In my metaphysics courses, I am currently teaching Buddhist thought. I find Buddhism powerfully attractive due to its emphasis on living a life characterized by non-hurtfulness, compassion, and the diminution of suffering. While one might be able to do all sorts of conceptual contortions to show that such concepts are present throughout the history of Western thought, it’s my view that these concepts are almost entirely absent. The closest one comes is the thought of the Epicureans and the Stoics, yet even there, while we get an emphasis on diminishing suffering (though not in that language), we don’t encounter much in the way of discussion of anything resembling a discussion of either compassion or non-hurtfulness. And here it should be understood that the diminution of suffering, and the pursuit of compassion and non-hurtfulness is restricted not simply to the human, but to existence in general. In my view, we need to make a place for these values. This is the way it is with most ethical philosophies: They boil down to the exhortation or imperative “don’t be an asshole!” It’s a shame that generally moralists are the biggest assholes of all. So it goes with the narcissism that ethical thought often invites despite itself.
Now, I’m just easing my way into various strains of Eastern thought (I’m nearly a complete virgin), so please go easy on me. However, my hunch is that the ethical system of Buddhist thought follows almost directly from the metaphysical of conditioned genesis. What, then, is conditioned genesis? The term “conditioned” should be understood, I think, as a verb, “to condition”. Something conditions something else when it affects that way through some sort of action. “Genesis”, of course, refers to the production of something. Thus, for example, when you cook dinner at night, you are engaged in an act of genesis that produces a meal. When the two terms are put together, you get the thesis that all entities are a product of their interactions with other entities. Contrast the wine grape approached in an Aristotlean manner from the wine grape approached in a Buddhist way. The Aristotlean would focus on the qualities of the grape: it is purple, round, has such and such a taste, etc. The Buddhist wouldn’t reject these qualities, but rather than drawing our attention towards the object taken in isolation would instead direct our attention outward, focusing on the relationships and interactions of the grape. Hence the Buddhist would attend to the soil conditions, the sunlight, the weather conditions, the other plants in the region, the smog of California, the animals and the insects that contribute to producing these particular qualities.
read on!
The concept of conditioned genesis thus leads to a few conclusions as to the nature of reality or what being qua being is. First, it leads to the conclusion that there are no individuals in isolation, but rather that reality is a web or fabric in which all entities are interconnected and interactive. The metaphor of reality as a “web” should be taken rather literally. When you encounter a spider web, if you pull one thread, the rest of the threads come with it. It is impossible to isolate one thread from all the other threads. They are all entangled with one another. So it follows, as a consequence, that nothing is the origin of itself. To be sure, discrete entities contribute something to their becoming, but they are never entirely their own authors. Second, as a consequence it is already a bit of a misnomer to speak of selves and things. Because beings belong to a fabric, mesh, or web of relations, authoriship is already and necessarily a complex event. Thus, for example, I am only one element in the writing of this post. This post is also necessarily authored by Morton (who’s pushed me to look more into Eastern thought), the texts I’ve read, the other things that have impacted me in my life, this computer, the internet, etc., etc., etc. Only a madman, as Lacan elsewhere suggests, would ever think she is the author of anything. Finally, third, insofar as being is interactive (conditioned genesis is, above all, a thesis about causality), it follows that for every event on the part of one object, this event produces reactions or effects in all other things. Those reactions or effects, in their turn, as events, produce effects and reactions in everything else. Thus, being or existence is necessarily characterized by ceaseless becoming.
One major source of our suffering is the desire to hold on to things as fixed and enduring. What Gotama shows, if he’s right, is that becoming is a necessary and unavoidable metaphysical truth. In the order of desire, there are thus two ways in which we suffer, deeply connected to the nature of time. One has to do with nostalgia or a relationship to the past. If we mourn over the loss of a past– a past that, as Proust suggested, was very likely never present –then the world of the present turns to ashes and becomes bland as it necessarily resembles the loss of this past. Will I someday curse the world because it is no longer the world that existed when my daughter was four? Will I therefore be unable to take joy in my daughter or the world in the present? Such is the suffering produced by nostalgia. By contrast, we can suffer our future. By imagining a future that would be abiding– what is known as utopianism –we come to see everything in the present as deficient.
