JF MARTEL
  • Home
  • Writings
  • Podcast
  • Media
  • Journal
  • About
  • Contact

"Let the Absolute Bury the Absolute"

6/5/2015

 
PictureNot to worry! Those are not protruding ribcages, but only ripples in mind-at-large.
As an addendum to my response to Bernardo Kastrup, who dismissed my critique of his philosophy by saying that I hadn't understood a damn thing, I'm posting the following quote from the great psychologist William James. Matthew David Segall included it in his own response to Kastrup, and I found it to be a simple and straightforward argument for being wary of consoling claims that "all is one."

"The sum of it all is that the absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker to whom it does not come as an ‘immediate certainty’… is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: reality MAY exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of eaches, just as it seems to—this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis. Prima facie there is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute, and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the details of the finite and the immediately given."

Now, in his response to my critique, Bernardo Kastrup writes:

... I should make one thing absolutely clear about me: I am not here to accommodate sensitivities; I'm not here to collect a large audience by catering to the inclinations of the highest possible number of people; I'm not here to find compromises that give everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling. My commitment is to truth, and truth alone, whatever the cost. [his emphasis]
To which I respond: It's easy to be so doggedly committed to Truth when your conclusions happen to be the warmest and fuzziest imaginable. Kastrup has elsewhere said that the number one reason we should all buy into his monistic idealism* is that it assures us we will never die. I am in agreement with James here: from a strictly practical viewpoint, the oneness philosophy of Bernardo Kastrup and Deepak Chopra is probably the most "rational" choice for anyone looking for a belief system. It consoles, it comforts, it gives courage. The only problem with it, as James notes, is that life in the phenomenal world contradicts it at every turn.

If belief in the existence of a real external world is just an inference, as Kastrup insists, then it's a universal inference, an instinctive inference that every human being, even the most hardened idealist, has make to get by in reality. It's also very useful when it's time, say, to tell the difference between a real apple the thought of an apple.  It's true that a handicap in this regard would have been a comfort to the children in the above photograph, who died in the famine Stalin inflicted on the Ukraine in the name of another abstraction. They could have had their fill of mental apples. But they still would have starved.

I realize this last paragraph is a caricature of Kastrup's thought. My point is that certain philosophies are so abstract, so divorced from the realities of embodied and ensouled experience, that they are only purchased at a high price. Buyer beware.

* Meaning, the first in a list of "implications and practical applications" of monistic idealism, given in answer to the title-question: "Does it matter whether all is in consciousness?" 
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/09/does-it-matter-whether-all-is-in.html
Paul
6/6/2015 02:57:49 pm

"Prima facie there is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously." (William James)

There is an impossibly rich irony in your choice of these particular words of James, when one considers that Jane Roberts, the woman who famously channeled the entity named Seth back in the 70s for many years, was just warming up, it seems, for her subsequent coup: channeling James himself. The material is available in the book "The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher," where James has quite a few second thoughts on his previous work… :-)

PeterJ link
6/21/2015 10:52:12 pm

Some good points JFM.

It seem to me that you are arguing sensibly against Kastrup's monism , but not against the mystical view. Kastrup speaks of monism while mysticism speaks of unity. Unity can be proved and has been by Nagarjuna, while monism is refuted by Nagarjuna. Monism implies numerical quantity and this leads to confusion, as we see, and as I annoyingly like to point out to BK whenever I can.

It would be a mistake, I feel, to assume that unity is an experiential phenomenon with no possible philosophical proof. It works as a solution for philosophical problems and is not just a free-floating conjecture with nothing but first-person reports to support it. .

I share your unease with BK's approach, then, but not your criticism of what is in fact a much more subtle idea. You may like this article. It seems directly relevant and is very good. Note the relative is not reduced to meaninglessness.
.
http://buddhismnow.com/2015/06/17/two-levels-of-truth-by-lama-chime-rinpoche/
. .

JF Martel
6/22/2015 01:50:03 am

Hi Peter,

The last paragraph of the article you linked here says it all rather beautifully, I think.

"In Zen Buddhism there is a saying, ‘Before one practises Zen, mountains are mountains and trees are trees.’ That is to say, there is only the reality of the relative world. ‘After one has practised Zen for some time,’ the saying continues, ‘mountains are no longer mountains and trees are no longer trees.’ One has seen the absolute, underlying unity of all things. ‘But at the completion of one’s practice of Zen, mountains are again mountains and trees are again trees,’ The relative is the absolute and yet at the same time it is the relative. We live in the same world, and yet it is completely transformed. It does not overwhelm us; we do not need it and yet we can enjoy it. It is one, and yet it is always changing. To the unenlightened it is a source of bondage, but to the enlightened it is a source of freedom, freedom at the heart of all things."

In other words, there is no reality beyond this world. All is relative—all is becoming. The relative is the absolute, or “being can only be said of becoming.” To accept this and let go of attachment to final truth – i.e. to some underlying reality that is “more real” than this world – is to attain freedom. I agree with this 100%

I think you and I disagree when it comes to logically or rationally processing this absolute nature of the relative or the relative nature of the absolute. I don't think it's possible to make a logical argument for it without positing some transcendent value that thereafter exists outside the world. Which to me is a parody of what the author of this article is getting at. If it weren't, all we would need would be the logical argument; there'd be no need for contemplative practice and meditation. The reason these practices are necessary is precisely that the nature of reality cannot be understood by the rational intellect. Or at least that's my understanding of Zen and other similar traditions. As Lao Tse put it: "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao".


Comments are closed.

    Author

    I am a writer and filmmaker based in Ottawa, Canada. Follow me on Twitter.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    May 2018
    February 2018
    August 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    November 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014

    Topics

    All
    Aeshetics
    Anton Chekhov
    Bernardo Kastrup
    Consciousness
    David Hume
    Eugene Thacker
    Gilles Deleuze
    Graham Larkin
    Idealism
    Johannes Vermeer
    Lev Shestov
    Matthew David Segall
    Metaphysics
    Panpsychism
    Paul Cézanne
    Phil Ford
    Philosophy
    Reclaiming Art
    Richard Grossinger
    Television
    The Real
    Thomas Ligotti
    Vilhelm Hammershoi
    Vincent Van Gogh
    Weird Realism
    Weird Studies Podcast

© 2019 J.F. Martel. All rights reserved.