Paradoxes of Transcendence

The title of this thread comes from an essay with a similar name by Alan Malachowski, a writer on Rorty and also TSK.  I don't have an electronic copy of it to share, but I think the question it addresses is a relevant one for this group, so I'll try to get at the gist of it here.

To the degree that spiritual traditions aim towards absolute transcendence of limitations, towards 'ultimate' conditions or states (timelessness, omniscience, absolute freedom, unconditioned existence, etc), are they engaged in a project that is self-defeating?  Are these actually desirable conditions for a meaningful, fulfilled human life? 

In a piece that addresses similar questions, Martha Nussbaum writes:  “What my argument urges us to reject as incoherent is the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity, and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being – as if it were a higher and better life for us.”

Here is how Malachowski summarizes the main points of her argument:

(1) The humanly good life is necessarily subject to constraints;

(2) Although it is often sensible for us to try to overcome those constraints that are “constitutive of our humanity,” complete success in this respect would be self-defeating;

(3) The idea that a human being might lead an unconstrained life, beyond all limits, is incoherent;

(4) Beings that could lead an unconstrained life might well be worse off than human beings precisely because their life lacked limits.

These are, of course, fairly “pedestrian” observations.  Nussbaum (and Malachowski) raise them because they directly challenge the coherence (or desirability) of the longing for the realization of an “absolute” state or condition that informs many spiritual approaches.  It makes good sense to desire to rise above or transcend certain limiting conditions, but total success in that endeavor (total transcendence of limitations) would likely be self-defeating.  (Nussbaum gives the example of an athlete transcending all human limitations in a given sport undermining the meaningfulness of the exercise – when limits disappear, so do values, meanings.)  Arriving at an absolutely limitless form of life (beyond time, beyond space) would likely deposit us in an ultimately empty, valueless state.

These issues have been recognized and addressed by many thinkers – among them, Shunryu Suzuki, Thomas Merton, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, etc.  The Buddhist two-truths doctrine could be considered an attempt to resolve, or at least acknowledge, this paradox. 

The naturalist-leaning Nussbaum would question whether the “ultimate realization” of an unconditioned absolute is something humans should bother to aspire to – arguing that such a condition would be alienating, not fulfilling.

In posting these arguments, I am not necessarily arguing in favor of naturalism over against various spiritual traditions.  IPM involves a naturalistic bent, and we have reviewed some of the challenges a post-metaphysical approach might pose to the two truths doctrine (metaphysically conceived), but I am not entirely sure it fits completely within a naturalistic 'box' either.

What do you think?  What is the 'place' of transcendence and transcendental aspiration in an evolutionary post-metaphysical spirituality?

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Good questions, Bruce.  Fullest transcendence is limitless, no?  I mean, we can transcend through stages faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and never reach infinite fastness: in fact, at each next “transcendent” stage we are infinitely removed from infinite anything (fastness, stage, etc.).

Here's a question I posed in a different thread: can a negative fact (ie, not red) be perceived in absence of a positive fact excluding the negated quality (red)?  

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Hey,

Just a couple of thoughts. The only absolute state is the State of Here
and Now which includes the mental contortions that posit something
outside of or extra to that state, such as some transcendent ideal.

It is likely that the ability to suspend disbelief in fairy tales is
hardwired and serves, or at least once served, some survival related
function. Transcendence is an adult fairy tale, as is Spirit, thus
arguing against seeking transcendence is, here and now, a transcendent
ideal. Screwing around with the ideal of transcendence is just one of
those things that people do and saying that one should not do it is
like trying to educate against nose picking and masturbation. Plus, it
appears to some to be a good way to occupy their time between meals or
to shovel smoke while dining with others who are likewise inclined. As
recreation I think that screwing around with the ideal of transcendence
is preferable to playing Bridge with really old people but far inferior
to a couple of rounds of Cowboy Billiards (a.k.a. Cowboy Pool).
I have heard that there actually are people who make a fairly decent
living hustling the chumps by playing transcendent ideals, just the
same a those who hustle the chumps by playing Cowboy Billiards. (There
are no hustlers when really old people play Bridge.)

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LOL…with Steven…*

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Looking at Tom’s question we might say that there is a conditional transcendent, but also a transcendental condition. The former is the recognition that any transcendent is quasi, i.e., that even though present conditions are transcended by future conditions they do not reach a final, absolutely absolute state. On the other hand the latter is that unconditional unknown, not as fixed ideal but as openness, without which we wouldn’t have the necessary reference within which to see conditional differences. In a sense it is the metaphor of the blank page or space in which words appear, without which there could be no words. It is the space or silence between notes, without which there could be no notes. It is the “timeless” present moment, without which there could be no past or future. Or, in Derrida/Caputo’s terms, it is the impossible without which nothing would be possible. It is only when we reify this transcendence via metaphysics that we run into a problem.

On Steven’s note, I just finished watching the rented movie Brideshead Revisited. Highly recommended. One of its multi-textured themes is exactly this reified transcendence via the conflict of an atheist that befriends a wealthy family of rigid Roman Catholics. The atheist falls in love with both the son and daughter but their mother’s religion infects all of their relationships. The atheist’s realization by the denouement is that, as Steven suggests, it is fruitless to try to change people’s private beliefs, even if we think of them as nonsense. For not only can we not but there are dire consequences to the effort.

On the other hand, we really cannot let such private beliefs run political power structures. Indeed the separation of church and state is a positive and progressive advance that demands this. Even in the more narrow political context of the movie’s family we see how the transcendent, when not conditional, when it is absolutely reified, will create utter devastation and destruction in this world here and now. The protagonist though sees that the transcendent can and must serve the useful purpose of providing meaning to our lives.