From Gotama’s point of view, both of these psychic structures are forms of foolishness precisely because being is necessarily characterized by ceaseless becoming. As a consequence, nostalgia for the past– like that found in the character of the uncle in Napoleon Dynamite –is foolishness because nothing can ever remain as it is, but is doomed to necessarily passing away (Gotama is the ultimate anti-Platonist). Likewise, utopianism towards the future is foolishness because it is metaphysically impossible to produce an abiding present that wouldn’t be subject to the order of becoming. We can see that the political difference between the left and the right largely maps on to different temporal attitudes. The right mourns for a past that has been lost and that must be reproduced in the present, while the left aims at world of being free of becoming in the future that would be fixed and abiding. Both end up concluding that the present is crap because it is neither the idyllic past or the hopeful future.
This is my take, anyway, of what the Buddhist are getting at with the four noble truths and the eightfold way. Now Morton has been writing a great deal lately about overlap between OOO and Buddhist thought. It is here that we get at the issue of squaring the circle. My question to Morton– and I do not pose it in an antagonistic spirit, by any means –is how it is possible to square the circle of endorsing the autonomy or independence of substances as OOO does, with the thesis of conditioned genesis? How is it possible to think these two things together. One of the aims of the eightfold way, I take it, is to abolish both the conception of self and things, so as to encounter reality as an anonymous fabric or web of interactive relationships. Yet this is precisely what OOO cannot do, for OOO insists on the irreducibility of substances in the sense described in my prior post today. Consequently, if we’re to go the Buddhist route Timothy is proposing, we require some substantial metaphysical revisions that both do justice to relation and substance. I am eager to hear how Morton squares this circle and am deeply sympathetic to the project. Another way of putting the question would be to ask what it means to be Buddhist when one abandons the idea that it means overcoming self and things.
I apologize to Ian for writing so many posts today.
September 30, 2010 at 1:46 am
Wow, Levi is going Buddhist… how wonderful. That was my first thought, but of course it’s not the case. (Yet.)
These are great questions. Conditioned genesis (a.k.a. dependent origination, codependent arising, etc.) is, in my understanding, exactly the way you’ve described it and it is the central metaphysical principle that underlies Buddhist soteriology, etc. But each jewel making up Indra’s net (the spider web) is a unique and distinct jewel, different from all the others by virtue of being its own particular set of relational conditions. This “its own” shouldn’t, of course, be understood in the sense of being its own property. These relations are, after all, always in process and one can neither posses them nor stop them from proceeding forward; the desire to do either brings about suffering. Nevertheless, this moment (and now this one, and now this one) is real and it offers possibilities unique to itself.
The doctrine of “two truths” is relevant here (though it’s complicated to get into; there seem to be almost as many interpretations of Nagarjuna as there are readers of him). And I agree that Tim has a fairly high evidence threshold to cross before his OOO=Buddhism will convince those who find Buddhism to be completely process-relational. But I think that Whiteheadian process philosophy can be very helpful here, because it’s more obviously temporal-directional than Buddhism tends to be, which means that its relationalism is more clearly asymmetrical. This thing at this moment may be conditioned by its various causes, and may be a condition contributing to things that come after it, but it isn’t a condition contributing to things that came before it or that happened simultaneously somewhere else (far enough removed from it). It is a specific constellation of causes that doesn’t ever repeat itself (the next moment will be, at the very least, n+1). And it is creative (that’s clear in Buddhism and in Whitehead, but Whitehead makes it the cornerstone of his metaphysic).
One of the best articulations of this argument that I’ve seen is Peter Kakol’s excellent book “Emptiness and Becoming: Integrating Madhyamika Buddhism and Process Philosophy” (published by a New Delhi-based publisher, but deserving to be read widely, imho).
Looking forward to more on OOB-ism,
Adrian
September 30, 2010 at 3:55 am
Aha! I shall have to think about all this. Great. Thanks Levi. And thanks for that comment Adrian.
September 30, 2010 at 4:23 am
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2010/09/object-oriented-buddhism-8.html
[…AH…I see Professor Bryant has another excellent post, this time on Buddhism. How does he do it?…]
September 30, 2010 at 12:41 pm
http://aivakhiv.blog.uvm.edu/2010/09/things_are_looking_up_in.html
[Does object-oriented ontology = Buddhism? Tim Morton has been making intriguing sounds to that effect, and Levi Bryant has…]
September 30, 2010 at 1:52 pm
[…] Co-dependent Origination There has been some talk of Buddhist relationism on blogs recently (1,2,3), so I decided to resurrect, tear apart, edit and rearrange an old essay of mine on the topic, […]
October 1, 2010 at 8:24 pm
“how it is possible to square the circle of endorsing the autonomy or independence of substances as OOO does, with the thesis of conditioned genesis? How is it possible to think these two things together?”
that is the RIGHT question… How can we square śūnyatā with ‘withdrawn’ objects without an appeal to a completely monistic becoming??? Vedanta offers us the atman/brahman unitas multiplex, but Buddhism is fundamentally anti-essentialist.
