Recently I have been looking for some work by Peter van Inwagen and found his recent book Being A Study in Ontology. I believe the subject could be very interesting to you, because, as far as I know, you have written several times on his ontological views (even if there is deep disagreements between his and yours ontological views).
I hope you are doing well in this messy and unpredictable world.
Kind regards,
Miloš Milojević
Dear Mr. Milojević,
Thank you for bringing this book to my attention. I will try to persuade the editor of a journal to send me a review copy. Failing that, I will happily shell out 75 USD for a copy. The undisputed 'king' of the 'thin theorists,' van Inwagen is wrong about Being, but brilliantly wrong and a formidable adversary.
Other articles of mine on Being and existence can be found via my PhilPeople page.
As for this "messy and unpredictable world," let's hope it holds together for a few more years. I see no reason to be optimistic, but I derive consolation both from philosophy and from old age. In the meantime we must do our part-time best to beat back the forces of darkness. Only part-time, however, because this world is a vanishing quantity that does not merit the full measure of our love and attention. All things worldly must pass. "Impermanence is swift." (Dogen) "Work out your salvation with diligence." (Buddha)
Finally,Miloš, I thank you for your correspondence over the years,
Bill
Musical addendum
If Harrison was the Beatle with spiritual depth, Lennon was the radical leftist shallow-pate, McCartney the romantic, and Starr the regular guy and good-time Charley.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are ultimately meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eleven years now. In Platonic-Augustinian-Christian perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed. So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
Luther's German: Im Schweiße deines Angesichts sollst du dein Brot essen, bis daß du wieder zu Erde werdest, davon du genommen bist. Denn du bist Erde und sollst zu Erde werden.
Douay-Rheims: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return."
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows, at a level deeper than his self-deception, that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over ten years now. In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed. So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the self-existent Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.
On the still life: A meatless skull in the gathering darkness, the candle having just gone out, life's flame having gone to smoke, unable to read, with no need for food. The globe perhaps signifies the universality of the skull owner's predicament and fate.
How does one reconcile the temporal with the eternal, in a personal/spiritual or experiential manner? The political situation of our time strikes me as dire and incredibly important. Yet such things are transitory and will, ultimately, pass away, and so in another sense are not so important. I am torn between these two extremes on a daily basis. The latter is a source of hope and peace, the former a source of anxiety and unrest. Focusing more on one at the expense of the other seems to only intensify the problem, since doing that seems to downplay the importance of one of the extremes, when what I am after is a reconciliation of the two that does not dismiss or downplay either. But perhaps that goal itself is unattainable.
We are made for eternity, but we find ourselves in time. Both spheres are real and neither can be dismissed or pronounced unreal. You and I agree on that. You want a reconciliation of the two "that does not dismiss or downplay either" while suspecting that such a reconciliation is "unattainable."
Here I think lies the germ of an answer. One of the spheres needs to be "downplayed." For if there are these two spheres, they cannot be equally important.
Why can't they be equally important?
Within time, we rightly value the relatively permanent over the relatively impermanent. We reckon him a fool who sacrifices a lifetime of satisfactions for a moment's pleasure. John Belushi, for example, threw away his life and career for a ride on the 'Speedball Express.' Elliot Spitzer trashed his career and marriage to a beautiful woman because he could not resist the siren songs of the high-class hookers. And then there is David Carradine who died of auto-erotic asphyxiation in Bangkok. Examples are easily multiplied beyond necessity.
Infinitely more foolish is one who sacrifices an eternity of bliss for a lifetime of legitimate mundane satisfactions. One who believes that both spheres are real, and thinks the matter through, ought to understand that the temporal is inferior to the eternal in point of importance. That there are these two spheres is a matter of reasoned faith, not of knowledge. (It is 'metaphysical bluster' to claim to have certain knowledge in this area. One cannot prove God, the soul, or man's eternal destiny. Or so say I; plenty of dogmatists will disagree.)
I therefore make the following suggestion in alleviation of my reader's existential problem. Devote the majority of your time and energy to the quest for the Absolute, but without ignoring the temporal. The quietist must needs be a bit of an activist in a world in which his spiritual life and quest is endangered by the evildoers in the realm of time and change.
For spiritual health a daily partial withdrawal from society is advisable. It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it.
A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck. Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort. Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles. No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual and philosophical reading and writing, in silence, and alone.
So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.
