment of harmony and unity which does not have to be, given the wave nature of reality arising out of pure energy, chaotic energy and yet, nevertheless, is. So, what about temperature? How is temperature non-linear in this sense? We think absolute zero Kelvin is the end of the temperature scale and some unknown large temperature is the high end of temperature. What if that is also circular?

A new study finds that there is a ‘negative’ to absolute zero Kelvin. Temperature is not fundamentally a measure of cold and hot, but it is really a measure of less or more active energy. While energy does have a zero point we think as absolute zero, the study shows that this is not the end of the story. At absolute zero all motion freezes, it stops – just as at the speed of light nothing can change, grow old and die, since time stops. The study shows that in a laboratory situation when temperature is zero and energy is motionless, change is possible in the ‘negative Kelvin direction’. The team pushed further in a highly controlled laboratory experiment to show results of high energetic activity after crossing the Kelvin zero point into the ‘negative’ domain. In our universe, we started out with a high level of pure energy in the big bang. However, with entropy, that higher level of energy gets ‘colder and colder’, more and more entropy, and the energy clumping level goes down until, in the heat death of the universe, the universe reaches absolute zero in which no change can occur. At this point there is no change just as when time stops at the speed of light. What the new experiment showed is that when pushed past zero into ‘negativity’ we get an immediate burst of high energy. As we push further into negativity the energy calms down.

On the absolute temperature scale, which is used by physicists and is also called the Kelvin scale, it is not possible to go below zero – at least not in the sense of getting colder than zero kelvin. According to the physical meaning of temperature, the temperature of a gas is determined by the chaotic movement of its particles – the colder the gas, the slower the particles. At zero kelvin (minus 273 degrees Celsius) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. Thus, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Physicists have now created an atomic gas in the laboratory that nonetheless has negative Kelvin values. These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behavior that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology.

According to the physical meaning of temperature, the temperature of a gas is determined by the chaotic movement of its particles – the colder the gas, the slower the particles. At zero kelvin (minus 273 degrees Celsius) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. Thus, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Physicists at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now created an atomic gas in the laboratory that nonetheless has negative Kelvin values. These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behaviour that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology. Supposedly impossible heat engines such as a combustion engine with a thermodynamic efficiency of over 100% can also be realised with the help of negative absolute temperatures.

 “The inverted Boltzmann distribution is the hallmark of negative absolute temperature; and this is what we have achieved,” says Ulrich Schneider. “Yet the gas is not colder than zero kelvin, but hotter,” as the physicist explains: “It is even hotter than at any positive temperature – the temperature scale simply does not end at infinity, but jumps to negative values instead.”

The achievement of the Munich physicists could additionally be interesting for cosmology, since the thermodynamic behaviour of negative temperature exhibits parallels to so-called dark energy. Cosmologists postulate dark energy as the elusive force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, although the cosmos should in fact contract because of the gravitational attraction between all masses. There is a similar phenomenon in the atomic cloud in the Munich laboratory: the experiment relies upon the fact that the atoms in the gas do not repel each other as in a usual gas, but instead interact attractively. This means that the atoms exert a negative instead of a positive pressure. As a consequence, the atom cloud wants to contract and should really collapse – just as would be expected for the universe under the effect of gravity. But because of its negative temperature this does not happen. The gas is saved from collapse just like the universe.” (S. Braun, 2013)

Doesn’t this remind us intuitively of anti-particles, dark matter, dark energy and even the singularity, the zero point of a black hole? We know that the universe is expanding and will eventually result in the heat death of the universe but is heat death the end like absolute zero? What happens when energy is frozen and motionless? Does it linearly stay that way forever? That would be impossible since time, or change, is no more as we also think occurs at the speed of light, how can we call that zero point an instant, a moment of time, since time-space is no more?

What is more, in 2005 a study was published, “Influence of quantum entanglement on quantum tunnelling between two atomic Bose-Einstein condensates [rapid communication]” (Zeng & Kuang, 2005), which showed that close to zero degrees Kelvin atoms are in a highly coherent state. This means they are stable, and all occupy the same position in space. When they separated these atoms into two clouds, they found that the two clouds were entangled and remained entangled. This generated much excitement from quantum computing research.

Quantum tunneling is essential to fusion. It is an odd phenomenon that allows electrons to move through potential energy barriers which would normally offer a high degree of difficulty for the electron waves to penetrate. It is based on the quantum wave function which, like the tree branch example, utilizes uncertainty to perform a totally different kind of computation than our current digital technology allows. Our brains work like quantum computers. We can recognize images and make associations faster because we can deal with probabilities without have to perform very complex matrix operations in a more serial, linear, operation which can only use zeros and ones. Quantum computing allows much faster computational rates than our current computers. This is because the technology is much smaller than our current computing technology. It is also able to perform calculations in multi-dimensional, matrix operations. The matrix operations are highly scalable so more complex matrixes simply use more qubits. A qubit is a quantum bit. It can be in a state of 0 or 1 or both 0 and 1, like the tree branch example. This allows it to compute complex probability equations much faster using quantum transistors.

When researchers were able to couple quantum tunnelling with quantum entanglement at near zero degrees Kelvin, they found that this increased the possibilities for quantum computing exponentially from mere quantum tunneling. Article, (A quantum entanglement between two physically separated ultra-cold atomic clouds, 2018) If true, artificial intelligence is possible, it would have to be based on this technology. I was a skeptic for a long time because it seemed that for a time, artificial intelligence was really a marketing spin on expert systems. However, with quantum computing we are most likely employing the same ‘technology’ that our brains use AND that technology has the capacity to far out ‘think’ our brains. See (Article, What is a qubit?), (Article, Quantum tunnelling), (Article, What Is Entanglement and Why Is It Important?)

If intelligence is endemic to the universe as I believe, then, while it burns my fingers to type this, could it be that close to plus zero degrees Kelvin we have some indication that there is a capacity for a ‘brain’ that would make our brains look like a piece of wood? Okay, I know that sounds nutty, and likely is nutty, but not as nutty as certain politics these days (equivocations for fun). However, why have an ultra-mega-supercomputer if it is not used? While some may call this the mind of God. I would simply say that it is mind or as Plato would say, the form of which we only perceive shadows. However, these shadows are not copies of some absolute. They/we participate in the first moments (which are not anything like our time-space moments) of creation and destruction just as entanglement, likely is pre-emergent from, and gives rise to, time-space. My only redemption in thinking this is that, unlike a new-ager, I have no problem being wrong as I am merely musing.

We know that pure energy has massless, and even neutrally charged moments of pure, unbound energy in which sub-atomic, particle/waves pop in and out of existence, perhaps below and above the speed limit of light or somehow still ‘are’ that zero point where time-space has not yet emerged. Is this how we can see such artifacts of pre-emergent time/space as entanglement? I think of Shunyata in Buddhism which has been translated as emptiness, but I think of it more as Aperion in classic Greek which is more closely translated as the fertile void. There is nothing to constrain pure energy to be in this universe. Additionally, we know there are darker and colder spots in the current universe from the background heat radiation of the big bang, perhaps the fingerprint of God? Could these dark spots indicate the transition from absolute zero to negative Kelvin still at work in our universe? – before the fabric of space and time, pre-light, when light was anti-light, matter was anti-matter, energy was dark, mass was dark. Is our universe still a composite of this pre-time and its other? Could it be that when a black hole breaks reality down into a singularity it reaches a zero point where nothing is bound, nothing can move, time cannot exist and, therefore, -we can relieve ourselves of the impossible idea that more and more stuff can be crammed into nothingness and still retaining its linear, ‘stuff-ness’. Perhaps a black hole is the transition from,

stuff => no-stuff => anti-stuff => repeat

or from,

universe => heat death of the universe => zero point => immense stuff => repeat

in the opening moments of another big bang. In this case, creation and destruction are bookmarked by zero points where negative Kelvin, the speed of light, marks the transition from,

universe of high energy dying in entropy => the nothingness of zero, motionless, changeless, timeless => high energy, anti-universe (noteworthy that anti-universe would be indistinguishable from our universe or universes) => anti-entropy, increasingly lower energy => once again the zero point => beginning all over again.

If the speed of light is the limit of time and zero degrees Kelvin is the limit of space, then time-space is emergent from this limit. The limit is both the end and the beginning of time-space. Additionally, traces of another time-space an anti-time-space are still with us as dark energy, dark matter, anti-matter.

Could it be <time-space> and <speed of light-zero degrees Kelvin> are cousins of someone who plays dice with the universe?

All of this is shrouded in the wave of uncertainty and anti-matter. Anti-particles are created every time a particle is created. Anti-matter has been created ever since the big bang. Anti-matter annihilates matter but due the Higgs boson matter wins out in our universe. Could it be the opposite in the anti-universe?

The energy of the Big Bang can be converted into particles with mass, via E = mc². However, this conversion happens only in a particular way: every time a particle of matter is created, along with it an associated particle of anti-matter must also be created. That is, when an electron is created from energy, an anti-electron (positron) is also created; when a proton is created, so is an anti-proton, and so on. Each anti-particle has exactly the same properties as its ordinary matter counterpart: exactly the same mass, the same size of electric charge (but of opposite sign). To turn mass back into energy, one matter and an equivalent antimatter particle must annihilate each other. (Article, Prof. David DeMille awarded Cottrell Plus SEED award, 2021)

In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation of physics tells us that uncertainty is a real as anything else we call reality. It agrees that uncertainty is reality. It also agrees that the looming questions of anti-reality and uncertainty, should be ignored in so far as it does not produce any real results.

So, pragmatism should win out over unanswerable questions. Yet, uncertainty is the basis of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics makes probability guesses about energies and wave/particles. It does so highly accurately which is why we talk about technology, computers and quantum computers (the next evolution of computers). However, what the Copenhagen agreement agrees to ignore might be exactly why we cannot reconcile the macro and the micro, gravity and the three forces (strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force). Are we still looking for a linear-like mechanism, a ‘pragmatism of uncertainty’ (oxymoron or Zen Koan) which cannot be found in nature or mathematics? Uncertainty is real and usable in physics to a high degree, but the implications may go much further than practicality will allow. Pure energy as motionless, timeless, changeless, the architype of zero, is but a moment when moments are impossible so we call that eternity; may as well ‘be’ – if ‘be’ here is thought for lack of better word. I see this as a type of nexus where philosophy and physics need to come back together to complete themselves in a way which cannot be accomplished separately, linearly/mechanically/causally/deterministically/absolutely. The two are at least on speaking terms after the great divorce of the Royal Society and the transmutation of alchemy. Further back still we have the possibilities all laid out in astonishing detail from the pre-Socratics of Anaximander and Heraclitus to Parmenides who is told by the goddess:

TRUTH

Come, I shall tell you, and do you listen and convey the story,
What routes of inquiry alone there are for thinking:
The one- that (it) is, and that (it) cannot be,
Is the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon truth);
The other- that (it) is not and that (it) needs must not be,
That I point out to you to be a path wholly unlearnable,
For you could not know what-is-not (for that is not feasible),
Nor could you point it out.
(areopagite, 202)

If the universe requires observers, listeners of the muses, we must not think that this means Homo sapiens. Beauty, wonder and awe can lapse into mechanics, mere causality and determinism. In this case, the death of music has become the static death of possibility. All is mere repetition, simulacra and simulation. If we choose the path of appreciative observation, do we end as Aristotle did in Nicomachean Ethics and the later revised Eudemian Ethics? -On happiness and virtue? Would this be the telos, the culmination of a life well lived? – the best observer and participatory engagement with the universal muses? Mechanics speaks of self-engagement. Mechanics does not require an other to itself. It merely needs to fulfill its cog-like function. Externality is abandoned in favor of isolated function. Does the universe spring forth the other as a face to be recognized? Is recognition purely pragmatic where any excess is mere interaction as language games, is accounted for as superfluous, mere whim, simply an all too human fabrication? If so, why is there something rather than nothing? A cog in a machine needs to know nothing, it simply functions until it doesn’t. Does the universe bring forth form and order from chaos so it cannot be recognized beyond function? Why do we reflect and observe infinites and uncertainties which astound and confound us? How far can we let the face of the other be more than ships passing in the night, quarks popping in and out of existence? Is recognition and participation as a possibility built into the universe, into the other, which sparks and invites recognition, responsibility and ethics? I will explore these topics in a later post.