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On related notes (and spaces), Martin Morris says in “Between deliberation and deconstruction” (in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, edited by Lasse Thomassen, U of Chicago Press, 2006):

Against what, precisely, the boundaries of the lifeworld stand remain obscure, mysterious; but this obscurity and mystery can be productive. Borders, frontiers, boundaries, are always seemingly also divisions, identities and oppositions, even if they are conceived as absolute limits. While an absolute limit cannot be crossed no matter what, its sense of limit always implies an opposite or further space beyond (240).

Derrida refers to Plato’s notion of the khora…. Khora is the space that gives place….of the space in-between. This is a desert place….a concept at once non-identical with itself in its very intention ‘as if there were two, the one and its double’, for it opens ‘an apparently empty space’ but is not ‘emptiness’. It is thus that which is in this sense indeconstructible…as the very spacing of deconstruction…. Khora itself cannot be another language, even the metaphoric language of space…for the referent of this reference…does not exist (241).

The result is a ‘philosophy of the limit’ whose quasi-transcendental universal call denies the possibility of any metalanguage while trying to achieve ‘the effects of metalanguage’….but the call of profound understanding that arises from the irreplaceable place in which identities gather themselves is a call for an openness to the new, to the unique other: ‘it should be anticipated as the unforeseeable, the unanticipatable, the non-masterable, non-identifiable, in short, as that of which one does not yet have a memory’ (248).

More than this, however, the stress on the dynamic relations of identity and non-identity is also key if the positive effects of a deconstructive universal are to be realized….responsibility consists ‘in renouncing neither of these two contradictory imperatives…. It is even impossible to conceive of a responsibility that consists…in responding to two contradictory injunctions…but there is no responsibility that is not the experience and the experiment of the impossible’ (249).

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Further to ideas on this thread, allow me to present a division of polar terms from Peirce and Hartshorne.  Left hand terms can be called relative, right hand terms absolute.  Thus:

1 relative absolute
2 subject object
3 whole part
4 effect cause
5 later earlier
6 becoming being
7 temporal nontemporal
8 concrete abstract
9 particular universal
10 actual potential
11 contingent necessary
12 finite infinite
13 discrete continuous
14 complex simple
15 proximate ultimate
16 real unreal
17 dependent independent
18 totality constituent
19 true false

Notice the following correlations and observations.  RH terms are negating, LH terms positing.  RH terms are thus abstract (8) and universal (9).  They abstract from LH terms and, by their negating abstraction, or negating stripping, are impoverished, in a word, simple (14).

RH terms are almost the exclusive domain of so-called spiritual talk, which terms spiritualists take to be, quite rightly, ultimate (15).

But as negative terms, RH terms require the specificity denoted by their LH origins (the posits they negate) for meaning.  A RH term, on the above organization, and taken by itself—introduced as the X—must be meaningless or contradictory.  Try imagining “the infinite.”  If the infinite refers to some existing reality, it cannot exist.  “The infinite” must refer to all possibilities in any manner conceivable.  How can the infinite be infinite when even one instance of finite exists?  By definition, the place of that finite will be this-not-that, therefore not infinite.  The existence of the finite therefore abolishes the notion of the infinite.

LH terms are inclusive, RH terms exclusive.  This correlation sets up a basic asymmetry between LH and RH terms.  A whole (3) therefore includes its parts, the later (5) includes the earlier, the concrete (8) includes the abstract.  Thus can one speak of a particular abstraction (9,8), but not an abstract particular; a discrete absolute (13,1), but not an absolute discrete; etc.

“Absolute,” for its part, but negates “relative,” but by the operation of history, we can say any absolute will appear relative.  This but restates the rule that LH terms (relative) include RH terms (absolute).

LH terms are real (16), RH terms unreal.  An effect, for instance, is real whereas a cause is but abstracted (8) from inferences drawn from present (5) observation and experience.  “Cause,” for its part, is abstract reconstruction.

The totality of all (18) is relative (1), as it depends (17) on its constituents (18), parts (3) and causes (4).  Each of these latter are but objective (2) abstractions that cannot be seen to exist absent reference to the LH term they imply (thus “constituent of,” “part of,” “cause of”).

If God is the all, God must be relative also.  So, too, any image of That Largest Reality.

Negating terms like absolute and infinite are functionals, not existents, they are unreal (16).

Now a paragraph from Hartshorne:

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Tom, u musta been goin thru ur opposite's attract stage…lol*

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Caputo in “The experience of God and the axiology of the impossible” (in Religion After Metaphysics, edited by Mark Wrathall, Cambridge UP, 2003):

But by “the impossible,” I hasten to add, I do not mean a simple contradiction, the simple logical negation of the possible, like (p and ~p), which is cornerstone of the old onto-theology, but something phenomenological, namely, that which shatters the horizon of expectation and forseeability…. I am resisting all a priori logical and onto-theological constraints about the possible and the impossible in order to work my way back into the texture of the phenomenological structure of experience (123-4).

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What Caputo refers to here is obviously not a pure immediacy, for he is an avid antagonist of metaphysics. So what then does he mean by this? Recall Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of experience:

“There is hence a fundamental divergence within the body, but just as this gap ensures the impossibility of any thorough and all-encompassing self-perception, it is also that which allows perception, and indeed subjectivity, to be possible at all.”

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So rather than having preference for one pole in any opposition, Derrida euphemistically calls their relationship “khora,” which is the cleavage or fold in which they interact. It is not, in itself, one side or the other, not yin or yang. This is how Caputo means the impossible. Merleau-Ponty calls it the chiasm or gap. And it is this fundamental condition of undecideability, or the impossible, at the core of experience that is a (quasi)transcendental, yet not metaphysical, condition. 