We die twice. We pass out of life, and then we pass out of memory, the encairnment in oblivion more final than the encairnment in rocks. Boethius puts the following words into the mouth of Philosophia near the end of Book Two of the Consolations of Philosophy.
Where are Fabricius's bones, that honourable man? What now is Brutus or unbending Cato? Their fame survives in this: it has no more than a few slight letters shewing forth an empty name. We see their noble names engraved, and only know thereby that they are brought to naught. Ye lie then all unknown, and fame can give no knowledge of you. But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.
And why are these engraved names empty? Not just because their referents have ceased to exist, and not just because a time will come when no one remembers them, but because no so-called proper name is proper. All are common in that no name can capture the haecceity of its referent. So not only will we pass out of life and out of memory; even in life and in memory our much vaunted individuality is ineffable, and, some will conclude, nothing at all.
"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." (Shakespeare, The Tempest.)
Monk: The world you love cannot last and betrays its vanity thereby. Its impermanence argues its unreality. It is unworthy of your love, noble soul!
Worldling: The God you love is worthy of your love should he exist, but he does not, or at least you have no proof that he does; no proof sufficient to render reasonable your rejection of this passing world and its finite satisfactions for a possibility merely believed in.
"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." So he preached the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, letting an ersatz Absolute in through the back door. Becoming became enshrined as Being. Thus was an attempt made to fix the flux and assuage the metaphysical need.
Addendum
After penning the above observation, I stumbled upon the following entry in Theodor Haecker's Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 31, #127):
The most radical denial of need of redemption in this world seems to me to lie in the phrase, 'the eternal recurrence of the same' (Nietzsche). Logically it represents a fantastic confusion thought, since quite evidently everything points in the very opposite direction. Theologically, it is at an infinite distance from God, and it turns everything upside down. At this point discussion is no longer possible.
Haecker is on the right track, The eternity of Recurrence is a paltry substitute for true eternity and in the end no true redemption.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
Genesis 3, 19 is true whether or not God exists and whether or not man is spirit.
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself. If our secularist is a leftist utopian, then he pins his hopes on developments no reasonable person could believe in, and that he won't be around to enjoy in any case. His erasure of the historical record allows him to persist in his self-deception. The Left is at war with memory and its lessons.
I will be coming back to this theme in connection with Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2018). A quotation to tantalize: "Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence, and in practice, against memory." (9) We saw that play out in our cities last summer, as the Left stood idly by, and in many instances encouraged, the destruction of statues and other monuments for reasons that are no reasons at all but nihilistic ventings from the pit.
Our plesance here is all vain glory, This fals world is but transitory, The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee; Timor mortis conturbat me.
No stait in Erd here standis sicker; As with the wynd wavis the wicker, Wavis this wardlis vanitie; Timor mortis conturbat me.
(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")
Here lie I by the chancel door; They put me here because I was poor. The further in, the more you pay, But here lie I as snug as they.
(Devon tombstone.)
Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety, Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.
Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"
Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found A lad to love you, girl, under the ground. Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.
(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)
The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it, when it has been his study and his desire for so long.
Escapism is a form of reality-denial. One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion. One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist. Why not? Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated. The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.
Is religion escapist? It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death. But that does not suffice to make it escapist. It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is. And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.
You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it.
You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!
There is a nuance I ought to mention. In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to return so as to help those who remain below. This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d. In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.
To return to the image of the burning building. He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition. Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.
Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them. But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.
I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.
No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality.
E pluribus unum is a noble goal. But a durable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many. Not just any diversity is combinable into unity.
This is why the oft-repeated 'Diversity is our strength' is foolish verbiage that could be spouted only by a liberal-left shallow pate.
We blew it as a society and now we are in trouble and teetering on the brink of collapse. No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality. The commonality that insures social harmony requires the stoppage of illegal immigration and reasonable limits on legal immigration together with the demand that potential immigrants be assimilable and willing to assimilate. But we no longer have the will to make that demand. We don't even have the will to protect the borders.
But of course foolishness about immigration and its effects is only one part of the explanation of our decline and eventual dissolution.
Still, we fight on, but only part-time because, being conservatives, we understand that the political is but a limited sphere. So ride the bike, traipse the trails, make music, draw and design, contemplate the constellations, make love to the wife.
Above all, lift up your eyes, if you can, to a Reality superior to this passing scene, superior to this vain world whose vanity will vanish along with it.