References

A.Kowalewska-Kudlaszyk, W. L. (2010). Sudden death of entanglement and its rebirth in a system of two nonlinear oscillators. Physica Scripta, 2010, 014051. Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sudden-death-of-entanglement-and-its-rebirth-in-a-Kowalewska-Kudlaszyk-Leo%C5%84ski/c3ce044260abfa80d3d4288abb75ba6e58b45f83

areopagite, a. d. (202, November 18). Commentary on Parmenides’s On Nature. Retrieved from https://dionysiosareopagite.substack.com/p/commentary-on-parmenidess-on-nature

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What is Reality?

I have had several conversations recently which I think bring up this interesting question. My background in a lifetime of interest in philosophy and physics has sometimes caused me to over-assume that others are aware to some degree of how 19th century metaphysics of mechanics is still very dominate in most folks thinking. The metaphysics of mechanics assume an absolute time and space dominated by Cartesian metaphysics in which Renes’ Descartes writing in the 17th century declares, “I think, therefore I am”. At the very beginning of the Scientific Revolution, time and space was thought through the metaphor of a machine. This was no ‘spooky action at a distance’ but with Newton there soon would be ‘action at a distance’ with gravity and later with electromagnetism. The notion of aether had been around for a very long time before Newton but Newton would attribute gravity to a Christian God. Therefore, it was reasonable that shortly before the birth of Newton, Descartes in keeping with Latin Christianity would think of reality as subject and object. The subject was the domain of aether, God, mind, spirit, etc. and the object was matter, substance, body, just dead stuff. This metaphysic of absolute dualism would make the Mechanical Revolution of the 18th and 19th century possible. I use metaphysic from the Latin as the Christianized transformation from Aristotle’s works on ‘first philosophy’ or being as such. This metaphysic became ‘reality’. It became a largely unquestioned assumption which underscores more the impact and vast significance of history as human than any such thing as the ‘real’.

In the 19th century Hegel’s dialectic shattered with great genius and logic this dominate metaphysic. His impact was so devastating that reactions to Hegel spun off Karl Marx and communism (long before the Russian Revolution). Marx vigorously opposed the bourgeois Hegel in favor of material dialecticism. Hegel also spun off the British Empiricists and Adam Smith which became the foundation of capitalism. What was so devastating about Hegel’s observations? Hegel pointed out clearly that the dominate metaphysic of his day was an abstraction. It was not a matter denying the ‘reality’ of Cartesian dualism but of showing how it was an abstraction. Kant tells us,

For human reason, impelled by its own need rather than moved by the mere vanity of gaining a lot of knowledge, proceeds irresistibly to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason and any principles taken from such use. And thus all human beings, once their reason has expanded to [the point where it can] speculate, actually have always had in them, and always will have in them, some metaphysics.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Isaac Topete writes,

Kant posits a two-fold constitution of knowledge by the two faculties of understanding and sensibility, and thereby, rejects the hypothesis of an intuitive understanding. With these two stances in mind, Hegel—within the Science of Logic—is critical of Kant insofar as he sees these above positions by Kant as detrimental to the project of idealism. Detrimental in the sense that Hegel thinks that Kant’s position is self-contradictory to the extent that concepts exist only in relation to appearance (i.e. illusory being) and, hence, concepts do not have any actual ‘truth’ to them insofar as they only apply haphazardly. So, from the perspective of Hegel, for Kant, concepts are derivative and hold no actual traction beyond that which appears. This, therefore, leads to Hegel’s attempt to critique and overcome these Kantian assumptions within the Science of Logic. (Topete)

Kant distinguished concepts from the ‘thing in itself’ or noumenon as opposed to phenomenon or manifestations – concepts. So, Kant was still to some extent working from Cartesian metaphysics. However, even Kant was already thinking clearly about the absolute abstractions of concepts and their inability to sustain any such thing as ‘reality’ without essentially being a metaphysic. Hegel shows through rigorous and extensive writings that Kant’s dualism resulting in the ‘thing in itself’ could not stand as Kant intended but even Kant’s unstated dualism was itself merely Concept. Hegel thinks Kant is still a victim of abstraction in that he could not break with some notion of reality which maintained the opposition of noumenon and phenomenon. This was the beginning of the end for Cartesian dualism over one hundred and fifty years ago.

Philosophy after Hegel broke into two main divisions: Continental and Analytic Philosophy. Continental meaning mainland Europe and Analytic meaning chiefly United States. However Analytic Philosophy grew out of the British Empiricist’s reaction to Hegel and the German Idealists. Both strains of philosophy have also traversed to widely varying degrees away from the mechanics of Cartesian reality.

Continental philosophy eloquently shows the break from the classical world to the modern world beginning with Existentialism and into phenomenology. Existentialism was focused on the matter of existing in a daily world and how to live without the metaphysics which made the classical world possible. Phenomenology was contemporaneous in the early 20th century with Einstein and Relativity. While not directly affecting each other they had some interesting parallels. Phenomenology started in earnest when Edmund Husserl began by focusing not on abstractions of metaphysics but how phenomenon shows itself from intentionality. As human we always encounter the world with intention which is not passive but active in determining what shows itself. His student Martin Heidegger also working from Husserl discusses two examples of how this works. Heidegger asks how do we experience spatiality? Do we encounter it as linear extension, as feet or inches from objects?

Actually, linear extension is an abstraction. It is a grid we impose on the world. Even Einstein tells us space is not linear but relative to time and frames of perspective. ‘Long’ and ‘short’ change relative to the speed of light. For Heidegger, we have lived-space. We bring close and distance ourselves from regions of contoured spatiality. While the glasses on our face may be much closer to us in linear extension our lived space is what our intentions are occupying in interests beyond and through our glasses. When we are in a class room there is a space between the teacher and the students which we experience as different regions where possibilities are delineated in advance. Lived space is not devoid of everything except dead extension. It is alive and has various qualities which inform us about ourselves, others and the world and how we act in various regionalities. Additionally, lived-time is not linear now moments. Lived time has a stretch of duration from a past through a present to a future. When we are happy ‘time flies’ and when we are bored or depressed time slows to a halt. Lived-time is a stretch of qualities and not just dead time. In terms of Einstein, time is relative to us, our frame of reference. Continental philosophy goes on to show how time and space are concretized by qualities of our experience of them.

Continental philosophy moved on in the mid to latter 20th century to structuralism and poststructuralism, modernism and post-modernism. These movement encompassed vast areas beyond philosophy including architecture, art, feminism, etc. These movements laid a foundation for a critique of abstractions from the classical and modern world and showed how their influences became occasions for violence and domination both to ourselves and our environment. Derrida showed through deconstruction how dominate, historic narratives must necessarily include their own antithesis and undoing. Fanaticism and terrorism result from their inevitable collapse. Furthermore, any form of structuralism is doomed to carry the seeds of its own demise. Derrida even goes so far as to say that “deconstruction deconstructs itself”. A case and point here is the interesting turns we find in Analytic Philosophy.

Analytic philosophy got its impetus from getting back to the senses in British Empiricism and not German Idealism. However, it quickly became entangled in linguistics, semantic and syntax. Once it emerged from the logic of language it took on the philosophy of language in a much more evasive role.

Those who use the term “philosophy of language” typically use it to refer to work within the field of Anglo-American analytical philosophy and its roots in German and Austrian philosophy of the early twentieth century. Many philosophers outside this tradition have views on the nature and use of language, and the border between “analytical” and “continental” philosophy is becoming more porous with time, but most who speak of this field are appealing to a specific set of traditions, canonical authors and methods. (PhiIn)

I am not as familiar with the Analytic tradition but I understand that sense perception has become inseparable from language games, context, intentions, intersubjectivity and histories. Rudolf Carnap even went so far as to substitute intention for sense. Contextuality is not something added on to reality but constituent of reality. The ‘Pittsburg Hegelians’ have even taken Analytic Philosophy back to Hegel in some important respects. Writing of Wilfred Sellars (an important advocate of the Pittsburg Hegelians) Willem A. deVries writes,

For both Hegel and Sellars, the sociality of thought entails also its historicity. We always operate with a less than ultimately satisfactory conceptual framework that is fated to be replaced by something more satisfactory, whether on the basis of conceptual or empirical considerations… Sellars denies both that there are ‘atoms’ of knowledge or meaning independent of their relation to other ‘pieces’ of knowledge or meaning, and that they are structured in a neat hierarchy rather than an interlocking (social) network. The determinate content of a thought or utterance is fixed by its position in the space of implications and employments available to the community in its language or conceptual framework. This kind of holism is congenial to Hegelian modes of thinking… Hegel is an epistemological realist: he rejects the idea that we do not (or are not even able to) know things as they are in themselves. Yet neither Hegel nor Sellars wants to reject altogether the distinction between phenomenal reality and things as they are in themselves. Sellars calls the distinction between the phenomenal and the real the distinction between the manifest and the scientific images of man in the world.

Hegel provides for numerous phenomenal realities related in ways that require a phenomenology to understand. It is not the distinction between phenomenon and reality itself that Hegel and Sellars attack, but the notion that it is absolute, establishing an unbridgeable divide.

McDowell, however, is concerned to defend our ‘openness to the layout of reality’ and seems not to take seriously the idea that we might have systematically false beliefs about the nature of things… The strategy, boiled down, is this: Kant’s critical philosophy is formulated in terms of basic dualisms, apriori/aposteriori, analytic/synthetic, receptivity/spontaneity, even empirical science/philosophy. Hegel insists that trapped in these dualisms Kant cannot satisfactorily explain human cognition or action. The gaps imposed by the assumed dualisms never get properly bridged. (deVries)

DeVries goes on to state that Sellars rejects the standard static interpretation given by Hegel in Hegel’s absolutisms. The important point here is that even the arch-typical school of sense empiricism has re-discovered, perhaps in some novel ways, the radical and complete loss of metaphysical ground which dominated the West from the Roman Empire to the 19th century.

Physics tells us of the absolute (if you will) relativity of ‘objects’ in which size and even temporal existence is contingent. In quantum mechanics it appears that even the notion of a particle is simply relative concentrations of energetic field densities more like micro and macro waves and currents in the ocean. Subatomic ‘particles’ with no mass (infinitesimal forces popping in and out of existence) energize these densities to create mass, gravity and their relative temporalities. This tells us that a ‘particle’ as a solid piece of matter is an abstraction which we have told ourselves through history based more on a quasi-scientific/theological notion of Newton’s absolute time and space. Newton told us gravity as action at a distance was God.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle even tells us that there are aspects of phenomena which are impossible to reconcile (position and momentum of the wave-particle). This hits at the very heart of logic as built upon the principle of non-contradiction.

Schrödinger’s cat in the box thought experiment tells us the cat in the box can both be alive and dead at the same time. This is really an observation about the mathematics of superposition which is the basis of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics tells us about infinite possibilities which are actualized, made real, by observation. The immediate reaction of many including myself years ago was, ‘Are we saying that everything is subjective?’ This jump to subjectivity was the only possibility given to us by our metaphysics when confronted with this observation.

