Reason and Religion: Irremediably Incompatible Bedfellows?
Page 7 of 9 pages « First < 5 6 7 8 9 > Last » - Full Article
I do not mean what I just wrote in some frivolous way. Nor am I advocating irrationalism, and I am certainly not implying nihilism. The Mādhyamika is not really irrational, because ‘it is not irrational in that it nowhere contradicts the principle of Non-Contradiction’ (Staal 1975: 40). That is to say, it doesn’t contradict the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the event that you wish to stick to classical principles. It lets you do as you wish. Live and let live.
Actually, the logical liberty I am proposing is not as wild as it seems at the outset. Nor is it entirely unknown to Western thinking. Intuitionist mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer argued that when we are considering infinite sets—or anything else that is equally unsurveyable—it is not always the case that ‘Either A or Not-A’. There can be values other than merely the dichotomous pair. Something else can always emerge between the either and the or. With neither time nor space to go into detail, I might add that Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a controversial paradox regarding rule following along comparable lines (Baker and Hacker 1984, Shanker 1987). Putnam (1981) expounded at length on a natural language rendition of what is called the ‘Löwenheim-Skolem Paradox’ to yield comparable results. Then we have Kurt Göödel’s incompleteness theorems. Göödel demonstrated that a sufficiently rich formal systems is destined either to incompleteness— hence it must be opened and a new sentence added— or inconsistent. If it is incomplete, it must be opened for reception of some clarifying details. If it is inconsistent, it cannot pass the classical logical litmus test. So it must be amended or tossed in the circular file and replaced by something else (DeLong 1970, Goldstein 2005). If these apparently devastating consequences of tough-minded formal thought and reason apply, then what chance do the tender-minded disciplines have of getting things right once and for all time?
The moral to the story? Dilemmas of thought and reason there will always be; however, in the world of everyday life processes, the timeless iron-handed control of reason and thought wanes, for they have no direct bearing on concrete temporal process. So forget about quandaries. Keep things open by allowing for Included-Middles if you need to. Embrace the Principle of Non-Contradiction and at the same time embrace Contradiction when it becomes expedient to do so— and all other binary antagonisms for that matter. In other words, when things are a question of what can usually be considered C. S. Peirce’s bivalent category Secondness, Non-Contradiction can be our best friend. When Peirce’s unary, self-contained, self-sufficient, self-reflexive category Firstness is up for contemplation, Contradictions can exist as quite peaceful bedfellows, and our creative thoughts and we can be so much the better for it. When Peirce’s triadic, mediary category Thirdness and the necessity of new concepts, procedures, strategies, tactics, methods, and theories are up for alteration, something always stands a chance of emerging from the gap between erstwhile Excluded-Middles; consequently, what was once excluded can now be included. As the context goes, so also the affirmation or the negation of any of Nāgārjuna’s sentences.
In this light, those who follow the Mādhyamika rely on the Principle of Non-Contradiction whenever they attempt to refute their opponents. For, ‘the notion of refutation depends on the correct use of the particle “not” and makes no sense unless that principle is presupposed’ (Staal 1975: 42). The Mādhyamika method can be effective only insofar as the Contradictions they derived in their argument are considered intolerable and Non-Contradiction is deemed at least for the time and within that particular context valid. For, if the Mādhyamika can ‘harbor contradictions in their own position, they could not claim to have refuted their opponents on the ground that only they did the same’. Moreover, if the Principle of Non-Contradiction is not accepted as valid, then the Mādhymaka’s opponent’s views are ‘just as good as the negations of these views, and cannot therefore be shown to be false’ (Staal 1975: 42).
I cannot overemphasize the important point that Mādhyamika thought does not simply reject the tenets of classical Western logic. Mādhyamika scholars make best use of logic whenever they need to. For example, they use it to develop an argument between two opposite views, their’s and their opponent’s. If their opponent’s argument defends classical logic, then they use logic to trash logic. Yet they are also comfortable outside ordinary logical principles, for they are aware of logic’s limitations. Besides, if binary logic were all we had to work with, then forget about Peirce’s Firstness. Forget about creativity and novel concepts. And forget about the very idea of waves and particles too, for waves, as ‘possibility’ or ‘potentiality’ in the words of Werner Heisenberg, are a matter of Firstness. As such, they are absolutely necessary for the existence of our actualized world of things and their opposites as we know it. If we ignore Firstness, then forget about Thirdness as well. For anything and everything in the way of novel thought comes by way of emergence from the virtually infinite expanse of possibilities of Firstness.