Seize the day, my friends, the hour of death is near for young and old alike. How would you like death to find you? In what condition, and immersed in which activity? Contemplating the eternal or stuck in the mud of the mundane or lost in the diaspora of sensuous indulgence?
The clock is running, and in the game of life it is sudden death with no way of knowing when the flag will fall.
For some of us the harvest years come late and we hope for many such years in which to reap what we have sown, but we dare not count on them. For another and greater Reaper is gaining on us and we cannot stay the hand that wields the scythe that will cut us down.
Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment will be all the greater. Or as one of my aphorisms has it:
Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.
Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.
As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.
Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on? Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world. In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor. But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eight years now. In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed. So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.
It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.
The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.
There is not enough time to understand this life in time, but then it is such a fleeting, paltry thing, such a blend of form and formlessness, such a chiaroscuro of light and dark, such a scene of desires insistent yet insatiable, ultimately unknowable and ultimately unreal -- that the time allotted is perhaps time enough.
Neither admire the handsome face that looks back at you, nor be troubled by the inevitable signs of aging as the face gives way to a meatless, brainless skull.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes ?
Our plesance here is all vain glory, This fals world is but transitory, The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee; Timor mortis conturbat me.
No stait in Erd here standis sicker; As with the wynd wavis the wicker, Wavis this wardlis vanitie; Timor mortis conturbat me.
(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")
Here lie I by the chancel door; They put me here because I was poor. The further in, the more you pay, But here lie I as snug as they.
(Devon tombstone.)
Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety, Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.
Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"
Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found A lad to love you, girl, under the ground. Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.
(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)
The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it, when it has been his study and his desire for so long.
The empty aspect of the world. Or, exchanging an aural metaphor for the visual: this world rings hollow. In tactile terms: it's slippery, flimsy. And it stinks because it's rotten. The food that supplies us has a limited shelf life and so do we. And it leaves a bad taste in our mouths. We speak of bitter experiences and of people who are embittered. But life can be sweet as well. You call your lady love 'sweetie.'
I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice?
Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you think that vipassana practice as such is not exerting that tendency and that the tendency is rather exerted by the combination of the practice with certain doctrines brought into the practice.
E.g., yesterday I read (in a Buddhist manual by Daniel Ingram) that when practising vipassana -- in a way that increases the speed, precision, consistency and inclusiveness of our experience of all the quick little sensations that make up our sensory experience -- "it just happens to be much more useful to assume that things are only there when you experience them and not there when you don’t. Thus, the gold standard for reality when doing insight practices is the sensations that make up your reality in that instant. ... Knowing this directly leads to freedom."
Will the vipassana practice tend me to believe that "useful" assumption, so useful for becoming to believe the Buddhist doctrines? Also, can I make any serious progress in that practice without making that assumption?
A. One Way to Meditate
Let me tell you about a fairly typical recent morning's meditation. It lasted from about 3:10 to 4 AM.
After settling onto the meditation cushions, I turned my attention to my deep, relaxed, and rhythmic breathing, focusing on the sensation of air passing in and out through the nostrils. If distracting thoughts or images arose I would expel them on the 'out' breath so that the expulsion of air coincided with the 'expulsion' of extraneous thoughts. If you have already learned how to control your mind, this is not that difficult and can be very pleasant and worth doing for its own sake even if you don't go any deeper.
(If you find this elementary thought control difficult or impossible, then you ought to be alarmed, just as you ought to be alarmed if you find your arms and legs flying off in different directions on their own. It means that you have no control over your own mind. Then who or what is controlling it?)
I then visualized my lungs' filling and emptying. I visualized my body as from outside perched on the cushions. And then I posed a question about the awareness of breathing.
There is this present breathing, and there is this present awareness of breathing. Even if the breathing could be identified with, or reduced to, an objective, merely physical process in nature, this won't work for the awareness of breathing.
What then is this awareness? It is not nothing. If it were nothing, then nothing would appear, contrary to fact. Fact is, the breathing appears; it is an object of awareness. So the awareness is not nothing. But the awareness is not something either: it it not some item that can be singled out. There is at least an apparent contradiction here: the awareness-of is both something and nothing. A Zen meditator could take this as a koan and work on it as such.
Or, in an attempt at avoiding logical contradiction, one might propose that the awareness-of is something that cannot be objectified. It is, but it cannot be objectified.
I am aware of my breathing, but also of my breathing's being an object of awareness, which implies that in some way I am aware of my awareness, though not as a separable object.