Einstein referred to entanglement as ‘spooky action at a distance’. Most quantum fields have a property called spin. These fields become constituents of many particles such as an electron. One characteristic of spin is called up and down. This is really how a magnetic field effects the orientation of the field. When particles such as an electron become entangled with each other they form a pair that can be separated by billions of light years and a magnetic field on one electron will instantly change the orientation of the other electron no matter what the distance between the two electrons. This seems to violate Einstein’s basic postulate which tells us nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. This appears to violate a fundamental law of physics concerning locality. Einstein thought perhaps there were hidden variables which could explain this problem. One possibility could be that the universe is composed of more dimensions than four, three dimensions of space and one of time. Locality is intuitively thought as the ‘me’, the ‘I’ of ‘I think, therefore I am’. History has taught us that we are all absolute individuals. We have a certain sacred and protected domain which endows us with sacred, unalienable and unquestionable ‘rights’. We typically downplay the absolute of individuality with the equal and opposite other half of rights which is responsibility.

The notion of a multi-dimensional universe has contributed to many-worlds theory (which goes all the way back to the Greeks). String theory and parallel universes coupled with Schrödinger’s observation tell us that possibilities may be more than reality fictions but fundamentally comprise the ‘stuff’ of reality. What we thought as dead stuff, substance, may have much more to it that could make the boundaries of what is thought as living and dead a more complex problem.

Dark energy is thought to comprise 73% of all mass and energy in the universe. Additionally, dark matter is thought to comprise another 23% of the universe. The leaves 4% to comprise everything we see such as planets, stars and people. And, we really have no clue what it is. We know it must exist because we see its effects like wind in the trees. Dark matter and dark energy may solve a problem which resulted in perhaps Einstein’s greatest blunder, the cosmological constant. In short, Einstein inserted this ‘x’ factor into his equations to make relativity of time and space work with gravity. This made the universe static and kept the universe from flying apart. However, many subsequent discoveries have leads us to the dark halls of dark energy and matter as the reason why the universe does not fly apart. Without the gravitational effects of dark matter and energy we would have to accept the almost theological explanation of Einstein’s ‘x’ factor. The mystery of what dark matter and energy tell us is to buckle up, we really know very little about reality.

What is the real? It is neither subjective nor objective but those tired old metaphysics should tell us more about who we are that what reality is. We have inherited ‘filters’ which help us make sense of the world in language and history. Language and history are as much a part of our anatomy as our heart is. The ‘real’ is not some absolute, everlasting reality apart from us to which we are enslaved but essential to us in an ‘essentially’ indeterminate way. Philosophy and physics have come together to show us that our ability to abstract not only is the ‘real’ but somehow indeterminately determinate of what gets taken up as ‘real’.

To speak of the ‘real’ in this way is not to deny the ‘real’ but to put the ‘real’ in a more nuanced and less abstract way than historic embodiments which grossly oversimplify and distort ‘isness’. These distortions lead to the worst of human behavior as they champion the heroic ‘defender of the faith’ at any horrific cost. The threats to reality are manufactured inherent in ‘reality’ not imputed from the unrepentant. We do not really know to what extent our forceful expectations of ‘reality’ force the reality we ultimately find. It may be that the worlds we create become our tomb and not the occasion for an ‘other’, infinitely removed from our metaphysical prisons.

Creation did not happen from our reality but from a reality we never knew. Language was not our invention after birth but in some indeterminate and historic fashion constitutes who we are, what ‘reality’ is or isn’t. It constitutes a past that never was our personal past but somehow participates intimately in our moments and after-moments of creation, of birth. To think of ourselves as an absolute individual is perhaps the momentous sin of ‘reality’ which ignores the grace which makes us possible. We owe a debt to creation, the moment of birth, that gives gifts and makes possible language and meaning. It is up to us as to how we embody these gifts with wistful arrogance or humble gratitude. The other, the he or the she, is not diminished or captured by our petty judgements of them. They are as much the miracle of who we are as language, as ‘reality, as the indeterminate infinity which we choose together and apart. The possibility of ethics is a choice, perhaps the only choice we can make. Over one hundred and fifty years we have traversed from ‘I think, therefore I am’ to ‘We think, therefore we are’. We can welcome this transformation or die fighting it but who is to say if we meet our apocryphal demise, another unaccounted, unrecognized moment of creation will not create infinites of ‘realities’ which once again ask for gratitude, grace and ethical desire for what we know not.

Works Cited

(n.d.). Philosophy of Language. Retrieved from https://iep.utm.edu/lang-phi/

deVries, W. A. (n.d.). Hegel’s Revival in Analytic Philosophy. Retrieved from https://mypages.unh.edu/sites/default/files/wad/files/devries_hegels_revival_in_analytic_philosophy.pdf

Topete, I. (n.d.). Idealism from Kant to Hegel. Retrieved from https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/University%20Honors%20Program/Journals/isaac_topete.pdf

Thoughts on the Afterlife and Other Tales

Part of the beauty of life is not knowing. ‘Knowing’ has a tendency for reduction. It can dampen basic questions of existence. It can provide an answer, at least a contingent answer. It has the allure of solace, comfort, and security. While it does dampen the angst of existence, it also dampens the intensity of passions; of beauty, wonder and awe. It also squelches creativity. Creativity is the catalyst which made science and our present lived-world possible. In religion, the lack of distance from God undermines the passion of the Holy. It gives ready-made answers in lieu of faith. God talks to devotees in regular and daily conversation which they all too happy to tell us about. Whatever happened to the passion of faith was a problem Kierkegaard brought to our attention. Kierkegaard tells us that we do not need faith to believe that 1 + 1 = 2. We have no real stake in the daily and absolute knowledge of a God we know and understand with absolute certainty. That is not faith but the mechanical garbs of science without the objectivity of facts and instead, the subjective experience of knowledge which has become an unfalsifiable fact, which is intolerant of doubt. What we have in this case is the inception of extremism that can solipsistically know no other. What this really brings to the surface is a uniquely historic, 19th century, worldview in which absolute time and space came into fruition with the Industrial Revolution. This is why religious modernity and capitalism have become cozy bedfellows and why anything such as a ‘Trump’ was made possible in the vestibules of faith. All the resentment in religious, reaction to enlightenment is,

“Wokeism makes you lose, ruins your mind, and ruins you as a person”

which Trump tells us is why the US soccer team lost. Enlightenment as the result of unbridled positivism in an empirical reality of objective science has in religious modernity become a battle cry for God-Enlightenment. Science is no longer needed; education has become a vehicle for radical “Wokeism” in which one knows all especially about “two Corinthians”.

The path of religion in post modernity is riddled with extremism, danger and desperation. Kierkegaardian passion of faith has been replaced with social media’s fanaticism to indoctrinate and dominate more and more adherents to ‘Sleepism’. Anti-enlightenment is the new battle cry of those who will not settle for anything less than total and absolute submission to the social, economic, political, moral theory of everything which grows as a cancer in the rapidly evolving dogma of religious groupthink. Religion has been replaced with Mephistopheles’ ‘hell of a deal’ when you accept Jesus Christ as you Lord and Savior. You are welcomed into the on-line group where you all become one in everything you always wanted to know about; everything with rapidly evolving answers of salvation, politics, morality, economics, “Wokeism” in general. In all this we see a radical conformism which consumes without cessation. Has this become the actualization of Nietzsche’s “last man”? What we see in ‘sleepism’ is lucid dreaming which can only end in nightmare. The looming problem of ‘sleepism’ that it robs us of what made religions a reality in the first place. Religion was not born of ready-made answers although, like manna from heaven which was miraculous edible substance, decays in institutionalism and even faster now with virtual reality. Could it be that ‘mana’ has been replaced with manna:

Mana is the spiritual life force energy or healing power that permeates the universe, in the culture of the Melanesians and Polynesians. Anyone or anything can have mana. It is a cultivation or possession of energy and power, rather than being a source of power. It is an intentional force. (Wikipedia)

In the interest of provoking some whimsical and perhaps more fresh questioning on the topic of an afterlife, I would like to attempt a thought experiment.

We know that the universe has memory to an exquisite degree. Scientists call this information theory. Entropy is key to information theory as it is a predictor of more and less information. Physicists have traditionally shown that information is encoded in the most intricate and exquisite workings of the universe. Stephen Hawking went against this knowledge base in showing that information might be lost in the long death of a black hole which is called “Hawking radiation”. A long and intense battle with physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerald t’ Hooft ensued in 2008 and ended in the “Susskind quashes Hawking in quarrel over quantum quandary” with the holographic principle. The holographic principle shows that radiation receives quantum corrections which encodes information about the black hole’s interior and thus retains information. Later theories offer further alternatives to the loss of information in non-unitary time evolution. The point here is that the universe has an exquisite memory. Even if other universes exist with vastly different ‘laws of physics’ (coined and piggybacked in Latin Christianity as ‘natural laws’), information theory is still an absolute necessity as only the Hesiodic theory of chaos would be the absolute loss of information…more about this later. Information is also clearly exhibited in chromosomes and the evolution of species. Instinct is also another evident form of information theory.

If the universe has memory in the form of information, it is not hard to understand that information theory is the retention of memory. While I personally am 50/50 on the certain knowledge that an afterlife is possible, I do find that apart from religious concerns, it is not hard to make the uncertain leap from information theory to a thought that information could be retained in the form of memory in other realities. I think this not so much from a personal desire for any kind of ‘proof of an afterlife’ but more from a non-mechanical, 19th century, basis which finds truly astounding and quite unmoored observations in the recent century of Continental and Analytic philosophy trends. Even in the 19th century, in Hegel there is a foreshadowing of information theory in his notion of Concept. Metaphysics, a Latin term not ancient Greek, is a tradition which counters what philosophy and science is telling us about what we [metaphysically] ‘think’ as reality. The question of objectivity and subjectivity are both brought into fundamental question. This Cartesian dilemma which encapsulates much of modernity in historic certainty has truly been overcome in recent trends in philosophy and physics. We see this most clearly in Phenomenology, Structures and History of Language and physics starting in the early 20th century in Einstein’s Relativity Principle. What all this is telling us is that what we think we know is more about who we are and less about reality.

I would not be surprised in the least if there was an ‘afterlife’ which retained the intimate information of what we think as ‘my life’ or ‘our history’. Knowledge does not have to be Blanchot’s unescapable impossibility of death or Sartre’s horror of No-Exit. Neither does it have to be absolute extinction into the impossibility of nothingness. Knowledge itself may be a clue, a bread crumb, to a retention intrinsic to the universe. In Hegelian terms perhaps the universe itself is a retreat from what he deems ‘Absolute Concept’. The larger point for the purposes of this post is to attempt to unmoor ourselves from the supposed history we think as reality and point to a confluence of fundamental inquiries which do not ‘add’ to our current understanding of reality but actually and radically transform our ‘sleepism’ into a ‘wokeism’ which cannot be escaped except into deeper sleep. In sleep we find the brain escapes into non-sense. Perhaps the brain’s cure of too much apparent sense is to counter with a truth of its own; to what may point to an other, a radical other from all our Platonic Forms which history has made static and a kind of living death. Levinas called this static-sation, totalization. Totalization has been saturated through and through with the notion of being, what philosophers call ontology (the study of being). Totalization reduces absolutely. It denies the face in Levinas’ terms. The face absolutely counters the concretization in which sleep-fully determines who and what the other is. Truly totalization is Blanchot’s death of language, Satres No-Exit, and Levinas’ “there-is” in which the ‘I’ entombs itself as if to find relief from the radical alterity of the other. We have devised intricate, historic, linguistic escapisms to give us certainty or apparent certainty in the face of radical otherness. Our dreams tells us that our waking life is fundamentally contradictory and inadequate. Hesiod tells us that chaos or more precisely the ‘yawning gap’ is the face of the-an-other which we tirelessly want to retreat from. We have fashioned for ourselves an oasis in the chaos which we think is dry land but firmly rooted in sub-atomic particles popping in and out of existence in which the vastness a subatomic space implies infinitely more space than matter (if there really is such a thing) – gap, is the root of our realities and incessant daydreams. Perhaps waking up is discovering what we do not know, what inspires creativity and wonder, is vastly more meaningful than what we think we know. All the while an other, the other, which requires ethics, decision, to counter the incredible smallness of our certainties; to actively hold open the beauty of infinities which we behold every day in waking sleep.