October 2, 2010 at 12:30 am
I’m really not sure that this particular circle can be squared–the metaphysics seem too different in each case.
But perhaps one could instead superimpose another shape (a rectangle would seem somewhat fitting) upon the cirlce and work with the resultant hybrid.
To put it in Harmanian terms: the pursuit of no-self and the effort to appreciate the codependent interrelationship of all things could be conceived as an attempt to have some sort of existentially bracing and transformative encounter with the totalizing referential contexture of equipment. But because the contexture is fundamentally unrepresentable and cannot be directly experienced, any such encounter would involve a certain amount of ambiguity, indirection, and displacement, and the practices, concepts and language that are used both to induce and describe such experiences would need to push and strain against the representational boundaries of languge, ideation and praxis. (Which is of course what various forms of Buddhism has been doing for millenia.)
But an Object Oriented Buddhism would have to acknowledge that the totalized circle is only part of the picture. We approach it from the sharp individuated corners of the rectangle, to which we cannot help but return when the strange encounter is complete. Thus nirvana or satari or any other name for an experience of non-individuation would not reveal an ultimate metaphysics, but would instead allude to one feature of the meta-cosmos–a feature that is metaphysically contrasted (though not contradicted or cancelled) by the reality of substances.
The reality of substance would thus account for the fact that meditators return to their matts at the end of their sessions. In a sense there would be no Buddhas who make a final escape from the world, only Boddhisattvas who return to it.
So perhaps we should be talking about an Object Oriented Boddhisattvism instead?
October 2, 2010 at 1:14 am
One more corresponding thought: I believe that there is a point somewhere in Nagarjuna’s verses where he denies the existence of the self, then turns right around and somewhat surprisingly affirms it. Seems to jive fairly well with a contexture-substance parallax.
October 2, 2010 at 4:24 am
Hi Aaron, I like what you wrote a lot. For me, it comes down to a deep similarity between contexture (my “mesh”) and Buddhist emptiness. What distinguishes Buddhism from nihilism (AND idealism, imho) is that this contexture is the BASIS for things’ existence, not their telos. NOT “It’s all empty, so this cup might as well be a silverback gorilla” but “This unique cup exists BECAUSE of emptiness.” Or as Tsoknyi Rinpoche put it, “This glass of water EXISTS–that’s how you can tell it is empty of essence.” “Essence” in this case meaning presence-at-hand, reification, correlation with a subject. But not essence as in OOO glassness.
As Harman observes, there is ACTUALLY NOT MUCH difference between touchy-feely embeddedness lingo and plain Cartesian dualism. Buddhism agrees with Harman. It’s only a distinction between unconscious and conscious ego.
The Nature speak that emerged from the Beats and their view of Zen has set up big roadblocks against our seeing this.
October 2, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Tim. I completely agree that the Beats had a lamentable impact on the Euro-American encounter with Asian thought. They certainly helped to supply Zizek with balls for his cannon.
Btw, I’m also of the opinion that early Confucianism is WAY more interesting than is commonly thought–especially as regards its relationship to Chinese Legalism.
Perhaps I’ll track down your email and send you some of my written thoughts on the subject.
October 2, 2010 at 6:03 pm
I wrote somewhat on this back in June.
October 2, 2010 at 6:57 pm
I am very much enjoying this discussion and entanglement of Buddhist thought and object-oriented ontology.
Since I am woefully ignorant of Buddhist philosophy (which is obviously very rich and profound), I still can’t help but make this observation: in a sense, there is no such thing as context for object-oriented philosophy. One of the most disturbing moments for me in Prince of Networks, and I mean disturbing in the best possible intellectual way, was that I had to rethink my very idea of “context.” It seems to me that, for the object-oriented, there is no homogeneous, interconnected weave of context from which objects emerge. Rather, there is always-already discrete objects. So, I would think that there is no problem for this philosophy to think of any kind of object emergence from context, only to think (only? — still a difficult task!) the emergence of objects from other objects. I think this is a radical point of departure from, at least, some aspects of Buddhist ontology (or ontologies). I can only leave it to the Buddhist experts to discern that. But it seems to me that, for object-oriented thought, there is nothing other than objects — no undifferentiated or “pre-“differentiated field — from which objects emerge. One of the very brilliant insights of this philosophy is precisely the ontologically fundamental nature of the object itself. This does not seem like something that OOO can really abandon without losing itself.