Within this chiasm MP also shows the reversibility of opposites; they are not in themselves permanantly fixed either. (Hence ultimately “undecidable” one way or the other). In tai chi theory and practice this is known as the following: “when yin goes to its extreme it becomes yang; when yang goes to its extreme it becomes yin.” Here’s how MP’s Internet Encyclopedia entry describes the process: 

Rather than maintaining a traditional dualism in which mind and body, subject and object, self and other, and so forth, are discrete and separate entities, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty argues that there is an important sense in which such pairs are also associated. For example, he does not dispute that there is a divergence, or dehiscence, in our embodied situation that is evident in the difference that exists between touching and being touched, between looking and being looked at, or between the sentient and the sensible in his own vocabulary. On the contrary, this divergence is considered to be a necessary and constitutive factor in allowing subjectivity to be possible at all. However, he suggests that rather than involving a simple dualism, this divergence between touching and being touched, or between the sentient and the sensible, also allows for the possibility of overlapping and encroachment between these two terms.  

For example, Merleau-Ponty has somewhat famously suggested that the experience of touching cannot be understood without reference to the tacit potential for this situation to be reversed. As Thomas Busch points out, The Visible and the Invisible highlights that “in the body's touching of itself is found a differentiation and an encroachment which is neither sheer identity nor non-identity” (MPHP 110)…. There is then, a gap (or ecart in French) between ourselves as touching and ourselves as touched, a divergence between the sentient and sensible aspects of our existence, but this gap is importantly distinct from merely reinstating yet another dualism. Touching and touched are not simply separate orders of being in the world, since they are reversible, and this image of our left hand touching our right hand does more than merely represent the body's capacity to be both perceiving object and subject of perception in a constant oscillation (as is arguably the case in Sartre's looked at, looked upon, dichotomy, as well as the master-slave oscillations that such a conception induces).

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Hi Edward, according to the little list I gave above, polars are not symmetrically reversible (later includes earlier but not vice versa).  Busch sounds like he is arguing for symmetrical polars, or looks otherwise to have introduced terms lacking necessary precision. 

The experience of touching can be conceived as a process whereby cells as constituents of a larger whole “experience” something, an object, then relay this experience into the whole.  This description gives due regard to time and sequence in the process of any experience, and respects the constitutive, holarchical nature of self.  In this sequence, cells experience something object to them, whether other cells of the whole in which the former subsist, or the cells of another person's body.  Whatever they experience is then passed into the larger whole.  I don't see the gap, here, if one assumes that by “I” is meant a holarchically structured society of the nature I'm describing (ie, constituents—cells—retain real independence within the whole).

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Actually the confusion about reversibility is my fault, not the IEP author (Reynolds) or his referenced source, Busch. I mixed my metaphors poorly with the tai chi reference that I might or might not try to reframe later. For now, within the context of the entire referenced section of IEP, I'd say Reynolds is not saying that oppositional pairs are necessarily symetrically reverisible. I think the reference to touching and being touched refers to the notions of identity and non-identity and their association, which is “overlapping and encroaching.” That is, perceptual experience is at its core the differentiation between self and other, inside and outside.

If we look to Busch's quoted source in the IEP article it's from p. 100 of Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics and Postmodernism (SUNY, 1992). Here are a few excerpts that I think clarify his position. First is him clarifying the meaning of the term “reversibility” as “implication” and “entertwing.” And then another excerpt on the general idea of differentiation at the heart of bodily experience (before consciousness), which does not yield “emptiness” or an absolute (or an absolute emptiness).

“Reversibility…can be infra-linguistic, as is the case when signifiers systematically implicate one another diacritically, and extra-linguistic, when perception and language implicate one another. The entertwining of perception and language brings language outside of itself (111).”

(My yin/yang reversibility might have more to do with the infra-linguistic, whereas what Reynolds and Busch are referring to is the extra-linguistic.)

“…rejecting coincidence [fusion with the existent] involved itself with the question of distance, differentiation, and separation…. He [MP] agrees with Sartre that distance or differentiation is the very condition of possibility of experience…. Differentiation is not an alienation of experience and its overcoming would not result in achieving absolute knowledge. MP disagrees, however, with Sartre’s depiction of difference as neant, a nothingness beyond being, which would have the effect of desituating experience. On this point MP reiterates the centrality of bodily experience…now holding that the body is the “prototype of Being.” In the body’s touching of itself is found a differentiation (ecart) and an encroachment with is neither sheer identity nor non-identity. He then moves from the prototype to Being…. The ecart, unlike neant, is not brought about by consciousness. It is, instead, ‘a natural negativity, a first institution, always already there’” (109-10).

This is akin to Lakoff & Johnson’s notions of how differentiation is at the heart of our bodily hard-wiring, and it is this same basic differentiation that is the foundation for more complex “conscious” thought and language at higher levels. So in the sense you mean, yes, the body is before thought in both time and as foundational principle. As to your asking how this works, see L&J’s Philosophy of the Flesh (Basic Books, 1999), particularly Chapter 3, “The embodied mind.”

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Balder posted a link to a new essay by Cameron Freeman, which I want to link to here as well, because it’s getting at that different meaning of “reversibility” in another context.  Cameron: “…by simply showing that the same paradoxical structure, what is also called a dynamic pattern of bi-polar reversals…”

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Here is another way of putting it, from Balder’s new thread on Panikkar. This might even be the answer to Balder's question of Cameron, i.e., what comes after Derrida's first stage of reversal? The answer below could have come straight from D's own mouth. The excerpt:

In a phrase deliberately patterned on Heidegger's key notion of ontological difference, Panikkar speaks of a “symbolic difference” indicating the differential entwinement between symbol and (ontological) reality—an entwinement which allows him to say that reality “discloses itself only as a symbol” with the result that “what reality is, is its symbol”….the earlier notion of “symbolic difference” was modified or amplified by a further difference or differential entwinement equally opposed to both fusion and separation. 