On Death

Death is not something that happens at the end of life. As Blanchot mentions in the quote at the end of my recent post,

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying…. I have no relationship with it, it is that toward which I cannot go, for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not finish dying ― Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death.

The only way I experience death is through life. Death is strictly a phenomenon of life. The fear of death is a fear of life as life and death are inseparable. The death of my son in 2017 is not ‘his’ death. He is not experiencing death as he is not mortal any longer; not living. Chris is not human now. He was a beautiful, young, and amazing human but now his humanity is in my heart, my memory, my pain. This is where he dwells now in me and those who knew and loved him. The pain of death is the pain of living. It is not optional but essential. The question remains, how shall we live in the essence of death?

Death is a zenith. It is where life disappears into the infinity of horizon. It is not the horror of hell or bliss of heaven. It is the gate of the infinite. Mortality cannot pass through its gate. The absolute fluidity of this universe breaks upon the shores of death in which there is no return. Does death start where it began as if some universal law of physics requires it to do so?

What we know of physics is that there is a vast multitude of possible and actual physics. The laws of physics in our current universe are themselves a zenith of time and place. The ‘laws’ are an invention of circumstance. According to physicists, they were radically different at the beginning. If not for slightly more matter than antimatter after the ‘big bang’ or the ‘big bounce’ we would not be here at all. As to the question of what’s ‘outside’ the universe we are told two things: 1) Outside is a conventional notion we have derived from this time, this space, this circumstance and says nothing about this mythical notion of an outside to the universe, 2) If there are other universes, they have radically different physics. They would have absolutely no necessity placed on them to mimic our space/time physics in this singular moment of our circumstance.

So, this tells us that even this moment we call ‘life’ is itself a zenith caught on the brink of infinity. We stare infinity in the face every moment of our existence and found or are found by language as history to pacify our delusions of security as we draw in the breath of ‘I’. We forget the boundless ocean of eternity we stand on the shores of. We rationalize and sanctify and flee in the face of this awe and beauty and wonder which is the essence which can no longer be thought as ‘essence’. There is no ground beneath our feet only instantaneous, massless ‘particles’ better thought as infinitesimal force fields which pop in and out of existence and declare, “I am”. What we need in the face of eternity is perspective not absolute determinations.

We breath ‘we’ in this eternity of temporality. Sure, we have individual bodies which are really a communion of organism, cells, molecules, atoms, infinitesimals popping in and out of existence but somehow organizing themselves as an illusion of a whole, a body, my body. We communicate with language which we did not invent but in some undeciphered way acquired from a history we never knew or experienced. ‘Understanding’ is not a something but an acquisition of a ‘not me’, a gift given without merit or even existence as ‘mine’. We think ‘me’ from ‘we’. The ‘me’ that protests, that complains, that judges is a construction of the ‘we’ of language which speaks and has spoken and will speak with and without me, my existence. In all our languages we face plurality of other languages. Not just human but also animal languages, plant languages (actual science behind this). Existence is language. It is communication. It is the physics of interaction. It is the boundary conditions. It is the face. The face is not just a ‘presentation’, a presence. It is an absence of infinity which cannot present itself except as the boundary conditions of this moment, this interaction, this ‘idea’ of reality.

‘Idea’ informs us of notions which give reason, promise meaning, promotes sense and sensible. We even have the notion of ‘absolute’ which finds no home in infinity except as ‘idea’. What is more, ‘idea’ is what Hegel believes is all that faces us. There is no exterior ‘thing’ out there. The ‘thing’ is the idea. There is never a ‘thing’ without an idea. So, in Hegel’s estimation idea ‘is’ infinity and finite, it is ‘isness’. The face of which I spoke is the idea of face, nothing more, nothing less. For Hegel, the ‘notion’ exceeds other notions as being and nothingness and finds place as ‘Concept’. Concept is the embodiment of place, of divine, of me and us, of face. The other and the same cannot remain as they are but must be taken up by the necessity of self-consciousness. There is no self as a notion without an other as a counter notion. The same and the other are the necessity of a self, a me. Even the notion of space and time is a requirement of particularity. We must be a ‘we’ by necessity of Concept not by some exteriority which makes it so. For Hegel this does not do violence to the other as another person for example but requires us to look further into exactly what we are talking about and referring to; to fundamentally question the very fabric of isness and how Concept becomes the necessity of isness.

This leads us to choice. There is no way in my estimation to prove Hegel wrong. He may well be correct that Concept is essentially ‘is’. For Hegel this does not end in some kind of essential narcissism but in a foundation from any such thing as narcissism. Hegel is not bestowing sainthood on individualism and such notions as chest-beating ‘capitalism’. He is certainly providing a foundation for their existence, for existence itself, but not some modern right-wing notion of ultra-conservatism. In any case, there is a question Hegel poses which must be faced, a choice must be made.

I started this post with the notion of infinity. In due course, we have found that infinity and finitude may have and certainly, in some yet undetermined sense, has a basis in Concept but is that the end of the story (or perhaps another beginning)? Even if Hegel is correct, is there an ethical necessity placed on us to face the other, to face my son without Hegel’s face? Are we to abandon ourselves to the necessity of Concept and if so, how does that effect my orientation to the other, to the infinity of the face, to the requirement of my son’s life and living death which I must endure? Even more, what of the suffering of the other? How shall I face this lifetime of suffering which I must endure, my suffering and the suffering of the other? Should I find some kind of solace in the absolute fact of ‘Concept’? Should I think infinity as a necessary condition of finitude? Have I violated something other than my own biases and misunderstandings of Concept? Isn’t ethics just another requirement of Concept, of self-consciousness?

This is where choice determines eternity. I have no basis external to the requirements of self-consciousness for choosing an exteriority which cannot be thought only or more precisely determined by thought. I can choose to found self on Concept and call that ‘isness’. I probably have more reason to do so than not in Hegelian terms. I see many folks who use Hegel (and less intellectual achievements) as a kind of license to justify whatever they want to do to whomever they want to do it to. Perhaps, Hegel’s philosophy is not ready for mere mortals or vice versa. However, I do have to live in the face of the absolute, unsubstantiated abyss of existence. I have to wake up every day with my death, the death of my son, the death of innocence from bigotry, greed, injustice and I have to face it on an ongoing basis without any justification for why it must be so from Concept. In all this I must act and I must make choices not because I am that Concept but because I suffer and I am with those that suffer. My choice is to be self-determined or, without necessity, to heed the cry of the other.

To conclude, I would like to add a bit of speculation, highly speculative. We see in nature and physics (whether it is pure Concept or not) a return to regularity, order, instinct; to repetition in some degree. We did not proceed from Concept to birth but from nothingness (certainly with regard to consciousness) to birth. Somehow, I and we popped into existence. Is there a regularity in ‘popping into existence’? Perhaps, we don’t know. However, one thing we do know is that we did become but from what? We can call this Concept and satisfy the need for origin. However, I prefer to leave that to what Hesiod referred to as chaos (really the yawning gap). There is a gap of not knowing which we can choose to reserve. There is also the observation that phusis or physics, biology, ‘isness’ might like to repeat itself. We are gift standing from infinite abyss facing eternity with language and consciousness that is not our own. Who is to say that that gift cannot find repetition, increasing wisdom and another moment when what I did, how I acted in the face of the other; who is to say it is not the foundation for something I know not what…choose wisely.

Readings from David Loy -“Nonduality”(updated 9/14/10)