Who is aware of these things? I am aware of them. But who am I? And who is asking this question? I am asking it. But who am I who is asking this question and asking who is asking it?
At this point I am beyond simple mind control to what could be self-inquiry. (Cf. Ramana Maharshi) The idea is to penetrate into the source of this awareness. One circles around it discursively with the idea of collapsing the circle into a non-discursive point, as it were. (I just now came up with this comparison.)
B. Does doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs?
I don't think so. The Vipassana meditator's experiences are interpreted in the light of the characteristic Buddhist beliefs (anicca, anatta, dukkha). They are read in to the experiences rather than read off from them. A Christian meditator could easily do the same thing. I reported an unforgettable experience deep in meditation in which I felt myself to be the object of a powerful, unearthly love. If I take myself to have experienced the love of Christ, then clearly I go beyond the phenomenology of the experience. Still, the experience fits with Christian beliefs and could be taken in some loose sense to corroborate it. The same goes for the Vipassana meditator.
C. Impermanence
For example, does one learn from meditation that all is impermanent?
First of all, that
T. All is impermanent
Can be argued to be self-refuting.
Here goes. (T) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (T), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (T) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether. (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing, and indeed continuously changing.)
Note also that if (T) is true, then every part of (T)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.
In short, (T), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (T) undermines the permanence/impermanence contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (T) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.
What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.
No doubt (2) is meaningful 'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.
Now perhaps the Vippassana meditator gets himself into a state in which he is aware of only momentary, impermanent dharmas. How can he take that to show that ALL is impermanent?
There is also a question about what a belief would be for a Buddhist. On my understanding, beliefs are "necessary makeshifts" (a phrase from F. H. Bradley) useful in the samsaric realm, but not of ultimate validity. They are like the raft that gets one across the river but is then abandoned on the far shore. The Dharma (teaching) is the raft that transports us across the river of Samsara to the land of Nirvana where there is no need for any rafts -- or for the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.
D. How Much Metaphysics Does One Need to Meditate?
Assuming that meditation is pursued as a spiritual practice and not merely as a relaxation technique, I would say that the serious meditator must assume that there is a 'depth dimension' of spiritual/religious significance at the base of ordinary awareness and that our ultimate felicity demands that we get in touch with this depth dimension.
"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) I would add that meditation is the difficult task of swimming upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.
As St. Augustine says, Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi; in interiore homine habitat veritas. The truth dwells in the inner man; don't go outside yourself: return within.
We should anchor our thought in that which is most certain: the fact of change, the nearness of death, that things exist, that one is conscious, that one can say 'I' and mean it, the fact of conscience. But man does not meditate on the certain; he chases after the uncertain and ephemeral: name and fame, power and position, longevity and progeny, loot and land, pleasure and comfort.
Wealth is not certain, but the grave is. So meditate on death, asking: Who dies? Who survives? What is death? Who am I? What am I?
Death is certain, but the when is uncertain. Do not try to make a certainty out of what is uncertain, or an uncertainty out of what is certain.
"What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14)
"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304)
What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence?
While we are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient shows that their passing is not worthy of the full measure of our sadness. You are saddened by loss, but what exactly did you lose? Something that was meant to last forever? Something that could last forever? Something that was worth lasting forever?
Sadness at the passing of what must pass often indicates an inordinate love of the finite, when an ordinate love loves it as finite and no more. But sadness also bespeaks a sense that there is more than the finite. For if we had no sense of the Infinite why would we bestow upon the finite a value and reality it cannot bear?
Sadness thus points down to the relative unreality and unimportance of the world of time and change while pointing up to the absolute reality and importance of its Source.
But Nietzsche, of the tribe of Heraclitus, could not bring himself to believe in the Source. His bladed intellect would not allow it. But his heart was that of homo religiosus. So he had resort to a desperate and absurd measure in reconciliation of heart and head: the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as if the redemption of time could be secured by making it cyclical and endless.
This is no solution at all.
The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of Being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity.
To the moment I say, with Faust, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.
But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty here below except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillments vouchsafed only to some, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity.
So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life.
We too weep with Heraclitus, but our weeping is ordinate, adjusted to the grade of reality of that over which we weep. And our weeping is tempered by joy as we look beyond this scene of flux. For as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, "all joy/desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep, eternity." All Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit!
This longing joy, this joyful longing, is it evidence of the reality of its Object? Great minds have thought so. But you won't be able to prove it one way or the other. So in the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens. He's dead. In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed. So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.