Still, I find this discussion and even celebration of Eastern philosophy to be very important and seemingly ignored in much of Continental philosophy.
October 2, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Joseph, “contexture” (not “context”) is Graham Harman’s term for the totality of tool-beings. The fact that there is nothing “behind” objects is PRECISELY a theory that concurs with Buddhist emptiness.
October 2, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Aaron–please do email me if you like. Skholiast, thanks for that link.
October 2, 2010 at 10:42 pm
[…Name ONE Buddhist view that says “behind appearances there is an undifferentiated mush/flow/process.”
Stuck? Thought so…]
October 2, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Tim,
I think Joseph is right here though. In Harman’s OOP and my own onticology, there’s nothing like context or contexture (I don’t recall coming across that term in Harman’s work, but I might have missed it). Rather, entities are radically withdrawn and independent of one another. In my own framework, this is a result of the operational closure of objects which I develop in detail in chapter four of TDO. Because entities define their own environment and are only selectively open to the world, we cannot speak of a context or contexture defining entities. This leads me, in chapter five, to the issue of how entities can nonetheless be constrained. This is one of the central reasons that I’m led to reject the existence of THE world. We can’t speak of entities belonging to the same over arching world because of this feature of closure.
I’m a philistine where Buddhism is concerned, but my sense, from what I’ve read is that the term “emptiness” is really misleading. Everywhere I encounter the term emptiness, I replace it with relation. A relation is a ” no-thing”. Thinking in terms of emptiness would then mean thinking in terms ofnhow things are produced by relations or interactions. This is where the conflict with ooo would occur insofar as following Aristotle, relations are secondary to suvstance.
October 2, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Levi, emptiness is NOT “relation.” It is a MUCH more profound concept akin to “withdrawal.”
October 2, 2010 at 10:57 pm
…in other words, “emptiness” means “devoid of concept.” That is, nothing is truly merely present-at-hand.
October 2, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Here are some quotations from Graham on contexture etc. Great discussion.
“equipment *is its context” (Tool-Being, 23)
“the totality of equipment *is the world” (Tool-Being, 23)
“We cannot presuppose the notion of the tool as an impenetrable, self-sufficient unity that shifts between contexts” (Tool-Being, 23)
“all objects in the Universe refer to one another” (Tool-Being, 33)
“tool-beings always belong to a referential contexture” (Tool-Being, 42)
October 2, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Levi–oops, my comment before the one with the ellipsis was lost. I wrote that “emptiness” is FAR more profound than “relation.” One thing that Nagarjuna (the philosopher of Buddhist emptiness) takes apart is precisely the idea that things are “related.”
October 2, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Tim:
It’s a fine point, to be sure, but I read Graham as making a decisive break with Heidegger on this point of a totality of tool-being — that is, that there is no totality or wholeness linking everything together. Some things are linked or connected, of course, because by definition an object is made up of other objects. I’m not sure from what you wrote if you agree with Graham on this point.
I must admit ignorance about the Buddhist concept of “emptiness” and if it agrees with OOO here. I suppose I am perplexed by why this would be considered “emptiness”? I’m going to read your post on this as I see you posted one.
October 2, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Tim:
As I suspected, there are many different kinds of Buddhist thought and perspective — very rich indeed.
You write (in your post):
There is NOTHING UNDERNEATH this display. And the display happens whether “we” observe it or not.
I’m glad you said this, as it gets to the heart of this interesting Buddhist-ontology exchange (for me, at least): what does it mean, “nothing underneath,” precisely? Nothing underneath the phenomenal itself? When you say “display,” I think appearance, and it could be an appearance to anything — the candle, the wax, the fire, etc, not just humans. I have heard this expression before in relation to Buddhism, but what does it mean, more precisely, the “nothing underneath”?
October 3, 2010 at 12:40 am
Tim,
But it’s precisely this relationism that Graham is injecting to. That’s the basic thesis of his object-oriented ontology. You also rejected Joseph’s use of the term context in the post I was responding to. At any rate, Graham distinguishes between a standard reading of Heidegger- represented by the passages you quote -and his reading based on entities as radical,y independent and withdrawn from any context or relation. It’s the latter that he sees as Heidegger’s genuine discovery.
October 3, 2010 at 12:42 am
As I said, I don’t know Buddhist thought well. This is just what I draw from my limited reading of Nagarjuna. Either way, I don’t find the term emptiness helpful or illuminating.