This is a running log of my readings of David Loy’s, “Nonduality”. The most recent comments are at the top of the post.I am merely jotting down impressions, thoughts and questions as I read Professor Loy’s book. There is absolutely no attempt to systematize a critique or even make assertions that are not hugely bracketed.————————————————————————————————————————-Tuesday, September 14, 2010Chapter 3The discussion of wei-wu-wei in Taoism, action that is non-action, has some good illustrations. I like the illustrations of how children play. Certainly, children have action (frenzied at times) and could rarely be characterized as ‘laid back’. They also have intention. What they lack is a very well developed sense of ‘I’. This does mean they are not self-centered at times. What it means is that they are not burdened and encumbered with angst, guilt, morality, inhibition, etc. These kinds of descriptions seem to be more associated with being older.I also like the quotes from Nietzsche. His inversion, the body does the mind, roots the un-rooted metaphysics of the Occident in the ‘unseen’, going under. Just as the techne of the artist produces the work of art, ‘I’ is the work of the body. By ‘body’ I would think that phenomenology could add some meaning.History in not reenacted in every cerebral event of ‘now’ moments. It is carried along in its entirety throughout dasein’s (the there of human being’s) stretch of lived time (as Heidegger thought). An infant is not a tabula rasa that has to learn everything from scratch. Historicality is carried along in our being, our body. (1) It is worlding as Heidegger calls it. Worlding is how the whole, language and pre-cognitive understanding, is always already in our ‘theres’. However, it does not seem to start out as a well developed theme, a canon. It seems that the ‘work’ of every human is to actualize it as ‘I’. The narratives of history that we adopt get taken up as ‘I’. Children have not yet refined and actualized the work of ‘I’. This does not mean they are ‘I-less’ (although autism is a kind of retardation of this development) but that they are less inhibited in action and intention. They do not need to consult their ‘I” about their activity. They simply act from innocence and the sheer joy and newness of (their/the) ‘there’. This seems to me to get at wei-wu-wei.The criticism that Dr. Loy brings up about pure wantonness or acting like a spoiled child probably deserves more thought. There is a difference from what we call in the Deep South a ‘red neck’ and a spoiled child. A child’s wantonness is not captivated by their sense of ‘I’. It is more like an immediate impulse in the absence (but on the way to) an ‘I’. The drunken bravado of the ‘red neck’ is perhaps also an immediate impulse but from the point of view of an ‘I’ that is captured by itself and is no longer on the way to its development. Additionally, there are pathological examples of the development of the ‘I’ that are more extreme than a ‘red neck’ like vegetative, psychopathic, sociopathic, serial killer that seem to all involve a deviation from normal social development of the work named in ‘I’. Children have the potential for the development of the ‘I’ as normative. Those that are older have actualized their disposition to an ‘I’, as pathological or normative. Just as adult bones are capped, the epiphyseal plate completely ossifies, so ‘I’ caps worlding of ‘there’. I think that the normative ‘I’ is not monotonic but has ranges from closed to open, oriented to the past or the future, totalitarian or other oriented, etc. Just as the artist’s techne determines the work, normative beings are more than passive with regard to the ‘I’ of (their/the) ‘there’. In any case, as Aristotle pointed out, the cause of the ‘I’ as I am suggesting here would be: hule (raw material, the whatness), telos (goal, the fulfillment and completion, the towards which), eidos (the knowledge of the artist about materials, brush strokes, etc,, the how) and techne (a gathering or bringing together of the other causes, the from which) (2) The capacity for the work of the ‘I’ is what makes anything such as self-determination and Absolute Spirit of Hegel, the alienation of Marx, social contract theory, psychology, an overman of Nietzsche, the enframing (standing reserve) of Heidegger, etc. possible. It is also the possibility for enlightenment, the extinction of ‘I’, as Dr Loy discusses.I am not so thrilled with what I see as the devolution of Dr. Loy’s discussion into idealism or realism but I understand that this was very much a part of the audience he was writing to in the eighties and probably still applicable in Occidental, analytic philosophy. I can see that Dr. Loy has been influenced by empiricists, positivists, analytic philosophers, etc. but that is not uncommon in the United States. (3)(1) Perhaps other contributing evidence would bea. Chomsky’s deep language structures that cannot be reduced to one individual’s activityb. Jung’s cross-cultural symbols that cannot be linked as cause and effect but are better explained as psychological archetypesc. Freud’s psychic structure of conscious/unconscious and id, ego, superegod. Capacities embedded biologically by evolution(2) http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/02/aristotle-and-modern-sciences/(3) It is amazing to me that Colorado University’s philosophy department in Boulder is chiefly analytic. Generally, students can always get into those classes but one continental philosopher, Dr. Michael Zimmerman, always has his classes full…you would think the department would have to think analytically about that…I guess capitalism and careers is an impediment to academia and logic…————————————————————————————————————————-Friday, September 3, 2010Chapter 2 continuedHeidegger would not deny nondual, meditation, Samadhi, exceptional, profound, ecstatic, mystical or pathological experiences. As a phenomenologist he would try to see in these experiences what shows itself. Dr. Loy is also looking into what shows itself and thus, in this sense, is acting as a phenomenologist. His primary method is to find what shows itself in the texts. He also wants to bring his theory (theoria; his way of seeing) into praxis with the actual experiences of others. Phenomenologists were very cautious about bringing theoria into observations because as human, we are historical and they did not want to repeat the mistakes of historical ‘seeing’. Thus, Heidegger did not want to read the ontology through the lens of Latin and subsequent Christendom. This is why he read ontology through the Greeks and Aristotle. In this way he saw the beginning of ontology in a radically different way and found what he thought were the mistakes that derailed Occidental history, the loss of the difference of being and beings and their presencing, the ‘there’ of being. Form this abstractions such as space as linear, time as a succession of ‘now’ moments, substance, mind/body, subject/object – dualism, Occidental history lost the ‘there’ of our experience and wandered in the wasteland of abstractions for millennia. However, fundamentally he found his way by noticing that our lived experience diverged from our abstraction of how we thought we lived. This gave him another clue, that as ‘there’ we are historical beings. We ‘see’ (theoria) from our history not merely some ‘brute facts’ of ‘reality’. He saw that this way of seeing was a mode, a historical mode, of understanding our ‘there’ as present-at-hand. He also saw that there are other ways of being ‘there’ such as instrumentality. The result of this is that our theoria guided our common understanding and diverged from our common experiences.————————————————————————————————————————-Tuesday, August 31, 2010More impressions in Chapter 2It seems to me that Dr. Loy’s description of Zen and the sound of the bell (previously remarked upon) are very reminiscent of Heidegger and my initial discussion of the different modalities of being already mentioned in this post. He has spent a lot of time on the notions of savikalpa (perception that has been differentiated into names, forms, labels, recognizable categories, etc.) and nivikalpa (‘bare’ perception that is not yet differentiated into savikalpa) in early Buddhism. It seems to me that one impediment to understanding this is to be looking for some sort of ‘mystical’ state in non-dual nivikalpa.At the beginning of Western metaphysics stands Plato’s Forms. The Forms were the perfection of everything perceived by the sense. Thus the ideal triangle was the perfection of all empirical triangles perceived by sight. Aristotle rejected Plato’s Forms and wanted to show that physics (phusis), the original word for being (ousia), was a riddle, a conundrum (aporia). Physics is the co-arising of empirical observations (more accurately ontic, phenomenological observations) and ideals (more accurately ontological, phenomenological observations). Aristotle thought Plato’s Forms were simply generalized logical conceptions drawn from lived experiences, sensations (in the reduced modern and historical sense of the word). For Aristotle perceptions (and inductions) were ‘the real’ and Forms were a privileged, apotheosis of the one over the many.In Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle the word physics (phusis) is the original word for being (ousia). Physics is a conundrum (aporia). It is the generative (Brahman), multiple manifold of the ‘there’ of beings AND the unity of nonduality (in Dr. Loy’s terminology), the persistence of the ‘there’ of Being. Metaphysics in Aristotle is not to be thought after the scholastic, Latin interpretation of Aristotle (where phusis is thought as substance and not ousia) but from the Greek texts themselves as the philosophical thinking of physics. Aristotle was not thinking of Forms or substance that stood behind the manifold of beings but of how beings understand their experience of the ‘there’ of being. In this regard, I think Heidegger has some relevant discussions of how nivikalpa can be thought from an Occidental perspective.The Heideggerian notion as spatiality (regions of lived space as opposed to linear, abstract, historical notions of space as linear extension) is not composed of separate geometric spaces that we assimilate after the fact in our mind (nous). Our ‘there’ is lived as a manifold of regions that are dynamically (dunamis) desevered, brought near and far, in everyday experience. Thus, we could be riding and ox in search of an ox because we have brought near the region of searching for an ox while relinquishing the ox we are riding on to the hinter region.Temporality (the lived stretch of time as opposed to a linear, abstract, historical notion of Now moments) is experienced in our ‘there’ as spread across a past and a future. Our notion of a linear succession of ‘nows’ is a misunderstanding of our essential (wesen) temporal ecstasies (Sorge – the structure of the practical way we experience temporality – see my whimsical and exploratory article http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/18/towards-another-heideggarian-discourse/). The connection Heidegger makes to our practical experience of the temporalizing of our ‘there’ has similarities to the idea of Tat tvam Asi of Vedanta. The lived experience of time is not just a personal, private, separated, purely subjective experience but a shared experience of histories and futures that is already understood prior to ‘thinking’ about it (pre-cognitive). It is important to understand that Heidegger in no way thinks this as a underlying form (peras) of our experience but as he calls it, a thrown nullity or void, empty, nothingness (apeiron is the Greek word translated chaos but the fertile void is closer to its meaning – sunyata perhaps). The temporalizing ‘there’ of our being is not a thing or can be modeled after a thing. It is how we find ourselves situated in the null throwness of our ‘there’. There is no ‘Latinized’ underlying substance of how we are called ‘time’.Additionally, Heidegger’s notions of present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit; how we are in the scientific, abstract, objectifying modality of being) and instrumentality or readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit; how we are when using a tool for instance where the hammer disappears in use) certainly move us in the direction of the distinctions of savikalpa and nivikalpa. When we are in the modality of instrumentality we and the hammer meld without abstracting from the hammer – we are the bell. When we drive a car we are not abstracting away from the car but ‘are’ together and undifferentiated with the car (unless the car breaks…then the car becomes present-at-hand). Some psychologists might suggest we are in a quasi-hypnotic state (nirvana) many times during the day as we go through the day.I think where Dr. Loy goes wrong (which may be driven by the texts he is interpreting) is where he is trying to dissect the senses (hearing, seeing, etc.) to get at these Buddhist notions of perceptions. He alludes to “phenomenalism” and Heidegger’s insistence that ‘sense data’ is already an abstract, historical step away from how we experience the world. We never experience sense data as separate experiences. Our lived experiences are always an amalgamation of ‘sense’. To analyze them separately is already a step away from lived experience. Additionally, he imputes the abstract notion of temporality as a linear succession of moments when he starts discussing how the visual sense differs from the other senses. On page 74 he states, “Vision provides us with a “co-temporaneous manifold”, whereas all other senses construct their perceptual “unities of a manifold” out of a temporal sequence of sensations.” He goes on to suggest that vision is built on a different temporality that is not just a “passing now” as the other senses but a sense of the “idea of the eternal” as vision “remain[s] the same” and “never changes and is always present”. I think all of these distinctions are driven by the initial, abstract, historical way of dividing the senses in an attempt to ‘explain’ lived experience. Vision never happens in some hermetically sealed analytic. We can abstract away for the experience of vision to understand it that way but that is not how we experience vision. Vision is always inseparably experienced in a context, a horizon. Our experiential horizon is comingled with other senses and with lived spatiality, temporality, and the various ways which we are comported to being (i.e., in the mode of instrumentality, science or present-at-hand, etc.).Furthermore, in Dr. Loy’s discussion he refers to Hume’s statement that Adam could not have inferred from fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him. The whole notion of an Adam that pops onto the scene is abstract. If Darwin is right we would have known about water since we crawled out of it. In any case, Dr. Loy asserts that the association with water and drowning is “subconscious” now and “automatized”. He suggests that this “thought-constructed” “unity of apperception” can be undone vis-à-vis nonduality. This suggests a kind of “pure sensation”, undifferentiated, that precedes the names and forms we attach to it later.Dr. Loy goes on to assert that the non-dual “pure sensation” cannot be fundamentally derived from Heidegger. He is probably right here because Heidegger would not understand an order of experience where a sound devoid of associations occurs and then an abstract ‘mental link’ makes sense of it. Dr. Loy thinks Berkley can refute Heidegger (and phenomenalism). It rests on the fact that if I never heard the sound of a motorcycle I would not be able to make the association ‘motorcycle’. Since I must have made a historical association of the sound of the motorcycle to make ‘sense’ of it, it means that the sound of the motorcycle does not co-temporaneously arise with the association to a motorcycle. He thinks this proves:1. Initially, there must have been a sound first that I heard (without knowing what it was)2. I looked to see it was a motorcycle3. Thereafter, I subconsciously associate the sound with a motorcycle.However, this is not a refutation of Heidegger. If you noticed every time I used the word ‘abstract’ above I also used the word ‘historical’. I did this because phenomenology gives us a mechanism for what Dr. Loy calls savikalpa. It is because we ‘are’ as historical beings. We have personal histories (Heidegger calls existentiell) that meld with collective histories (an example may be language [Chomsky’s deep structures of language, i.e., every baby does not have to learn all words and associations by rote] or scientific/technological, religious, Now moments, linear space, etc.). Abstraction or savikalpa arises because we ‘are’ historical, both collective and individual (ontological and ontic) historicality. To say that we associate the sound of the motorcycle with the abstract concept of the motorcycle is proof that Heidegger is right – we are in the world as historical beings. I think Dr. Loy would find an ally in Heidegger by taking our ability to abstract away from lived experience as mistaking the rope for a snake, the finger pointing at the moon as the moon and riding an ox in search of an ox. Heidegger gives an excellent path for Occidentals to access savikalpa and nivikalpa. We pick our own pocket and sell us our own watch when we mistake abstract, historical pre-cognitive understanding for lived experience.Additionally, Heidegger’s notion of whatness (quiddity) seems to me to come very close to suchness. Whatness is not about a noun. It is a transitive verb that has swallowed its nouns. One example could be the bridge quoted below, “The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.” The quiddity or whatness of the bridge is more like a regionality, an environmental gathering together, flowing together savor of sensations not a mere denuded noun, an object for a subject. The lived experience of a bridge is not one noun among many, one object surrounded by other objects, but a cohesion that cannot be subdivided into parts without losing or changing how it shows itself (aletheia).In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger asks the question. “What is a thing?” He uses the example of an artwork by Van Gogh that portrays a pair of peasant shoes. He understands that the observer of art (in this case The Peasants Shoes by Van Gogh) and the work of art is a kind of time-space transformative participation in the peasant’s field and toil. Heidegger says of this that “… at bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.” We certainly meld or flow together with our world during much of our everydayness. Only when we pull away, abstract from, do we experience anything such as a subject and an object. This way of being in the world is what Heidegger would call semblance (remind you of Maya). In everydayness (or ignorance) we forget how we are authentically experiencing our ‘there’ and lapse into our historically acquired notions of things, separate objects composed of substance.Heidegger certainly has a way of understanding our ‘there’ that does not rest on some ‘mystical’ apprehension of muddled wholes (gestalt). To lapse into an abstract analysis of separate senses and individual brains that, ad hoc, associate concepts (savikalpa) to ‘pure sensation’ (nivikalpa) is to hold to a historically ‘Latinized’ understanding of separate individuals that somehow put together thoughts and concepts to make sense of their senses. It is an absurdum reduction to individualism that rebuilds the world on a separate person by person basis.“what is perceived is the individual, but the perception is in relation to the whole”…“it is clear that we must know that which is first by epagoge [induction]. For even perception [aesthesis] lays claim to [empoiei] the whole [katholou] in this way.” Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 100 a16 and b4Let me add that I have skipped ahead to later works and articles by Dr. Loy that indicate a more subtle and developed understanding of contemporary, Occidental philosophy so these critiques are conditioned with the knowledge that “Nonduality” was written very early in his career. I look forward to more dialog with his works.————————————————————————————————————————-Tuesday, July 20th, 2010Impressions in Chapter 2 of “NonDuality”I am highly impressed with the work that Professor Loy has put into “NonDuality”. He obviously has an incredible handle on Eastern philosophy. I plan to do some more research in the library on some of the questions that follow but here are some questions that come to mind:The Indian philosophy of nirvikalpa and savikalpa reminds me of Husserl’s notion of noema and noesis and eidetic intuition. The problem with this kind of analysis is, as Derrida reminds us, the problem of origin (arche). Anytime an arche is posited (evolutionary/primitive , intuition, stream of consciousness, etc.) dualism necessarily follows. The diachrony of presence/absence, before/after (internal time consciousness), semantic/syntactic is pragmatic. Any soteriological analysis must reverse the pragmatic proliferation of symbols to some form of non-differentiation (i.e., nonduality, monism, etc.). The problem this inevitably runs into is how to differentiate this kind of mysticism from a vegetative state. I think this is where the notion of detachment may come in but this also raises questions. Feeling-flow (as Husserl observes) has then been severed from dianoia (thoughts) and we are again encumbered with another arche of duality. This is a knot that knots in on itself and seems to get more tangled as one tries to untangle it…————————————————————————————————————————-Wednesday, July 14th, 2010From: David Loy, “NonDuality”, page 33″When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just sound.”Kapleau, “Three Pillars of Zen”, 107, 137Compare this with:”The bridge swings over the stream “with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream’s bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream’s waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky’s floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky’s weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more. “”The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.”Building Dwelling Thinkingby Martin Heideggerfrom Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971.Section II————————————————————————————————————————–Wednesday, July 14th, 2010Preliminary Observations from My Reading of David LoyI am going to keep a running journal of my readings from David Loy’s “NonDuality” and “Lack and Transcendence”. I finished both introductions and decided to start with “NonDuality”. I like David Loy’s areas of interest, both East and West, and have trod similar grounds in my own readings. I hope that my observations do not come off as critical. My intention is to engage the works and express impressions not to suggest or imply any sense of “rightness” or “wrongness”. I am all too happy to be wrong and in need of further instruction…With regard to the notions of subject and object, I think that much of analytic philosophy and epistemology have been preoccupied with certain historically narrow readings found most exquisitely in Rene Descartes but with roots also in Aristotle with the notion of substansia (substance). This hermeneutic tradition has been preoccupied with dualism as Professor Loy suggests. Historically, those well trod paths have frenetically and obsessively worked themselves into a Kierkegaard-ian, Either/Or anxiety. They seemed to have lost themselves in the metaphysical play of oversimplifications and unquestioned assumptions.More specifically, I think Heidegger offers another reading of Western philosophy and the Greeks. By appealing to the pre-Socratics he follows Nietzsche in “The Birth of Tragedy” in un-cuffing and elucidating a different reading of the Greeks and thus, Western metaphysics. Abstractly, an object certainly can be anything other than “Me” but Heidegger wants to ask the question, “How do we experience objects?” If we look at our experience of “objects” we find that while the experiences can be made to surreptitiously correspond to a highly abstract and historically homogenized hermeneutic of all that is “Not Me”, this perspective strains the credulity of our common experience and traps experience in the quagmire of “standing reserve”. The “Not Me” is capital awaiting my use. Marx was prematurely insightful into this conundrum and Heidegger wraps this reduction in the technological revolution.Heidegger wants us to think (and listen) to how we are, how we be (forgive the transgression), with “objects”. For example, he notes that the way we are with tools is that tools disappear in their use. The only way they become conspicuous is when they break – and then, the mode of how we are with them changes to present-at-hand. We look them in disgust, throw them away with appropriate explicatives and call them stupid (forgive my embellishments on Heidegger). When we are using them in the mode of instrumentality we cohabitate a space with them where they disappear in our use-intention (more Husserlian). Our being with them has a decidedly different character than when we are examining them as an object present-at-hand (as we do in science). This is one example of how “objects” are experienced in deterministically different ways than present before us as a mere thing. Heidegger also treats spatiality and temporality as examples of different modalities of being, erroneously and traditionally, pre-cognitively understood as mere things (objects). Likewise, we can egregiously lump these nasty distinctions into some abstract homogenization of the “subject”. Please see my discussion here (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/23/a-brief-introduction-to-being-and-time/) for a more detailed discussion of this. For Heidegger, “Being and Time” is a work where he re-thinks human temporality in terms of Sorge (Care).The dualism of subject-object sets up another kind of pre-understanding of time as causality. This frames causality as a “linear succession of Now moments” as Heidegger would suggest. From this we get an “I” that travels through time linearly from birth to death. Other than allude to it, I will not delve into Care more specifically at this point. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is a blatant attempt to use metaphysics to get out of metaphysics and its nihilistic demise. If all experience from birth to death re-occurs eternally with absolutely no change we are left with the Great Nausea. To bite off the head of the snake (See “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”) is to finally let this tired old conception of time die and find ourselves in need or lack so we can begin to think anew, create anew and thus, overcome. I do not think Nietzsche wants to assert anew the old temporal, metaphysical epitaph but to skillfully (as a Zen master might) be the psychologist that presents a koan that cannot be solved, to show something that cannot otherwise be shown, with eternal recurrence. For me, this means the “thing” (derived from historically obtained categories of subject-object), causality and thus, time as linear need to grow rightfully old and let the “grass grow up under our feet” (Kierkegaurd) so we can understand the inadequacies of that motif.I think Levinas and Blanchot envision time as diachronous and anachronous. “Chrony”, chronological means time. Diachronous points to the split in time, a split that cannot be bridged. These splits are not casually related or subsumed into some master time motif. Perhaps the easiest way to think of this may be as different temporalities, think of astronomical, geological and human temporalities…think of lived temporalities (time when one is having fun and time when one is feeling anxiety)…etc. It might be tempting to line all these times up into a master, linear time but that is similar to lumping all objects into “Not Me” or subjects into “Me” – it can be done but specificities get lost, undermined and misunderstood. Anachronous or not-time is not commensurate to “My Time”. It is absolutely Other, for Levinas, the face of the Other. Perhaps for Blanchot, the Ilya (French for the there-is, the incessant buzz of existence or in my words, the background noise of the universe – see Note 1 below) is perhaps an anachrony – time is a meaningless concept here.The relevant point I am making here is that for many contemporary, continental philosophers another reading of Western history is in order and a deeper look into Greek thought is beneficial. My reflection suggests that this way of thinking causes me to think of myself, my experiences (including my notions of time) as a heterogeneous. The question then becomes can these heterogenies be made commensurate and subsumed back into the dominate Western metaphysic of linear time or is that a transgression that creates more problems than it solves and loses relevant meaning and measure?To overcome dualities into non-duality may be a way of re-asserting duality in a similar manner to the way atheism may assert the existence of God in order to deny it as some have maintained. In doing so, it seems to brush over some of the developments and new readings in contemporary philosophy but I am drawing no conclusions at this point as I really do like Eastern philosophy and know the extreme difficulties understanding it. I want to listen carefully to what Professor Loy is writing…Note 1 – Interesting enough I ran across another definition of Ilya – it is the Slavic form of the male Hebrew name for Eliyahu or Elijah meaning “My God is He” or (Yah is my God) – Yahwey is the personal God. Sinfully juxtaposing the French and the Hebrew do we get, God is my personal noise? …food for thought…