The task today is to move beyond these dualisms without lapsing into monistic coincidence:

God and the world are not two realities, nor are they one and the same.  Moreover, to return to our subject, politics and religion are not tow independent activities, nor are they one indiscriminate thing.  There is no politics separate from religion.  There is no religious factor that is not at the same time a political factor…The divine tabernacle is to be found among men; the earthly city is a divine happening. 

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Thanks for highlighting that, Edward.  I hadn't connected that to my discussion with Cameron, so that is helpful.

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These issues have been recognized and addressed by many thinkers – among them, Shunryu Suzuki, Thomas Merton, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, etc. 

Do you review the comments of the above authors somewhere, Bruce? I'd be curious to know how they responded to such questions.

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Hi, Kela, yes, I was intending to post some relevant comments.  Here are some of the ones I was referring to:

Shunryu Suzuki:  “We should be very grateful to have a limited body… like mine, or like yours.  If you had a limitless life it would be a real problem for you.”

Nietzsche:  “The riddle that the human being is supposed to solve can be solved only in being what he or she is, and not in being something else, in the immutable.”

Thomas Merton:  “Coercion from outside, strong temperamental inclinations and passions within ourselves, do nothing to affect the essence of our freedom.  They simply define its action by imposing limits.  They give it a peculiar character of its own.”

T.S. Eliot:  “Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place / I rejoice that things are as they are.”

Tarthang Tulku:  “The idea of 'transcending' limitations or conditions is actually its own trap.  Once we accept the need to transcend, we have to reject all present experience in favor of something ultimate or absolute or 'transcendent.' We don't know what it is; we can't really imagine it; all we have is the idea of an idea – yet we let this idea convince us that where we are right now is incomplete and unsatisfactory.  Somehow we expect to make a sharp break with the past.  How can we do it?  How can we ever go beyond where we are?  Aren't we condemning ourselves to failure?  In TSK, being trapped is potentially very valuable – the door to liberation.  If we investigate, maybe there is no trap in the first place.  Our understanding comes from time-space-knowledge, and goes to time-space-knowledge, and the coming and going reflect time, space, knowledge.  Why insist on 'trapped' as the right description for what is happening?  Why not allow for other possibilities?”

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Wow, like the Tarthang quote. Where's that from, Bruce?  “Can't really imagine it.”  That's so true.  “I'm trapped in reference to something I can't imagine.” 

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It's from an interview with Tarthang Tulku in the Spring 1996 issue of Gnosis magazine.

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The problem I have with “the unlimited” as an ideal is, apart from wondering what the heck it is, I can never be that—I can never be without limit, without body, without frame or context—so any contemplating the unlimited as my own goal must divide myself internally.  Even the idea of “unlimited” as wholly other than “limited,” apart from the contradiction it posits (how can a limited mind picture the unlimited-as-such), sets up, for me, an intolerable dualism.  Better, for me, is seeing the unlimited in the limited, as the freedom in negating what is thought as limit-as-undesirable.

Or something.

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Excellent. Thanks, Bruce. Hegel actually has something to say about this in the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit. No doubt, references could be culled from Heidegger and Sartre. In What is Metaphysics?, Delueze talks about the “plane of immanence.” The sense I get from Suzuki and Tarthang T, is that they may be coming at the issue from the point of view of Mahayana. In other words, the above responses might be related to particular contexts, and involve nuanced or “dialectical” responses to the problem. In any case, I like to pay respect to the answers of others before I begin deliberating on “big questions” (and this is a biggy) such as these. Thanks.

k

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“The idea of 'transcending' limitations or conditions is actually its own trap.  Once we accept the need to transcend, we have to reject all present experience in favor of something ultimate or absolute or 'transcendent.' We don't know what it is; we can't really imagine it; all we have is the idea of an idea – yet we let this idea convince us that where we are right now is incomplete and unsatisfactory.  Somehow we expect to make a sharp break with the past.  How can we do it?  How can we ever go beyond where we are?  Aren't we condemning ourselves to failure?  … being trapped is potentially very valuable – the door to liberation.  If we investigate, maybe there is no trap in the first place…. Why insist on 'trapped' as the right description for what is happening?”

While this response is quite good, it is actually a fairly recognizable one, found in a lot of literature associated with Ch'an, Ati Yoga, Kashmiri Shaivism, and Advaita — particularly works like Ashtavakra Gita and Avadhuta Gita. For example in this passage: “…we have to reject all present experience in favor of…” we find the familiar theme of “beyond accepting and rejecting.”

The teaching describes a kind of “catch 22 situation” that seems irresolvable, but that is actually the product of the seeker's own mind, finding its basis in the idea that there is some “problem” that needs to be rectified in the first place. The problem with the “problem,” and problem/solution based thinking, is that it creates an idealized situation in which an essential self is projected outside or “beyond” the actual self. This creates a sense of alienation that can never be overcome, since the idealized self must remain idealized.

While the idea of “transcendence” is subjected here to a kind of critique, I think that transcendence remains, if in a more “actualizable” and “realistic” form. The critique is really merely a way of clearing away improper delusional conceptions of the teaching, of doing away with a form of “spiritual materialism,” namely, with the idea that “enlightenment” or “transcendence” is something that can or should be “attained.” In any case, I think that some form of “transcendence” is still implied by the Buddhist and Vedanta teachings, and in this sense, their answers need to be distinguished from those of Heidegger or Eliot.

