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I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.
You know, nothing really has meaning.
What I mean by this is that within context things make sense. But what if you expand or contract the context? The meaning changes. So this in itself is an indication of the inherent instability of meaning.
So meaning is contextual. It is empty of any independent “substance”. Nothing new about this. Socrates said something similar about words in Cratylus. As did Buddha. And so the jump to this conclusion is not hard to reach.
Death is not a question of if but when. Framed this way, then, there is nothing to fear about death, and one can get on with life and live it to the fullest.
In this talk Thich Nhat Hanh said that Buddhism isn’t a philosophy but that it has philosophy in it. There is a minimum of knowledge of the world necessary in order to follow the Buddhist practice but after that we should get on with the practice and not dwell on philosophical speculation.
Thich Nhat Nanh talks about the much quoted Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta:
“Malunkyaputta, it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ there is the living of the holy life. And it’s not the case that when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ there is the living of the holy life. When there is the view, ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ and when there is the view, ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ there is still the birth, there is the aging, there is the death, there is the sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, & distress whose destruction I make known right in the here & now.”
What Adam Phillips, a psychotherapist and writer, says in this interview is, in my opinion, excellent and very close to Buddhist thinking.
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