Readings from David Loy – “Nonduality” (updated 9/14/10)

This is a running log of my readings of David Loy’s, “Nonduality”. The most recent comments are at the top of the post.

I am merely jotting down impressions, thoughts and questions as I read Professor Loy’s book. There is absolutely no attempt to systematize a critique or even make assertions that are not hugely bracketed.

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Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Chapter 3

The discussion of wei-wu-wei in Taoism, action that is non-action, has some good illustrations. I like the illustrations of how children play. Certainly, children have action (frenzied at times) and could rarely be characterized as ‘laid back’. They also have intention. What they lack is a very well developed sense of ‘I’. This does mean they are not self-centered at times. What it means is that they are not burdened and encumbered with angst, guilt, morality, inhibition, etc. These kinds of descriptions seem to be more associated with being older.

I also like the quotes from Nietzsche. His inversion, the body does the mind, roots the un-rooted metaphysics of the Occident in the ‘unseen’, going under. Just as the techne of the artist produces the work of art, ‘I’ is the work of the body. By ‘body’ I would think that phenomenology could add some meaning.

History in not reenacted in every cerebral event of ‘now’ moments. It is carried along in its entirety throughout dasein’s (the there of human being’s) stretch of lived time (as Heidegger thought). An infant is not a tabula rasa that has to learn everything from scratch. Historicality is carried along in our being, our body. (1) It is worlding as Heidegger calls it. Worlding is how the whole, language and pre-cognitive understanding, is always already in our ‘theres’. However, it does not seem to start out as a well developed theme, a canon. It seems that the ‘work’ of every human is to actualize it as ‘I’. The narratives of history that we adopt get taken up as ‘I’. Children have not yet refined and actualized the work of ‘I’. This does not mean they are ‘I-less’ (although autism is a kind of retardation of this development) but that they are less inhibited in action and intention. They do not need to consult their ‘I” about their activity. They simply act from innocence and the sheer joy and newness of (their/the) ‘there’. This seems to me to get at wei-wu-wei.

The criticism that Dr. Loy brings up about pure wantonness or acting like a spoiled child probably deserves more thought. There is a difference from what we call in the Deep South a ‘red neck’ and a spoiled child. A child’s wantonness is not captivated by their sense of ‘I’. It is more like an immediate impulse in the absence (but on the way to) an ‘I’. The drunken bravado of the ‘red neck’ is perhaps also an immediate impulse but from the point of view of an ‘I’ that is captured by itself and is no longer on the way to its development. Additionally, there are pathological examples of the development of the ‘I’ that are more extreme than a ‘red neck’ like vegetative, psychopathic, sociopathic, serial killer that seem to all involve a deviation from normal social development of the work named in ‘I’. Children have the potential for the development of the ‘I’ as normative. Those that are older have actualized their disposition to an ‘I’, as pathological or normative. Just as adult bones are capped, the epiphyseal plate completely ossifies, so ‘I’ caps worlding of ‘there’. I think that the normative ‘I’ is not monotonic but has ranges from closed to open, oriented to the past or the future, totalitarian or other oriented, etc. Just as the artist’s techne determines the work, normative beings are more than passive with regard to the ‘I’ of (their/the) ‘there’. In any case, as Aristotle pointed out, the cause of the ‘I’ as I am suggesting here would be: hule (raw material, the whatness), telos (goal, the fulfillment and completion, the towards which), eidos (the knowledge of the artist about materials, brush strokes, etc,, the how) and techne (a gathering or bringing together of the other causes, the from which) (2) The capacity for the work of the ‘I’ is what makes anything such as self-determination and Absolute Spirit of Hegel, the alienation of Marx, social contract theory, psychology, an overman of Nietzsche, the enframing (standing reserve) of Heidegger, etc. possible. It is also the possibility for enlightenment, the extinction of ‘I’, as Dr Loy discusses.