October 3, 2010 at 12:47 am
In both Graham’s and my variant of OOO, of course, there’s always something beneath display. Entity can never be reduced to phenomenal manifestation, but always exceeds any display or manifestation. In Graham this is cashed out in the distinction between real and sensuous objects. In me, in the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation. Both of us, I take it, embrace a variant of the reality/appearance distinction.
October 3, 2010 at 12:57 am
I haven’t read Tool-Being — lack of surplus capital and the book is rather expensive in the places I’ve looked — but he has written on Heidegger in several other places. All of those points you mention, Tim, I believe are aspects of orthodox Heidegger that Graham is trying to get away from.
In any case, you seem to be saying that emptiness means that nothing is purely present in its relation to other things, that the real thing there, the real object, is not truly approached or understood — hence it functions as a kind of emptiness in our thought. Empty because it exists truly separately and outside of the relations it enters into — is this something like what you are saying? Just trying to get a sense of it.
I am reading through your posts on Buddhism and OOO on your blog — something I should have done first (oh, well). Very interesting. Many things to think over…
October 3, 2010 at 1:08 am
And when I say that emptiness is best understood as relation and interaction in Buddhism, I just mean that the thesis if conditioned genesis has it that nothing is ever the origin of itself, but rather is a product of it’s interactions with everything else. There is no authorship, hence everything is empty of itself. For example, this post is authored not by *me*, but is a complex event to which you contributed to, Joseph contributed to, my students, the texts I’ve read, my iPad, fiber optic cables, etc. It’s a ” concrescence” of interactions. Hence all things are empty. To think emptiness is to become identical with everything else and recognize that there is no origination. For Graham, by contrast, things are empty in neither the set theoretical sense of void nor the sense I am proposing, of interaction. Not the former because they have a real and absolutely determinate essence (see the discussion of zubiri in Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics). Not the latter as entities are always in excess of their interactions and relations. This is the knot in relation to Buddhism.
October 3, 2010 at 1:15 am
Another way of putting it would be to say that all substances are radically anterior to any and all ecological relations. This, of course, is a metaphysical anteriority, not a temporal anteriority. The basic thesis, then, of the non-relational object-oriented ontologists is that entities are independent of relation.
October 3, 2010 at 1:50 pm
[…I am not asking you to believe this. I am simply asking you to recognize that Buddhism is a kind of OOO. It may not be YOUR kind of OOO…]
October 3, 2010 at 2:04 pm
I’m impressed by how this conversation has grown!
Just wanted to clarify some of my prior remarks via a quote from “Tool-Being”:
“The world is not just one; it is also many. It is not made up solely of pieces that push beyond themselves and lose their meaning in a cosmic meaning-contexture; rather, its pieces are also terminal points, closed-off neighborhoods that retain their local identity despite the broader systems into which they are partly absorbed. But we have seen that our only protection from the hegemony of the ‘in-order-to’ is the ‘for-the-sake-of.’ Heidegger may want to use these two phrases to refer to the difference between the inanimate and human spheres. Unfortunately, this wish remains unfulfilled, as both structures are found to an equal degree in all entities.” (Tool-Being, 34)
I want to draw attention to the sentences that contain the following qualifications and implications:
–The world is not “just”… it is “also”…
–It is not “solely”…its pieces are “also”…
–The hegemony of “in-order-to” is something real, against which the “for-the-sake-of” provides real protection.
–Things are “partly” absorbed in broader systems…
What I take away from all of this is that the contexture is in fact real. Reference does occur, and does aspire to a totalizing hegemony that it cannot fully achieve because of the individualizing effects of substance.
Harman does not deny the existence of the contexture. It is an important feature of his meta-cosmos, but it can’t account for everything that happens in it.
So, in my prior comment:
–the “circle” is the contexture. It totalizes (or attempts to totalize) within its own domain, but,
–the “rectangle” is the quadruple object (abstracted into a sort of principle), and,
–they are superimposed upon each other in such a way that the circle cannot fully contain the rectangle, due to the effects of withdrawal and substantial form.
The Buddhist aspiration towards no-self, in my account, aims to provide something akin to an experience of the referential, relational contexture of equipment–something that can never be directly experienced or represented. Hip to this impossibility, Buddhists use discourses and techniques that push and strain our representational capabilities (e.g. the early Theravedan refusal to describe nirvana in positive terms; riddles, koans, nonsense) in order to induce an experience of relational being.