However, I have certain truck with the Mādhyamika in regard to what might be construed as an esoteric posture. When a contradiction is dissolved by placing it in a new context, that new context invariably allows for a sense of something that is such as it is and it is not such as it is. It either is such as it is or it is not such as it is for ordinary folks. But the learned sages know better: they have been enlightened. For them, it is both such as it is and it is not such as it is and it neither is such as it is nor is it not such as it is. This move ignores the Principle of Identity. For, the assumption has it that nothing is as it is, for it is already becoming something other than what it was becoming. For example, it is often the case that what is today’s common sense and the intuitive view of popular culture was yesterday’s esotery, and occasionally what emerges from popular culture later by some quirk becomes profound philosophic, scientific or artistic insight.
After all, Picasso got his inspiration from African art. Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Bohr’s complementary principle owe a debt to Eastern philosophers. Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ purportedly came to him when he was walking the streets near a soccer stadium during a match. Tolstoy was taken by folk culture. And Einstein was obsessed with what might appear to pedants and snobs as so many childish games. On the other side of the ledger, a few centuries were required for the Copernican-Galilean-Cartesian-Newtonian mechanical corpuscular-kinetic view, presupposing linear time and space, to become commonplace. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the citizens of the West had become so inculcated into that world that they could hardly perceive and conceive of their world as anything else. We are at present still struggling with the world of relativity and quantum theory. A few centuries down the line, and who knows how the world will have become according to commonplace assumptions held by ordinary folks.
This reminds one of physicist Arthur Eddington’s mentioning to an audience during the early days of relativity theory that there were only three people in the world who understood it. It was taken for granted that one of them was Einstein. The audience acknowledged that much. Then, Eddington jocularly began speculation as to who the third person might be. Considerations of relativity theory have changed drastically since that time. Now, the basics of relativity and quantum theory are taught in high school physics classes. It is remotely conceivable that at some time in the future, relativity and quantum theory may be as commonsensical as Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry are today.
An other way?
If as H. H. Pattee suggests, at the very heart of life itself lies paradox, with renewed energy we can forget about quandaries, keep things open by allowing for Included-Middles if we need to, and embrace the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Perhaps in some form or another paradox at the quantum level extends upward to all levels. If this is so, then to expect the mind or consciousness to free itself of paradox is out of the question. It is more problematic to assume that enlightenment pays the paradox no mind and enters into some ethereal zone free of conflicts.
I would rather take it that, like Wittgenstein once said of logical conflicts that drive philosophers to fits, one should let go of the tension the paradox engendered, and show the fly out of the fly bottle. The fly enters the bottle, drawn by a sweet odor or some other attraction. Once inside, it rebounds at random against the inner boundaries of the container within which it is trapped. It does not fly toward the neck of the bottle, for in that direction its prison becomes more confining. So it remains within that part of the bottle of greatest circumference. If we show the fly its way out of the bottle, it is not free to roam at will. Rather, it remains oblivious of the fact that, although its world is now considerably larger, it is still caught within an existential prison. But not to worry. The parameters of this new prison are large enough for comfort. So our fly, now liberated from its erstwhile prison, is a happy fly. As far as it is concerned, its world is unlimited, infinite. It can fly in any direction it pleases, forever.
This seems to be the genuine Buddhist way, especially as incorporated within Zen Koans. The master asks the the apprentice ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’— from among a host of other Koans. How can she respond? She is placed in a bind. If she decides she can’t respond she fails the test, because she has exercised a mind search for a response and came up empty handed. That is the problem: she tried to solve the problem by an act of mind. If she decides the answer is ‘Silence’, she also fails. She tried, and came up with an answer, by just another mind act. So she tries gravely to try no more, and fails. For to try not to try is still the mind trying to mind the body. She decides to refrain from choosing an answer altogether, and fails. Her choice was mind motivated. What is an apprentice to do? At some point she rather mindlessly lets go of the paradox, and then she feels and senses the world anew.
This last move is not a mind act, not the product of a logico-rational process, not a selection or a choice, but a matter of the body simply doing what it does: it bodyminds, so to speak. As such,
there is no conflict between body and nonbody, living and nonliving, animate and inanimate. Everything is in a flowing, liquid embrace.
Page 7 of 9 pages « First < 5 6 7 8 9 > Last » - Full Article