I am not so thrilled with what I see as the devolution of Dr. Loy’s discussion into idealism or realism but I understand that this was very much a part of the audience he was writing to in the eighties and probably still applicable in Occidental, analytic philosophy. I can see that Dr. Loy has been influenced by empiricists, positivists, analytic philosophers, etc. but that is not uncommon in the United States. (3)

(1) Perhaps other contributing evidence would be
a. Chomsky’s deep language structures that cannot be reduced to one individual’s activity
b. Jung’s cross-cultural symbols that cannot be linked as cause and effect but are better explained as psychological archetypes
c. Freud’s psychic structure of conscious/unconscious and id, ego, superego
d. Capacities embedded biologically by evolution
(2) http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/02/aristotle-and-modern-sciences/
(3) It is amazing to me that Colorado University’s philosophy department in Boulder is chiefly analytic. Generally, students can always get into those classes but one continental philosopher, Dr. Michael Zimmerman, always has his classes full…you would think the department would have to think analytically about that…I guess capitalism and careers is an impediment to academia and logic…

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Friday, September 3, 2010
Chapter 2 continued

Heidegger would not deny nondual, meditation, Samadhi, exceptional, profound, ecstatic, mystical or pathological experiences. As a phenomenologist he would try to see in these experiences what shows itself. Dr. Loy is also looking into what shows itself and thus, in this sense, is acting as a phenomenologist. His primary method is to find what shows itself in the texts. He also wants to bring his theory (theoria; his way of seeing) into praxis with the actual experiences of others. Phenomenologists were very cautious about bringing theoria into observations because as human, we are historical and they did not want to repeat the mistakes of historical ‘seeing’. Thus, Heidegger did not want to read the ontology through the lens of Latin and subsequent Christendom. This is why he read ontology through the Greeks and Aristotle. In this way he saw the beginning of ontology in a radically different way and found what he thought were the mistakes that derailed Occidental history, the loss of the difference of being and beings and their presencing, the ‘there’ of being. Form this abstractions such as space as linear, time as a succession of ‘now’ moments, substance, mind/body, subject/object – dualism, Occidental history lost the ‘there’ of our experience and wandered in the wasteland of abstractions for millennia. However, fundamentally he found his way by noticing that our lived experience diverged from our abstraction of how we thought we lived. This gave him another clue, that as ‘there’ we are historical beings. We ‘see’ (theoria) from our history not merely some ‘brute facts’ of ‘reality’. He saw that this way of seeing was a mode, a historical mode, of understanding our ‘there’ as present-at-hand. He also saw that there are other ways of being ‘there’ such as instrumentality. The result of this is that our theoria guided our common understanding and diverged from our common experiences.

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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
More impressions in Chapter 2

It seems to me that Dr. Loy’s description of Zen and the sound of the bell (previously remarked upon) are very reminiscent of Heidegger and my initial discussion of the different modalities of being already mentioned in this post. He has spent a lot of time on the notions of savikalpa (perception that has been differentiated into names, forms, labels, recognizable categories, etc.) and nivikalpa (‘bare’ perception that is not yet differentiated into savikalpa) in early Buddhism. It seems to me that one impediment to understanding this is to be looking for some sort of ‘mystical’ state in non-dual nivikalpa.

At the beginning of Western metaphysics stands Plato’s Forms. The Forms were the perfection of everything perceived by the sense. Thus the ideal triangle was the perfection of all empirical triangles perceived by sight. Aristotle rejected Plato’s Forms and wanted to show that physics (phusis), the original word for being (ousia), was a riddle, a conundrum (aporia). Physics is the co-arising of empirical observations (more accurately ontic, phenomenological observations) and ideals (more accurately ontological, phenomenological observations). Aristotle thought Plato’s Forms were simply generalized logical conceptions drawn from lived experiences, sensations (in the reduced modern and historical sense of the word). For Aristotle perceptions (and inductions) were ‘the real’ and Forms were a privileged, apotheosis of the one over the many.

In Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle the word physics (phusis) is the original word for being (ousia). Physics is a conundrum (aporia). It is the generative (Brahman), multiple manifold of the ‘there’ of beings AND the unity of nonduality (in Dr. Loy’s terminology), the persistence of the ‘there’ of Being. Metaphysics in Aristotle is not to be thought after the scholastic, Latin interpretation of Aristotle (where phusis is thought as substance and not ousia) but from the Greek texts themselves as the philosophical thinking of physics. Aristotle was not thinking of Forms or substance that stood behind the manifold of beings but of how beings understand their experience of the ‘there’ of being. In this regard, I think Heidegger has some relevant discussions of how nivikalpa can be thought from an Occidental perspective.

The Heideggerian notion as spatiality (regions of lived space as opposed to linear, abstract, historical notions of space as linear extension) is not composed of separate geometric spaces that we assimilate after the fact in our mind (nous). Our ‘there’ is lived as a manifold of regions that are dynamically (dunamis) desevered, brought near and far, in everyday experience. Thus, we could be riding and ox in search of an ox because we have brought near the region of searching for an ox while relinquishing the ox we are riding on to the hinter region.

Temporality (the lived stretch of time as opposed to a linear, abstract, historical notion of Now moments) is experienced in our ‘there’ as spread across a past and a future. Our notion of a linear succession of ‘nows’ is a misunderstanding of our essential (wesen) temporal ecstasies (Sorge – the structure of the practical way we experience temporality – see my whimsical and exploratory article http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/18/towards-another-heideggarian-discourse/). The connection Heidegger makes to our practical experience of the temporalizing of our ‘there’ has similarities to the idea of Tat tvam Asi of Vedanta. The lived experience of time is not just a personal, private, separated, purely subjective experience but a shared experience of histories and futures that is already understood prior to ‘thinking’ about it (pre-cognitive). It is important to understand that Heidegger in no way thinks this as a underlying form (peras) of our experience but as he calls it, a thrown nullity or void, empty, nothingness (apeiron is the Greek word translated chaos but the fertile void is closer to its meaning – sunyata perhaps). The temporalizing ‘there’ of our being is not a thing or can be modeled after a thing. It is how we find ourselves situated in the null throwness of our ‘there’. There is no ‘Latinized’ underlying substance of how we are called ‘time’.

Additionally, Heidegger’s notions of present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit; how we are in the scientific, abstract, objectifying modality of being) and instrumentality or readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit; how we are when using a tool for instance where the hammer disappears in use) certainly move us in the direction of the distinctions of savikalpa and nivikalpa. When we are in the modality of instrumentality we and the hammer meld without abstracting from the hammer – we are the bell. When we drive a car we are not abstracting away from the car but ‘are’ together and undifferentiated with the car (unless the car breaks…then the car becomes present-at-hand). Some psychologists might suggest we are in a quasi-hypnotic state (nirvana) many times during the day as we go through the day.

I think where Dr. Loy goes wrong (which may be driven by the texts he is interpreting) is where he is trying to dissect the senses (hearing, seeing, etc.) to get at these Buddhist notions of perceptions. He alludes to “phenomenalism” and Heidegger’s insistence that ‘sense data’ is already an abstract, historical step away from how we experience the world. We never experience sense data as separate experiences. Our lived experiences are always an amalgamation of ‘sense’. To analyze them separately is already a step away from lived experience. Additionally, he imputes the abstract notion of temporality as a linear succession of moments when he starts discussing how the visual sense differs from the other senses. On page 74 he states, “Vision provides us with a “co-temporaneous manifold”, whereas all other senses construct their perceptual “unities of a manifold” out of a temporal sequence of sensations.” He goes on to suggest that vision is built on a different temporality that is not just a “passing now” as the other senses but a sense of the “idea of the eternal” as vision “remain[s] the same” and “never changes and is always present”. I think all of these distinctions are driven by the initial, abstract, historical way of dividing the senses in an attempt to ‘explain’ lived experience. Vision never happens in some hermetically sealed analytic. We can abstract away for the experience of vision to understand it that way but that is not how we experience vision. Vision is always inseparably experienced in a context, a horizon. Our experiential horizon is comingled with other senses and with lived spatiality, temporality, and the various ways which we are comported to being (i.e., in the mode of instrumentality, science or present-at-hand, etc.).

Furthermore, in Dr. Loy’s discussion he refers to Hume’s statement that Adam could not have inferred from fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him. The whole notion of an Adam that pops onto the scene is abstract. If Darwin is right we would have known about water since we crawled out of it. In any case, Dr. Loy asserts that the association with water and drowning is “subconscious” now and “automatized”. He suggests that this “thought-constructed” “unity of apperception” can be undone vis-à-vis nonduality. This suggests a kind of “pure sensation”, undifferentiated, that precedes the names and forms we attach to it later.

Dr. Loy goes on to assert that the non-dual “pure sensation” cannot be fundamentally derived from Heidegger. He is probably right here because Heidegger would not understand an order of experience where a sound devoid of associations occurs and then an abstract ‘mental link’ makes sense of it. Dr. Loy thinks Berkley can refute Heidegger (and phenomenalism). It rests on the fact that if I never heard the sound of a motorcycle I would not be able to make the association ‘motorcycle’. Since I must have made a historical association of the sound of the motorcycle to make ‘sense’ of it, it means that the sound of the motorcycle does not co-temporaneously arise with the association to a motorcycle. He thinks this proves:

1. Initially, there must have been a sound first that I heard (without knowing what it was)
2. I looked to see it was a motorcycle
3. Thereafter, I subconsciously associate the sound with a motorcycle.

However, this is not a refutation of Heidegger. If you noticed every time I used the word ‘abstract’ above I also used the word ‘historical’. I did this because phenomenology gives us a mechanism for what Dr. Loy calls savikalpa. It is because we ‘are’ as historical beings. We have personal histories (Heidegger calls existentiell) that meld with collective histories (an example may be language [Chomsky’s deep structures of language, i.e., every baby does not have to learn all words and associations by rote] or scientific/technological, religious, Now moments, linear space, etc.). Abstraction or savikalpa arises because we ‘are’ historical, both collective and individual (ontological and ontic) historicality. To say that we associate the sound of the motorcycle with the abstract concept of the motorcycle is proof that Heidegger is right – we are in the world as historical beings. I think Dr. Loy would find an ally in Heidegger by taking our ability to abstract away from lived experience as mistaking the rope for a snake, the finger pointing at the moon as the moon and riding an ox in search of an ox. Heidegger gives an excellent path for Occidentals to access savikalpa and nivikalpa. We pick our own pocket and sell us our own watch when we mistake abstract, historical pre-cognitive understanding for lived experience.

Additionally, Heidegger’s notion of whatness (quiddity) seems to me to come very close to suchness. Whatness is not about a noun. It is a transitive verb that has swallowed its nouns. One example could be the bridge quoted below, “The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.” The quiddity or whatness of the bridge is more like a regionality, an environmental gathering together, flowing together savor of sensations not a mere denuded noun, an object for a subject. The lived experience of a bridge is not one noun among many, one object surrounded by other objects, but a cohesion that cannot be subdivided into parts without losing or changing how it shows itself (aletheia).

In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger asks the question. “What is a thing?” He uses the example of an artwork by Van Gogh that portrays a pair of peasant shoes. He understands that the observer of art (in this case The Peasants Shoes by Van Gogh) and the work of art is a kind of time-space transformative participation in the peasant’s field and toil. Heidegger says of this that “… at bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.” We certainly meld or flow together with our world during much of our everydayness. Only when we pull away, abstract from, do we experience anything such as a subject and an object. This way of being in the world is what Heidegger would call semblance (remind you of Maya). In everydayness (or ignorance) we forget how we are authentically experiencing our ‘there’ and lapse into our historically acquired notions of things, separate objects composed of substance.