BUT: the Buddhist take on things is only part of the picture. The relational totality is always incomplete. Substance inevitably draws meditators back towards individuated self, like the Mahayana version of a Boddhisattva who experiences enlightenment but renounces Buddhahood and returns to the suffering world (rather than passing into nirvanic dissolution).
And for this reason I suggest that the B in OOB would need to refer to a Boddhisattva, not a Buddha. This assertion in fact seems perfectly in synch with Harman’s departures from Heidegger (who, in keeping with the relational nature of his thinking, argued that Buddhism and Taoism accord very closely with his philosophy), because it demands that we incorporate a tweaked neo-Aristotelian notion of self-sustaining substance into Buddhist (or Boddhisattvan) praxis and thought.
This suggests that there might be something positive to be taken, existentially speaking, from an impossible attempt to experience the contexture, even if such an attempt can only ever partially and inadequately disclose one side of a metaphysical coin…
October 3, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Having just read Tim’s most recent comment, I would add that perhaps there IS actually something akin to a notion of substance in certain forms of Buddhism (particularly the Mahayana forms). I admit that I was always perplexed by certain aspects of the doctrine of emptiness–especially the way it seems to be used to refer to eternal or transcendent forms that can never be destroyed. This struck me as counter-intuitive: doesn’t emptiness refer to the transience and impermanence of all forms?
But maybe we can make sense of this when we recall that a vacuum is the emptiest thing of all…
October 3, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Yes Aaron. To claim that Buddhism asserts “nothing really exists” would be to equate it with nihilism. There are countless refutations of nihilism in Buddhist philosophy.
This is relevant to our discussion in another way. Part of the Buddhist critique of nihilism is a devastating assault on RELATIONISM.
October 3, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Btw Aaron, a vacuum for a Buddhist isn’t “the emptiest thing of all.” Space qua vacuum is an element like water and fire for the early buddhists. For later buddhists it’s Vorhandenheit, presence-at-hand (an objectification). It’s still a broken tool when you or a rock look at it or use it.
“Vacuum-sealed” CAN’T mean “object in a literal ontic vacuum.” This would reduce OOO to atomism.
October 3, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Another thought Aaron: well 2 in fact.
1) Meditate. You will soon discover that what sounds “transcendent” is far more intimately real than this iPhone I’m holding
2) Sure, “emptiness” and “transience” are related, though historically they are separated by 500 years. They are related in the same way that a bad photocopy of the word “gold” (transience) is related to an ACTUAL GOLD BAR.
October 3, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Levi: “And when I say that emptiness is best understood as relation and interaction in Buddhism, I just mean that the thesis if conditioned genesis has it that nothing is ever the origin of itself, but rather is a product of it’s interactions with everything else”
This notion is PRECISELY what Nagarjuna (philosopher of emptiness) REFUTES. It’s NOT emptiness. It’s nihilism.
October 3, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Joseph: “In any case, you seem to be saying that emptiness means that nothing is purely present in its relation to other things, that the real thing there, the real object, is not truly approached or understood — hence it functions as a kind of emptiness in our thought. Empty because it exists truly separately and outside of the relations it enters into — is this something like what you are saying? Just trying to get a sense of it.”
No. The opposite. They are empty because they EXIST. You are real, yes? This iPhone is real, yes? Empty is EXACTLY WHY objects exist, for REAL. This iPhone is not just a piece of plastic connected to some circuits. Or as Buddha argues, a car is IRREDUCIBLE to it’s components. Again, Latour/OOO.
October 3, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Joseph: oops, correction. Withdrawl qua ungraspability yes. Agreed. But totally impenetrable? Even Harman can SAY things about Vollzug.
October 3, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Tim,
I’m basing my interpretation here largely on the Lalitavistara:
In comparison to the Lalitavistara, I find the work of Nagarjuna extremely dense, but if Wiki is any indication (I know, I know), my reading is not entirely off base:
It seems to me that nihilism isn’t the only option. Rather, the other way to interpret the non-being of self and entities would be according to an ontology approaching that of Spinoza’s: That is, that there is only one substance in all of existence of which all entities are elements. What Aristotle would call substance doesn’t exist within this framework because no unit or discrete substance has independent origination but is a product of everything else, but that whole or totality is itself a substance in its totality. One way or another, I don’t have much of a dog in this debate beyond an interesting in the concept of conditioned genesis, though I feel compelled to respond as I don’t think I’m completely off base here.
October 3, 2010 at 10:33 pm
I have to say that I am definitely excited about reading the piece you are writing for the OOO anthology.