Nussbaum notes that transcendence would be an “empty, valueless” state. Chuang Tzu, or Ashtavakra, or some other anarchist like Diogenes, might agree.
:-)

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Thanks, Kela – I agree.  I think there are certainly parallels between what Tulku is saying and statements you might find in some Mahayana, Vajrayana, and Advaita literature.  Not surprising, since Tulku's primary vocation is as a lama in the Nyingma tradition.  He insists that TSK differs from Buddhism in important ways, and I think this is true, but it also bears a number of similarities.

I also agree that, while the idea of transcendence is critiqued as problematic, a form of transcendence is nevertheless retained.  That's the point of Malachowski's essay – exploring just what role transcendence has, or should have, in TSK.  TSK does critique the notion of a transcendent realm, but retains a “transcendental orientation” as a functional device.  In particular, TSK posits several “levels” of time, space, and knowledge – identifying them not as truly distinct realms, but as a useful convention to encourage inquiry by challenging present presuppositions and the fixity of views.

I'm not familiar enough with Heidegger's perspective to be able to comment on the difference between his perspective and Mahayana.  I'm familiar with Guenther's quasi-Heideggerian reading of certain Dzogchen texts, so I haven't taken them to be fundamentally at odds with each other, but that's evidence of nothing really but my own lack of familiarity with Heidegger's work as a whole.

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Thanks, everyone for your comments so far;  I hope to respond to several of the posts this evening.  One thing I've been looking at, in relation particularly to Tom and Edward's discussion of polarity, is the TSK strategy of (playfully) using triple- negation to challenge conventional metaphysical accounts of 'existence' and 'creation' and so on.  I'll return to this in another post.  For now, here is an excerpt from an essay that deals with relevant questions.  Unfortunately, I only have access to a portion of it. 

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Hi Bruce, I like what the article says.  I like P's definition here:

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Paradox squared, or an enigma wrapped in a mystery?

Given all of the above I have some questions. We’ve seen Caputo say that what he refers to as the impossible is not the opposite of the possible, that the referent is not part of that metaphysical, dualistic opposition even though the signifier seems to imply as much. And yet all the descriptions of this impossible kingdom of god oppose it to the possible kingdom of man. The former uses a poetics, is disruptive, is incomprehensible etc. while the later uses logos, is stability and the understandable. Same with Pannikker saying that there is God and man, religion and politics.

Now both say something to the effect that the so-called dualism is overcome by positing their relationship as not one, not two, both are the same yet different. So is God one side in the God/man equation or is God the relationship between the two? Is God and/or his Kingdom merely the reversal and disruption of everything expected within the usual horizon of earthly business as usual? Or is God again how both the disruptive, singular event and the repetitious sameness of what went before come together in relationship? If so, what or who is this third thing that relates them? God, man, god/man and/or someone/thing else?

Is the relationship in the slash (/)? Or is God one slash (/) and man another slash (\) and their relationship a double slash (X)?

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It's the same old dualism, in my books.

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Your books then are missing some important chapters.

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Sorry Edward, I may have misunderstood your post, then ripped off my little demeaning sentence.  I'm running pretty fast today, so not concentrating well.

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I actually see much in common between Hartshorne and Derrida. I realize David Griffin, one of the founders of the Center for Process Studies, would find this anathema, dichotomizing the two into constructive and deconstructive postmodernisms. (And Wilber follows suit here.) I liked this article from the CFPS site, showing more of a connection between Whitehead and Deleuze, but in many ways could apply to Derrida as well. Granted some of the con v decon prejudice comes through in the article, but nonetheless it is instructive. “In the wake of false unifications” by Roland Faber.

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Me too I don't get it. How is this 'same old dualism'?

Edward: what or who is this third thing that relates them? God, man, god/man and/or someone/thing else?

Here, a third player enters the ring. What or who is this thing in-between the chairs?

We could say with Genpo Roshi, that we have God (or Absolute) and Man (or relative) and then there is the Apex of both. The 'X', the convergence point. The neither-nor-both. The seed for something new.

This is more like an intuition, I can't put it more precise than that. But I'm working on it. :-)

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I came across these passages in Tulku's Love of Knowledge this morning:

”The Idea of an Absolute

The notion of an absolute … raises difficult questions.  If the absolute is to have any significance for human beings, it must be related to us. For example, unless ‘ultimate truth’ either guarantees or otherwise affects conventional truth, how can it be called ‘true’?  Conditional reality must reflect, manifest, or share in ultimate reality. But the nature of this relationship, and even its possibility, remains a mystery.

The interaction of absolute and conditioned seems to lead directly to contradiction. Thus, the absolute is absolute only in comparison to what is not absolute. It follows that the absolute depends on the environment that validates it as absolute: the changing world of the conditioned realm. But this seems to mean that the conditioned realm as such must be absolutely conditioned. (If it could cease being conditioned, it would no longer be a validating environment for the absolute, in which case the absolute would no longer be absolute -— but an absolute that could stop being absolute is not absolute to begin with.) Can the conditional be absolute in any way? If so, what role is left for another, ‘absolute’ absolute? There is another difficulty as well: If the conditional is absolute, the absolute (its validating environment) must be conditional!

It might be that the absolute, though inaccessible to logic, can be directly experienced (assuming a human faculty for cognizing the absolute). Perhaps we have had such an experience -— an indisputable witness -— or perhaps someone we trust has spoken of it. Yet how trustworthy is the knowledge that such an experience brings? No matter how direct knowledge claims to be, it will be mediated through structures of knowing firmly tied to the conditioned realm, including language, concepts, images, and reasoning. Whatever we can know by such means will not be absolute.