The lament comes down through the centuries: Vita brevis est. What is the point of this observation? There are two main possible points.
A. One point, call it classical, is to warn people that this life is not ultimate, that it is preliminary and probationary if not positively punitive, that it is not an end in itself, that it is pilgrimage and preparation for what lies beyond the portals of death. One part of the idea is that the brevity of life shows life's non-ultimacy as to reality and value. Back of this is the Platonic sense, found also in Buddhism, that impermanence argues (relative) unreality and (relative) lack of value. Brevity entails vanity, emptiness. This life is empty and insubstantial, a vanishing quantity, a vain play of interdependent appearances. That which vanishes is vain, empty of self-nature, ontologically and axiologically deficient, if not utterly nonexistent. And all finite things must vanish. Vanity and vanishment are inscribed into their very nature.
The other part of the classical idea is that the vanity of life hides a reality the attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves in this vale of soul-making behind the veil of sense-induced ignorance (avidya). Since life is short, we must work out our salvation with diligence while the sun shines. For it is soon to set. It is later than we think in a world whose temporal determinations are indices of its relative unreality.
The brevity of life thus points both to its vanity and to the necessity of doing the work necessary to transcend it, toil possible only while caught within its coils. To put it in the form of a little ditty:
Ashes to ashes Dust to dust Life is short So renounce it we must.
B. The other point of vita brevis est, call it modern, is to advise people to make the most of life. Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it. Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets. Make the most of it because there is not much of it but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon.
The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us. One should make friends with finitude enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what might be. Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)
Ashes to ashes Dust to dust Life is short So party we must.
Which of these attitudes should one adopt toward the brevity of life? At the end of the day it comes down to a free decision on the part of the individual. After all the arguments and counterarguments have been canvassed, you must decide which to credit and which to reject, what to believe and how to live. Or as a gastroenterologist once said,"It depends on the liver."
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
We are 'reminded' (Plato) of the eternal both by the most transient and the least transient of things. The most transient teaches the ultimate ephemerality of all things finite. The least transient teaches that it is no substitute for the eternal.
The most ephemeral and fragile of things are yet not nothing: a wisp of cloud, a passing shadow, a baby whose hour of birth is its hour of death. And such seemingly permanent fixtures of the universe as Polaris are yet not entirely being. Both the relatively impermanent and the relatively permanent point beyond themselves to the absolutely permanent. Each is, absolutely considered, impermanent. No finite fixture is finally fixed.
Simone Weil puts the thought like this:
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity. (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, p. 97)
Her formulation, however, is defective: stars are born and die. They are not utterly permanent. They too are impermanent. Under the aspect of eternity, the different time scales of Alpha Ursae Minoris and a bear cub mean nothing.
This great version of a great song is back on YouTube. Catch it while you can. The lineup is all-star: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez imitating Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot.
Both worldling and philosopher distinguish between the permanent and the impermanent. How then do they differ? For the philosopher what the worldling calls permanent is impermanent, while for the worldling what the philosopher calls permanent doesn't exist.
No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and contain the dissipation wrought by time's diaspora and the mind's incontinence -- it passes all the same.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes ?
Our plesance here is all vain glory, This fals world is but transitory, The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee; Timor mortis conturbat me.
No stait in Erd here standis sicker; As with the wynd wavis the wicker, Wavis this wardlis vanitie; Timor mortis conturbat me.
(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")
Here lie I by the chancel door; They put me here because I was poor. The further in, the more you pay, But here lie I as snug as they.
(Devon tombstone.)
Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety, Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.
Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"
Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found A lad to love you, girl, under the ground. Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.
(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)
The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it, when it has been his study and his desire for so long.
I have long been fascinated by forms of philosophical refutation that exploit the overt or covert self-reference of a thesis. To warm up, consider
1. All generalizations are false.
Since (1) is a generalization, (1) refers to itself. So if (1) is true, then (1) is false. On the other hand, if (1) is false, as it surely is, then (1) is false. Therefore, necessarily (1) is false. It follows that the negation of (1), namely, Some generalizations are true, is not just true, but necessarily true. (1) is self-refuting and its negation is self-verifying. Some generalizations are true is an instance of itself which shows that it itself is true: one instance suffices to verify a particular generalization.