I had written a paragraph of questions, but it might be best to wait for your more extended treatment in the anthology. These comment sections are good, but it is sometimes difficult to get a grasp on the general form of what a person is trying to say in such a limited (by space and time, not quality) forum.
October 3, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Ack! I meant to address my previous comment to Tim, in case there is any confusion.
October 3, 2010 at 11:40 pm
I second Joseph’s sentiment! I’m just a neophyte in the process of learning!
October 4, 2010 at 2:51 am
Couldn’t resist the opportunity to be number forty-two and thereby disclose the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything! (Sorry if that reference is overly geeky or obscure.)
Anyway: I think Levi has a pretty strong point here. The orthodox doctrine of emptiness often seems to refer to something akin to an ultimate Spinozan substance, and not usually an individuated object-substance.
But that said, there are scores of Buddhist sects and philosophies huddled beneath the two main umbrellas of the creed, whose texts often emit deliberately contradictory or ambiguous signals. It seems to me that Tim has a sharp eye for those cases in which the evidence seems to suggest something more like individuated Aristotelian substance, and that his intuitions in this regard are loaded with potential.
One thing to keep in mind: Buddhism has constantly changed and evolved through the millenia, often by tending to ideas that exist only in seed-form in earlier texts.
Perhaps that’s what’s going on here: a debate about texts past that really concerns the incorporation of Aristotle into a Buddhism of the future.
Just a thought…
October 4, 2010 at 3:47 am
[…Graham Harman’s Tool-Being provides the first detailed and straightforward interpretation of Heidegger’s notorious das Geviert (fourfold), an account of the thing that has baffled and embarrassed many a Heideggerian for decades. I like this account very much, not the least because it’s isometric with an esoteric Buddhist account of objects! I only figured this out today so bear with me if this post contains errors. But Harman encourages us to dream about the fourfold and be in a fever about it—this pretty much describes my feelings right now…]
October 4, 2010 at 3:59 am
I’ve lately been wading into some of the work of the Kyoto school – which I realize might not be ‘Buddhist philosophy’ per se but rather Buddhist-influenced, maybe? Anyway, I came across the following claim by Nishitani that seems to be in line with what Tim is saying:
This seems to me to lean toward the more Aristotelian notion of discrete, particular substances. Of course, the other side of this is the dismantling (or “overstepping”) of the subject-object distinction… is this of a piece with what Tim mentioned earlier as the assault on relationism? I find it really interesting that a rejection of relationism could stand together here with something like a Latourian position.
October 4, 2010 at 3:45 pm
I remembered this fascinating line from a post of Levi’s on 8.19.10:
“Like any other object, an object-oriented theology would have to argue that God is withdrawn from both itself and that all other objects are withdrawn from God (i.e., that God has no privileged access to creatures).”
This is precisely the Buddhist theory of god (whoever that is). Some being was reincarnated as a formless god (no articulated body, just sheer extension+awareness). Formless gods live for billions of years. This formless god was around when our Universe emerged. He thought he had created it…
October 4, 2010 at 5:19 pm
[…What Buddhism calls “ego” is what Heidegger and Graham Harman calls Vorhandenheit or “presence-at-hand.” All objects treat themselves and all other objects as present-at-hand, retroactively positing them as this or that…]
October 7, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I just posted again (parts 16 and 17)…Zubiri to the rescue.
October 8, 2010 at 5:47 am
As an amusing side note, after looking over Prince of Networks again, I noticed that the idea that there is no total context which serves as a conditioning backdrop for objects was given a very charming (and not a little dark) name by Graham: Gavrilo’s Corollary. In a nutshell, an object is not conditioned by everything in its environment, and much of what surrounds any object is simply not related to it (the shiny, ravenous bugs deep within the grass in the opening of Blue Velvet probably went unperturbed by the roses swaying in the breeze, the dreamy red fire engine and the father’s nightmarish collapse onto the lawn). Also, any effect produced is not done so by a general “context,” or interwoven system, but by another specific, individual entity. (This also fits with Levi’s autopoietic object, I think, in which much in the object’s own environment is simply noise and is not transformed into information at all.)
October 9, 2010 at 9:32 pm
The only snag with that way of putting it, Joseph, is that if you draw the “background” circle big enough you sure do find a causal relation. Just widen that front garden to include, oh–the Sun? The Earth’s gravitational field? What happens when the Sun explodes, hypothetically? Or if Earth’s gravity switches off?
October 9, 2010 at 9:34 pm
…in other words, your example suffers from a correlationist optical illusion–you’re seeing that lawn within the bounding frame of a movie screen.