Heidegger certainly has a way of understanding our ‘there’ that does not rest on some ‘mystical’ apprehension of muddled wholes (gestalt). To lapse into an abstract analysis of separate senses and individual brains that, ad hoc, associate concepts (savikalpa) to ‘pure sensation’ (nivikalpa) is to hold to a historically ‘Latinized’ understanding of separate individuals that somehow put together thoughts and concepts to make sense of their senses. It is an absurdum reduction to individualism that rebuilds the world on a separate person by person basis.

“what is perceived is the individual, but the perception is in relation to the whole”…“it is clear that we must know that which is first by epagoge [induction]. For even perception [aesthesis] lays claim to [empoiei] the whole [katholou] in this way.” Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 100 a16 and b4

Let me add that I have skipped ahead to later works and articles by Dr. Loy that indicate a more subtle and developed understanding of contemporary, Occidental philosophy so these critiques are conditioned with the knowledge that “Nonduality” was written very early in his career. I look forward to more dialog with his works.

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Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
Impressions in Chapter 2 of “NonDuality”

I am highly impressed with the work that Professor Loy has put into “NonDuality”. He obviously has an incredible handle on Eastern philosophy. I plan to do some more research in the library on some of the questions that follow but here are some questions that come to mind:

The Indian philosophy of nirvikalpa and savikalpa reminds me of Husserl’s notion of noema and noesis and eidetic intuition. The problem with this kind of analysis is, as Derrida reminds us, the problem of origin (arche). Anytime an arche is posited (evolutionary/primitive , intuition, stream of consciousness, etc.) dualism necessarily follows. The diachrony of presence/absence, before/after (internal time consciousness), semantic/syntactic is pragmatic. Any soteriological analysis must reverse the pragmatic proliferation of symbols to some form of non-differentiation (i.e., nonduality, monism, etc.). The problem this inevitably runs into is how to differentiate this kind of mysticism from a vegetative state. I think this is where the notion of detachment may come in but this also raises questions. Feeling-flow (as Husserl observes) has then been severed from dianoia (thoughts) and we are again encumbered with another arche of duality. This is a knot that knots in on itself and seems to get more tangled as one tries to untangle it…

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Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
From: David Loy, “NonDuality”, page 33

“When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just sound.”

Kapleau, “Three Pillars of Zen”, 107, 137

Compare this with:

“The bridge swings over the stream “with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream’s bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream’s waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky’s floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky’s weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more. ”

“The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.”

Building Dwelling Thinking
by Martin Heidegger
from Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971.
Section II

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Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Preliminary Observations from My Reading of David Loy

I am going to keep a running journal of my readings from David Loy’s “NonDuality” and “Lack and Transcendence”. I finished both introductions and decided to start with “NonDuality”. I like David Loy’s areas of interest, both East and West, and have trod similar grounds in my own readings. I hope that my observations do not come off as critical. My intention is to engage the works and express impressions not to suggest or imply any sense of “rightness” or “wrongness”. I am all too happy to be wrong and in need of further instruction…

With regard to the notions of subject and object, I think that much of analytic philosophy and epistemology have been preoccupied with certain historically narrow readings found most exquisitely in Rene Descartes but with roots also in Aristotle with the notion of substansia (substance). This hermeneutic tradition has been preoccupied with dualism as Professor Loy suggests. Historically, those well trod paths have frenetically and obsessively worked themselves into a Kierkegaard-ian, Either/Or anxiety. They seemed to have lost themselves in the metaphysical play of oversimplifications and unquestioned assumptions.

More specifically, I think Heidegger offers another reading of Western philosophy and the Greeks. By appealing to the pre-Socratics he follows Nietzsche in “The Birth of Tragedy” in un-cuffing and elucidating a different reading of the Greeks and thus, Western metaphysics. Abstractly, an object certainly can be anything other than “Me” but Heidegger wants to ask the question, “How do we experience objects?” If we look at our experience of “objects” we find that while the experiences can be made to surreptitiously correspond to a highly abstract and historically homogenized hermeneutic of all that is “Not Me”, this perspective strains the credulity of our common experience and traps experience in the quagmire of “standing reserve”. The “Not Me” is capital awaiting my use. Marx was prematurely insightful into this conundrum and Heidegger wraps this reduction in the technological revolution.

Heidegger wants us to think (and listen) to how we are, how we be (forgive the transgression), with “objects”. For example, he notes that the way we are with tools is that tools disappear in their use. The only way they become conspicuous is when they break – and then, the mode of how we are with them changes to present-at-hand. We look them in disgust, throw them away with appropriate explicatives and call them stupid (forgive my embellishments on Heidegger). When we are using them in the mode of instrumentality we cohabitate a space with them where they disappear in our use-intention (more Husserlian). Our being with them has a decidedly different character than when we are examining them as an object present-at-hand (as we do in science). This is one example of how “objects” are experienced in deterministically different ways than present before us as a mere thing. Heidegger also treats spatiality and temporality as examples of different modalities of being, erroneously and traditionally, pre-cognitively understood as mere things (objects). Likewise, we can egregiously lump these nasty distinctions into some abstract homogenization of the “subject”. Please see my discussion here (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/23/a-brief-introduction-to-being-and-time/) for a more detailed discussion of this. For Heidegger, “Being and Time” is a work where he re-thinks human temporality in terms of Sorge (Care).

The dualism of subject-object sets up another kind of pre-understanding of time as causality. This frames causality as a “linear succession of Now moments” as Heidegger would suggest. From this we get an “I” that travels through time linearly from birth to death. Other than allude to it, I will not delve into Care more specifically at this point. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is a blatant attempt to use metaphysics to get out of metaphysics and its nihilistic demise. If all experience from birth to death re-occurs eternally with absolutely no change we are left with the Great Nausea. To bite off the head of the snake (See “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”) is to finally let this tired old conception of time die and find ourselves in need or lack so we can begin to think anew, create anew and thus, overcome. I do not think Nietzsche wants to assert anew the old temporal, metaphysical epitaph but to skillfully (as a Zen master might) be the psychologist that presents a koan that cannot be solved, to show something that cannot otherwise be shown, with eternal recurrence. For me, this means the “thing” (derived from historically obtained categories of subject-object), causality and thus, time as linear need to grow rightfully old and let the “grass grow up under our feet” (Kierkegaurd) so we can understand the inadequacies of that motif.

I think Levinas and Blanchot envision time as diachronous and anachronous. “Chrony”, chronological means time. Diachronous points to the split in time, a split that cannot be bridged. These splits are not casually related or subsumed into some master time motif. Perhaps the easiest way to think of this may be as different temporalities, think of astronomical, geological and human temporalities…think of lived temporalities (time when one is having fun and time when one is feeling anxiety)…etc. It might be tempting to line all these times up into a master, linear time but that is similar to lumping all objects into “Not Me” or subjects into “Me” – it can be done but specificities get lost, undermined and misunderstood. Anachronous or not-time is not commensurate to “My Time”. It is absolutely Other, for Levinas, the face of the Other. Perhaps for Blanchot, the Ilya (French for the there-is, the incessant buzz of existence or in my words, the background noise of the universe – see Note 1 below) is perhaps an anachrony – time is a meaningless concept here.

The relevant point I am making here is that for many contemporary, continental philosophers another reading of Western history is in order and a deeper look into Greek thought is beneficial. My reflection suggests that this way of thinking causes me to think of myself, my experiences (including my notions of time) as a heterogeneous. The question then becomes can these heterogenies be made commensurate and subsumed back into the dominate Western metaphysic of linear time or is that a transgression that creates more problems than it solves and loses relevant meaning and measure?

To overcome dualities into non-duality may be a way of re-asserting duality in a similar manner to the way atheism may assert the existence of God in order to deny it as some have maintained. In doing so, it seems to brush over some of the developments and new readings in contemporary philosophy but I am drawing no conclusions at this point as I really do like Eastern philosophy and know the extreme difficulties understanding it. I want to listen carefully to what Professor Loy is writing…

Note 1 – Interesting enough I ran across another definition of Ilya – it is the Slavic form of the male Hebrew name for Eliyahu or Elijah meaning “My God is He” or (Yah is my God) – Yahwey is the personal God. Sinfully juxtaposing the French and the Hebrew do we get, God is my personal noise? …food for thought…

Fun with Math – NOT

Professor Loy writes about the Diamond Sutra and the logic form utilized by the teaching as:

A is not A, therefore it is A

So, “Purity is not purity; that is why it is purity.”

This is transformative as we come back to purity with a different approach as a result of the process.

This has a striking similarity to Hegel’s aufheben – sublation from thesis and antithesis.

It also makes me think of integration in Calculus:

A is not A, therefore it is C where C is equal to (I have to write this out without mathematical symbols due to limitations of text):

…the integral from minus infinity to plus infinity of A AND Not A (or A – A)

In math, the result would be zero or cancel each other out. For Hegel, the cancelation keeps or holds the terms vis-a-vis lifting them up, synthesis (transformation of the integral).

So, for all instances (or dynamics of) the master AND Not Master (or Slave), the successful integration results in full self-consciousness (or the dissolution of subject-object in social acceptance of authority and responsibility). The master and slave find their freedom only in their positive acceptance of their dependence.

In calculus differentiation takes us in the opposite direction from, in Hegelian terms, the synthesis to thesis and antithesis. Of course, not all functions have known solutions and some converge to a limit and some diverge towards plus or negative infinity. I guess in Hegel sometimes the master and slave kill each other and synthesis is never obtained. I suppose some bone head could work out the calculus of Hegel for their doctoral dissertation but…

I think I prefer Zen. Hegel gives me a headache.

Heidegger and Buddhism

Check out this article:

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-MISC/91932.htm

The title is “What’s Wrong with Being and Time: A Buddhist Critique” By David Loy

Not only does it elucidate Heidegger but it also points out and contrasts Heidegger’s philosophy with Buddhism.
Here are a few tidbits that occurred to me while reading it:

As one gets older a certain kind of “inorganic” deflation of one’s illusions overtakes experience. The notions of youthful ambition such as wealth, passion/love – the heroic in this article, lose their force. The “Will to Power” is dispersed and the past as construct is not reconstituted but deconstituted – deconstructed. In occidental culture age and wisdom have been relegated to the non-consequential. Youth and illusion are brought to the fore and age is content-emptying. However, no refutation need be made to reinvigorate age – age brings its own possibilities. It opens by allowing illusion to age, to lose impact and therefore, its insanity.

The desperation of meaning-assertion becomes unraveled and space/rest/repose creep into our historical narratives. Emptiness, sunyata, is not a threat but a companion, a “me” when I am not “me”. In this way, a certain kind of authentic experience is not forced by dread or heroic effort but shows itself as the distance in narrative, the release/letting go of self and of neurotic, obsessive, drive to be. A certain kind of peace, not framed (or undergirded by enframing) but more like breathing out is organically brought to experience and the “inorganic” is merely a byproduct of the prolonged death of youth.

I suppose the critique of these thoughts could be pressed into this analysis by suggesting the old simply give themselves over to everydayness or in Freudian terms the unconscious. However, this seems to me to revive the youthful illusion of polarities, good/bad, differentiation/repression, etc. Being-towards-death or the death wish contrast as authenticity or dispersion. Does “Will to Power” age? Is authenticity the heroic possibility or passivity? Is death about the possibility for authenticity or about realizing what one always was? – Or both…

I think there are hints in this article and in Buddhism of a kind of utopist view of extinction. Realization ushers in a kind of non-articulated paradise. This may not be accurate but I think the allusions to such an experience of realization may create more problems than it solves. In the oriental tradition of Buddhism, a whole collection of Hindu theologies (reincarnation, karma, higher/lower worlds, demons, superstitions, etc.) have crept into Buddhism. Contrarily, Siddhartha Gautama started Buddhism to get away from the “metaphysics” of Hinduism. Buddhists commonly state that they are not a religion but a practice which implies that no theologies need be stated or accepted.