A possible response is to acknowledge that the absolute is beyond comprehension, while still asserting the validity of our inchoate experience of it. But if we cannot comprehend what we are pointing to, we are not ‘knowing’ it, but only expressing a belief about it. Saying that the absolute is ‘beyond thought’ is another thought Since by definition the thought -— being conditioned -— has no relation with what it claims to be pointing at, it cannot operate to establish an absolute.

If non-conceptual knowledge of the absolute relies on incommunicable experience, why speak of the absolute at all?  What is the basis of our belief that such inaccurate speech could be of benefit? Yet if we do maintain silence, are we admitting that the absolute and the conditioned are simply incompatible with one another?

The Role of the Supplicant

One final move remains available. Acknowledging our inability to gain access to an absolute, we can accept this inability as ‘proof’ for the absolute. Unable to speak, defeated by our own limitations, bereft of capacities, we find in our own weakness a source of awe and wonder at an inaccessible unknowable. From lack of knowledge comes humility, and out of humility grows worship. Our weakness and ignorance depart as envoys to the realm of the transcendent, bearing with them the gift of our devotion. We offer fealty to the incomprehensible, and in return seek compassionate protection.

Because such devotion turns on its head the conventional emphasis on a self, it can bring great benefits. The world becomes a simpler place, more integrated and more stable. It is easier to live in harmony and balance, for at last we have something to depend on. The mind and heart grow calm, and we can find peace in times of difficulty. Acceptance gives us strength: Through our commitment and determination, we witness our own experience more fully. The possibility emerges of a knowing that goes beyond temporal knowledge and self-centered concern.

Yet depending on how they are understood, these same virtues may become limitations. If we acknowledge ‘complete dependence’ and ‘incurable ignorance’, are we accepting restrictions on the power of knowledge and the capacities of our own being? Again and again throughout history, faith in an absolute has been interpreted to mean that humanity’s role is steadfast acceptance of an order whose workings cannot be questioned. If faith is made to point in this direction, we must proceed with extreme caution. Bound by the bonds of such a faith, we may be sacrificing a vital part of our birthright as human beings.

Does faith in such an absolute lead us any closer to a new kind of knowledge? If knowledge of the absolute is to emerge, it cannot come from conditioned human being, for the conditioned cannot transcend its own nature. In that case, where can it come from? The teaching of an absolute seems to make transformation dependent on an influx of will, understanding, or power from a source beyond the conditioned realm. What role remains for human knowledge and responsibility, intelligence and faculties? Does the individual still have responsibility for working out his own destiny?

Relying on the absolute may commit us to a new story -— the story of the powerless supplicant, dependent on what lies beyond. Obedient to the absolute, the supplicant awaits new knowledge and a new way of being. As waiting becomes hoping and hoping becomes wishing, the supplicant stands revealed as the historical self in a new guise. Eventually the self may tire of this story. Leaving others to maintain the vigil, rejecting a condition that asks too much, it may wander back into the pathways of daily life, no closer to a higher knowledge than it was at the outset.

On a more subtle level, however, an active faith may be related to the love of knowledge. Devotion can be a pointer directing us outside the range of ordinary experience and the concerns of the self, while the confession of ignorance can be a starting point for knowledge. By leading us beyond our own limited view, the recognition of powers, possibilities, and ways of knowing greater than the self can awaken a sense of awe that leads to wider vision and an ever-deepening appreciation.

Visionary Realm

Without accepting the limitations implicit in commitment to the incomprehensible, could we develop confidence in a source of knowledge beyond the self? Humility spacious enough to allow for this possibility might lead beyond the well-established self-concern that deadens inquiry. Perhaps it could allow as well for a more accommodating questioning that showed the way toward a greater and more complete knowledge.

Until now, we have considered ‘the absolute’ as a particular kind of story, one perhaps no longer told by the self. But this approach retains the structure of the narrative flow, and thus makes several key assumptions about the nature of space and time that may limit the availability of knowledge.

An alternative vehicle for attaining knowledge of the absolute is the timeless presentation of the vision. While the story focuses on the immediate situation defined by self-concern, the vision encourages aesthetic appreciation of the whole. The specific structures in which we normally place our trust do not need to be ‘known’ as fixed. Nor do we need to assert the ‘existence’ of what the vision reveals…”  (Tarthang Tulku, Love of Knowledge)

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The teaching of the “role of the supplicant” sounds a bit like the devotional teachings that Trungpa and Da Free John offered when their followers couldn't “get” the teachings of ati yoga and “radical understanding.” IOW, it sounds like it corresponds with a kind of “merely translative” exercize.

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You mean translative by way of a devotional offering called a cheque.

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As I mentioned many moons ago to Edward, TSK differs from Integral in that it doesn't draw a hard and fast line between translation and transformation.  That's one reason Tulku uses the word Knowledge.

That said, do you think all teachings should theoretically be accessible to all people at all times, or is a “stepped” approach sometimes appropriate?

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I'm guessing you meant to address kela here?

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Yes, I was telling Kela that I had mentioned this to you many moons ago.

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Hi Bruce,
I was making no comment about what kind of teachings should  be available. I just thought it interesting that there appeared to be a parallel between what TT was offering here and what Ken says in regard to the teachings of Trungpa and Da. I was wondering how Ken might assess TT's words here. Would he say that this is a “merely translative” exercise?

Personally, I kinda like where TT is going here. Much of what he says here parallels what I say in my recent blog post on sagehood, right down to talking about the love of knowledge, as opposed to the possession of knowledge. I wonder if what he is describing is the bodhisattva-yana?