October 9, 2010 at 9:38 pm
…That’s why, according to Graham, you have to think of these things outside any “horizon” (and why I used that as my blog’s epigraph)
October 9, 2010 at 10:01 pm
We can specify objects as such precisely because they do contain and take place within a “galaxy” of relations (Graham’s word). Yet despite this, they exist. This is a paradox identical with the Buddhist description of the chariot. Don’t throw out the baby of relation with the bathwater of antirealism.
October 10, 2010 at 12:53 am
Tim, you write:
“The only snag with that way of putting it, Joseph, is that if you draw the ‘background’ circle big enough you sure do find a causal relation. Just widen that front garden to include, oh–the Sun? The Earth’s gravitational field? What happens when the Sun explodes, hypothetically? Or if Earth’s gravity switches off?”
I thought that was the whole point: all those things you mention are objects. My point is that there is no single, total system or object which includes all other objects, unifying them into a working whole. The way I understand it is precisely what you are saying — you can’t have a total causal context, but must work to show specific causes. Yes, the sun is an object which would affect the vicious insects as well as the lawn and the flowers, etc. The point was that the insect is not causally touched by everything happening around it. We can’t forget the importance of sleeping or dormant objects, either, which means that some objects are not going to be part of a “galaxy” of relations.
When you write that:
“We can specify objects as such precisely because they do contain and take place within a “galaxy” of relations (Graham’s word).”
…I find this complex. Yes, the object is always compound or a composite. But not all objects are within other objects, which is to say not all objects relate. Also, I thought the reason we are able to specify objects at all is because there are objects. I don’t see why relations needs to be fundamental here. All objects have parts or pieces, but not every object is itself a piece of another object.
This might be an issue of the development of Graham’s thought, but I don’t think he holds any longer that there is a unified network of all objects, and neither do I. I don’t think there is a totality, a network or a universe of objects, all influencing each other while still being individual. This doesn’t make sense to me. Some objects are in networks (which really means they are inside larger objects), but there is no final, totalizing object which relates everything (at least, in my understanding of Levi and Graham). I am still unsure if you are saying that there is.
October 10, 2010 at 9:00 am
Just a follow-up:
I completely agree about your point on the sun and the complexity of causality there. I certainly wasn’t saying that the bugs in Blue Velvet (which I only picked as it illustrated several objects of different scales) were related to nothing or that they couldn’t relate to the fire engine or the roses, etc. In fact, there is probably causal relationships that I am not aware of at all at work in that ecosystem. The only ontological point is that one avoids a relationist vision in which everything is somehow connected. Now, as a caveat, it may be that there are cases in which everything is connected — but it would take considerable labor to both connect these things in reality and to show this theoretically, I think. (This is probably more of a Latourian point). Your question about the sun and its complex relationship to earth makes that point: these are contingent realities that could change (frightening for us puny animals) and take substantial (literally) work to keep them going or to perpetuate them through time. But they are relations between distinct entities that retain a very individual stamp on their causation and effect rather than a spiderweb of links which is then separated into individuals.
But, again, I am a little confused as to whether you are arguing for this global, Heideggerian system or against it. I still can’t wait to read your piece in the anthology to see a more sustained discussion of Buddhism and object-oriented ontology. The posts on your blog are always interesting and the crossbreeding looks very fecund, to me (though I feel less able to discuss the Buddhist aspects as this is not something I am familiar with).
October 12, 2010 at 9:11 pm
As a practicing Buddhist, I take all its philosophy to sharpen 1 point: there is no privileged awareness or being that is free of 3 things:
Every thing comes into existence as a result of causes and conditions and ceasing to exist when those no longer sustain it.
Every thing is neither definately a whole or a part. Context determes which.
Every thing is a thing only because awareness labels it.
If you apply this relentlessly you will understand it. If you look for an exception, or think you have found one, you will not. This includes Mind, enlightenment and bob.
July 6, 2012 at 10:03 am
Nagarjuna, with the ‘Two Truths’, distinguished ‘Ultimate Reality’ from ‘Conventional Reality’. Under ‘CR’, would be all the speculations contained in the above blog post and 54 of the comments.
The 55th comment (bob) is oriented towards ‘UR’, particularly with the suggestion “If you apply this relentlessly you will understand it.”
Nagarjuna’s Mahayana is a philosophy of the Absolute, beyond any and all objects, relations, conceptions, theories, or ‘transcendental signifieds’.
The ‘form’ of this Absolute is awareness.