Non-self is not to lose oneself to emptiness or nothingness. This is to gain a different kind of self that is utterly full and truly something.
Tag: philosophy
I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.
Lex Fridman and right speech
Lex Fridman, whether he knows it or not, understands Buddhist right speech (17 minutes in). This conversation with Richard Haier about the book The Bell Curve is an example of how something can be misinterpreted.
But sometimes, no matter what you do, people can twist your words to fit their agenda. Nietzsche is one such philosopher who had been the victim of misappropriation.
Speech as an action can be used (another action) against you. In other words, truth is not about what is there, but what people think is true, or rather, how people make you think something is true when it is not.
pick a landmark
life is
so much easier
when you have
a landmark
to orientate you
it may not be
anybody else’s landmark
(and it shouldn’t be)
but at least
you will know
where everybody else
is in relation to you
that is
the whole point
of choosing
a landmark
Love is not a thing
Love isn’t a thing.
It’s not a
you-either-have-it-
or-you-don’t thing.
It is what you do.
And it is what
someone does to you.
Go do love. Go love.
Go get loved. Be loved.
Then you will understand
what love is. Love is
not a thing.
Just love.
Philosophy kills poetry and art
Does anyone else feel that philosophy kills the creativity needed for poetry and art?
Pramāna
There are six pramāna (knowledge or valid cognition) in Indian philosophy.
Pratyakṣa (perception) is the sense data, essentially your intuition (Hume’s term) or experience. In Buddhism there are six senses – visual, aural, scent, pallet, tactile, and mind. Each have their corresponding “objects” – sight, sound, fragrance, taste, touch, and mind-object. Perception may correspond to sensation in psychology and not processed content.
Anumāna (inference) is similar to logic. One thing causes another by being inferred.
Upamāna (comparison and analogy) is to link two different unrelated situations or objects through similarity. This may include simile and metaphor.
Arthāpatti (postulation, derivation from circumstances) is implication by knowing the consequences of one action to another. Unlike anumāna it is long term and not immediate.
Anupalabdi (non-perception; negative cognitive proof) is the affirmation of the absence of the positive situation.
Śabda (reliance on past reliable testimony) is the reliance on past evidence given by others.
Buddhism, under Tibetan Buddhism system, recognizes that only perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna) as valid. All else are denied. This is interesting considering that the Buddhist sutras are taken to be sacred texts. On this count we must wonder how the rejection of śabda works here.
Svabhava – the doctrine of no intrinsic nature
There is no intrinsic nature (svabhava) to conditioned phenomena. All conditioned (samskara) and unconditioned (dharma) phenomena are without self (anatman) and are empty (shunyata). All conditioned phenomena are impermanent (anitya) and unsatisfactory (duhkha).
With this as base Buddhism teaches enlightenment (or release) (nirvana) that ends all rebirth (samsara, reincarnation).
Chicken soup for the non-soul
“So if there is no self, non-self, non-soul or no- soul what is it that gets reborn or reincarnated?”
This is question I often get from Westerners new to Buddhism. How can there be no soul? Who or what is doing these good and bad things?
The Buddha always starts with the idea of impermanence. All real things are impermanent. Real things do no stay the same. This much most people can understand and agree with. Then the Buddha moves on to the idea of unsatisfactoriness. All real things are unsatisfactory. This too most people can agree upon also. But then most people get tripped up by the last statement of the truth of reality. All real and unreal things have no inherent self. Real things are seen to have no coherent core, just as unreal things (ideas and concepts of the of the imagination) do not have any core.
What makes a rock a rock is not anything. There is no “rock-ness” of things. If there is a rock-ness then would that not entail a permanent “something”?
There is also another suggestion here with this formulation – that there is something permanent but without a self. Real things are impermanent and unsatisfactory. But Unreal things are “permanent” and “satisfactory” in some way even though they are without a self. But what can be permanent if it is unreal?
This kind of formulation is not dissimilar to that of God or soul. Since God and soul are permanent and satisfactory. This is the conundrum. So, does God and souls exist or not? According to Buddha they must be unreal but unreal things have no self. But real things have no self either.
The only way forward, I feel, is to deal with these issues separately. Understand the nature of real things before we deal with understanding what the nature of unreal things are.
*Remember that book? Sorry. Clickbait title.
Religion from a biological or anthropological point of view
It seems to me that everything we do is for one purpose and one purpose alone, and that is to survive. We eat, sleep, exercise, work, play, wear clothes, buy houses, read, write, speak, listen, study, teach, sing, have sex, defecate, pretty do everything as a way to survive.
We create institutions to survive. Health care, education, science, philosophy and religion are just some of the institutions we have as a way to survive as a group rather than as an individual.
Seen this way, religion is no different to the ballroom dancing club, tennis club, academic associations that we create in order to survive. Religion, God, souls, mind and self, therefore, are concepts to help us, and should be studied as a biological and anthropological necessities. It should be off-limits to scrutiny.
On nominalism
1.
If we are to take nominalism as 1) the rejection of universals, or 2) the rejection of abstract objects (of the mind) then I am neither.
What I reject is that universals or abstract objects are things in the conventional sense, or even real objects (of the mind). This sentient/animate being conceptualises universals, abstract objects and concrete objects, that is, conceptualisation is a process of a thing, this thing, and not a thing-in-itself. A process is a “characteristic” of a thing.
2.
The communicative symbol is the only “thing” in common between a universal or abstract object (of the mind) in mine and another person’s mind.
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