I have some detailed thoughts on the subject matter of this thread, but not a lot of time at this time of year. So here are some brief ideas (not necessarily addressed to anyone, but a kind of unrefined stream of consciousness thinking out loud):

Zak (from the Myth, Magic, Mystery thread): “Apply the concepts of emptiness and absolute only to oneself.”

Tarthang Tulku: “If the absolute is to have any significance for human beings, it must be related to us.”

Here we have Zak and Tarthang Tulku agreeing, though possibily not as both intend. I tend to agree. Such concepts must have soteriological or “practical” significance. I try to relate metaphysical ideas to soteriological ones in the “Enlightenment and the Logic of Being” blog-post, part of the intent of which was to show how the two might be related.

Perhaps the concept of the two truths is another instance of how the two can be related. It appears that the two truths are indirectly referred to in the passage by TT above. There is an interesting interpretation of the two truths and Zen given in the Rhetoric of Immediacy by Bernard Faure. Faure writes that a curious feature of the ultimate truth is that it is continually throwing us back into the “domain” of conventional truth. It's as if that's all we have, in some sense — pure immanance, as Deleuze calls it. But I think there is a difference for the classical tradition here, and that difference is that it maintains an ultimate truth, which for me means the person of the “sage” (as opposed to the philo-soph or bodhi-sattva).

Perhaps what TT is doing here is offering a verbal “concretization” of the “dialectical dance” that occurs between the two truths. He's thinking aloud for us. We are the dancers, of course, or, to put it another way, the dance is occuring “within” us. Our relationship to the ultimate truth is dialectical, or, to put it another way, dialogical. (This is the real value and place of post-formal thinking, IMO.) What I mean is that our approach to the ultimate is dialectical, or, that there is a constant dialogical process occuring as we relate to the ultimate truth, to transcendence, to god, to the absolute, that occurs via, or through the mediation of, tradition or a teaching. The dialogue is going on within us, as we continually relate ourselves to the ultimate truth.

At times it can seem that the ultimate truth cannot even be approached. This is the “catch 22”: we realize that “practice” is false in some sense; that it is merely an instance of our own attachment and longing — a kind of “spiritual materiarism.” And then we realize that the urge to transcendence is its own trap, as TT says in the first post — merely a reified object. But then, if we think that now we “get it” and that there is nothing left to do, there is the danger of a kind of hubris, of what some call “talking school.” Now, these two critiques — talking school and spiritual materialism — stand in a kind of dialectical relation. They are both “corrective” of problematic approaches. A potential problem here is in thinking that they need to be ascribed to someone, to some school: ”that is mere translation”; ”you are mere talking school” etc. But the point is not to point fingers. The point is to see that these are always potential problems, always possibilities on the path. At other times, the constant see-saw becomes tiring, and ennui sets in. Or we may become disillusioned due to the “catch.” But disillusionment can potentially be good, just as being critical and skeptical and cynical can be also good; they are needed in any healthy dialetical approach. But if we are always like that, we might appear jaded. So, though we are “stuck” as it were, there must be movement “forward.” A new approach to the question we ponder is needed. At such times we need hope, we need faith. Faith, here, is not so much belief, as a kind of trust, like the basic trust in humanity that is required of us as human beings. And we need patience. As TT says, we need to wait. So, we are oriented “toward” as it were, but we are not necessarily actively pursuing “it”. This is the “space” of Gelassenheit described by Eckhart, Chuang Tzu, Gadamer, Shunryu Suzuki, Ashtavakra, and others. It is neither active nor passive (Heidegger relates it to the middle voice in Greek), but it is not static. There is always the constant dialetical erotic tension; an acceleration even where there is no movement.

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Kela, I read your blog this morning and really enjoyed it – and also appreciated these off the cuff (but still quite interesting) reflections.  I agree that there is a Socratic flavor to TT's approach; several writers have noted this.  As to whether his discussion above amounts to “mere translation” – I'm not sure what Ken would say, but I would argue that it is not, and think that you've made a good case at the end of your post for rejecting that conclusion as well.  As I read him, TT is not so much interested in defending or making a case for allegiance to a particular entity or “ultimate reality,” or in issuing promissory notes to believers, when he talks about the movement towards placing faith in an “unknowable beyond”; rather, I think he is interested in the potential for such “narrative orientations,” dialectically engaged, to elicit or encourage a creative opening, a “waiting without waiting” (as Jean Klein puts it), that in TSK is related, at different times and in different contexts, to love of knowledge or 'knowledgability,' knowing-in-not-knowing, (holistic/aesthetic) appreciation, spaciousness, opening of habitual focal settings, and/or the dynamic edge of a 'future infinitive' temporal orientation.

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See the tangle one gets into by reversing the natural order of relative-absolute?  TT above conceives the absolute as the inclusive term.  He then tries to relate it to the relative world.  He's contradicting himself: absolute is exclusive, and cannot “relate.”  And of course TT must land in the conclusion that what is required is an act of faith—an act of positing a given—that something that might be called absolute, which can never be thought or conceived or experienced in its absoluteness, exists.  Then we relate to that and never it to us.  Escape-hatch redux.

What a headache.

Scrap the mistake and reverse the priority: relative is the inclusive term to which its negative, absolute, refers.

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Yo,

At the end of the day (a current celebrity cliche of choice that I always wanted to use at least once to get it out of my system and since this parenthetical material has broken up the rhythm of the opening sentence, I'll have to use it twice…)

At the end of the day, these are just word games; are they not? And depending on how earnest the local player each hand situates itself in a quality spectrum between stilted superstition and academic posturing.