There are those who dismiss arguments like this as quick and facile. Some even call them 'sophomoric,' presumably because any intelligent and properly caffeinated sophomore can grasp them -- as if that could constitute a valid objection. I see it differently. The very simplicity of such arguments is what makes them so powerful. A simple argument with few premises and few inferential moves offers few opportunities to go wrong. Here, then, is a case where simplex sigillum veri, where simplicity is the seal of truth. Now consider a more philosophically interesting example, one beloved by Buddhists:
2. All is impermanent.
(2) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (2), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (2) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether. (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing.)
Note also that if (2) is true, then every part of (2)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.
In short, (2), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (2) undermines the permanence/impermanence contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (2) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.
What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.
No doubt (2) is meaningful 'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.
Michael Krausz ("Relativism and Beyond: A Tribute to Bimal Matilal" in Bilimoria and Mohanty, pp. 93-104) arrives at a similar result by a different route. He writes:
Paradoxically, because all things are contexted, the idea of permanence cannot be permanent. But it does not follow that in the end all things are impermanent either, for impermanence too is contexted and it too finally drops out of any fixed constellation of concepts. (101)
Krausz invokes the premise,
3. All things are contexted.
Krausz writes as if (3) is unproblematic. But surely it too 'deconstructs' itself. Just apply the same reasoning to (3) that we applied to (2). Clearly, (3) is self-referential. So (3) cannot express an invariant structure of being. It cannot be taken to mean, context-independently, that every being qua being is contexted.
Note also that if (3) is true, then every part of (3)'s propositional content is contexted: the universal quantifier, the concept thing, the copulative tie, and the concept of being contexted are all contexted. What's more, the very contrast of the context-free and the context-bound is contexted.
In short, (3), if true, undermines the very contrast that confers upon it a determinate sense, namely, the contrast between the context-free and the context-bound. For if all is contexted, then so is this contrast and this distinction.
(3) collapses in upon itself and perishes for want of a determinate sense. And the same goes for all its parts. Copulative Being collapses into indeterminacy along with every other sense of Being: the existential, the identitative, the veritative, the locative, the class-theoretic. Being ends up with no structure at all. If Being and Thinking are one, as Father Parmendides had it, then the collapse of Being brings Thinking down with it.
Clearly, we are sinking into some seriously deep shit here, and it is of the worst kind: the formless kind, crap that won't own up to its own crapiness, the kind that deconstructionists, whether Continental or Asian, like to serve up. It is stuff so unstable that one cannot even say that it stinks. Do we really want to wallow in this mess?
Wouldn't it be better to admit that there is an Absolute?
The world's transiency is sufficiently stable to be soothingly seductive. One dies, no doubt, but one is still here and has been for a long time. One exploits the gap between 'one dies' and 'I die.' A feeling of pseudo-security establishes itself. The hard and intransient truth of transiency is kept at arm's length. Hence one does not seek truth, or does so without fervor. One is lulled into complacency by pseudo-stability. The complacency comes to extend to complacency itself. One no longer cares that one no longer cares to wake up from the dream of life. The very idea, if entertained at all, is entertained for the sake of entertainment: the Quest becomes joke-fodder.
An abbreviated version of the following paper was published under the same title in The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 9, ed. Stephen Voss (Ankara, Turkey), 2006, pp. 29-33.
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According to Buddhist ontology, every (samsaric) being is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. Anicca, dukkha, anatta: these are the famous three marks (tilakkhana) upon which the whole of Buddhism rests. I would like to consider a well-known Buddhist argument for the third of these marks, that of anatta, an argument one could call ‘The Chariot.’ The argument aims to show that no (samsaric) being is a self, or has self-nature, or is a substance. My thesis will be that, successful as this argument may be when applied to things other than ourselves, it fails when applied to ourselves.
Over lunch today the Buddhist claim that all is impermanent came up for discussion. Let’s see how plausible this claim of impermanence is when interpreted to mean that everything is always continuously changing in every respect. We need to ask four questions. Does everything change? Do the things that change always change? Do the things that always change continuously change? Do the things that change change in every respect?
With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past & Unalterable.
The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary.
There is a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take away what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.
Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent -- or should I say next to nonenexistent? You will thus be forgiven for valuing the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite.
And herein, in this hesitation, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possiblity, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up? The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality.
I turned 52 yesterday. The first decade of my life took 20 years. The second decade took 15 years. The third decade took a decade. The fourth decade took five years. The past dozen years took 12 minutes. At this rate, I'll be dead in less than half an hour.
As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us midstreamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.
Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on? Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world. In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places In California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor. But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from ages 49 to 59 I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.
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