Which of those two polars sits on the LH and which sits on the R?  Or are they entirely relative? Please give an brief explanation of your answer somewhere in the margin.

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Yes, assuming the day ends.  *Until it does,* I find it somewhat amusing to dig into certain things like: that just doesn't feel right, and to attempt to articulate why not. 

For instance, “the collapse of the wave packet” in quantum physics never felt right to me.  Now I have some minimum explanation why: wave is a RH term for possibility, which is not actual; possible never “collapses,” it's always included in every new actual.  Thus in getting the languaging a little straighter, the actual is a moving process that, as moving, references (includes) an indeterminate element.

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I think that's a good point, Tom.  I agree with your (or Hartshorne's) linguistic analysis of the terms, relative and absolute.  And I believe Tarthang Tulku's view is similar to Hartshorne's “surrelativity” in some important respects.  (One might also relate Hartshorne's panentheistic surrelativism even more closely to Panikkar's comsotheandrism.)  It's clear, also, I think, that some of Tulku's comments in the above passage appear to contradict what he said in the earlier passage I quoted (on the notion of transcendence being its own trap).

So, some context for the above passage:  The book, Love of Knowledge, was sort of a “step back” from his first book and is an attempt to approach the TSK vision primarily from what Tarthang Tulku calls a “first-level” view – meaning, starting more from conventional approaches and concerns.  In this case, I don't think he's saying that positing an absolute as a given and then placing faith in it is actually necessary or the best way to proceed (especially for the TSK project); rather, here I think he's trying to work with and look through conventional approaches, opening them up, instead of going straight to the heart of the perspective or approach he wants to present.  After all, throughout history, people have made this move (orienting in faith towards an imagined absolute).  Can this movement be worked with, or must it be scrapped?  (My view is that both approaches have merit, or are “workable”.  I'll say more about this in another post.) 

Regarding the Hartshornian analysis you've been pursuing here, I'm curious about your view:  What's your take on Hartshorne's panentheistic model as a whole?  He identifies the view of relativity he is presenting as identical with panentheism.

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Bruce, yes, I perceived that TT's quote above didn't jive with his 96 interview quote, nor with other quotes I've read from him, and I do accept that a stepped process in loosening one's views can be quite appropriate. 

Regarding Hartshorne's panentheism, if I were a theist, and I'm not entirely sure I'm not, I'd be a panentheist of pretty much the variety Hartshorne describes.  Hartshorne's God is not essentially different from the so-called material world, just bigger, or something.

Which is to say Hartshorne's God is an analogue of Hartshorne's view of creativity as the most general aspect of what is.  But I'm a big fan of Berdyaev from way back, and Boehme, and Bohm's work on creativity, and Rank's view of art and creativity (did my Masters work on Rank).  For me, perhaps the most basic question is: is movement determined?  If it is, then none of this questioning is real questioning, newness is not new, nothing emerges, nothing really moves, etc.

If movement is not determined, no explanation will suffice to describe movement.  Assuming this understanding, what is becomes a becoming that, in its fullness, indescribably is.  Any correlative aware sense of becomingness cannot, IMO, be perceived or understood, let alone languaged, apart from that in which the becoming becomes, which is a related world of similar and related becoming. This is to say that causation is not nullified under a process view, but is seen as context necessary for a full understanding.

But the whole such context—the so-called material world—is itself a becoming.  Thus the 100 trillion cells that contribute to my person-movement (which includes conscious awareness as a subfeature) are themselves not fully describable in what they are, as they likewise enact a kind of creative determination, the contributions of each to a whole forming what is called my self.  Even atoms and, below them, particles evince this indeterminacy and fundamental relatedness, such that all that is is relatedness-creative.  Newness thus ever appears, and appears in reference to, in relation to and as, that which came before in movement of relation, such that evolution accumulates referentially as is too plain to miss (hence molecules refer to atoms, ecosystems refer to species, etc).  Notice that “fer” in refer and “late” in relate are the same root from which we get differ and suffer: that is our process, no?

The creative determination at the heart of this process thus cannot be separated from, and is the motion of, anything that is.  Hartshorne calls this creative synthesis.  Here are a few quotes:

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The old metaphysics is based on a linguistic and observational error.  The infinite does not include the finite (that's the continuum problem that drove Cantor over the brink), the absolute does not include the relative, and emptiness does not include form.  The former of all three pairs are negatives of the latter of the three, and are included by the latter.  TT even said it: one cannot even conceive of “absolute” without its related word relative.  The notion “absolute” is relative.  One can even infer that from the notion of definition: each word is “defined” by words it is not.  Definition is relative.

“Pardon me, what does absolute mean?”  “It means absolute.”  “Yes, but what does it mean?”  “Absolute absolutes.  Absolutely.”

Our brains evolved tremendously in the last 40,000 years, which saw the appearance of language itself.  We're still learning to use both.

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Damn Gaia to hell! It destroyed the formatting of my last post. I'll try to re-do it here so Balder, please delete the non-formatted version.

In The Weakness of God (IUP, 2006) Caputo talks about Heidegger’s “hermeneutic pre-understanding,” which serves much like Habermas’ “lifeworld” in that it remains largely indeterminate and in the background of all understanding. In the hopes of understanding this indeterminacy we project onto it all sorts of things, like God, the unconscious, whatever. But for Caputo “transcendence” is defined by the nature of this pre-understanding being indeterminate. Transcendence and indeterminacy seems almost synonymous (113-14). 

This is echoed in Impossible God (Ashgate, 2003) by Rayment-Pickard, in that for Derrida differance is that radical uncertainty and indeterminacy at the heart of experience. That indeterminacy is always already there from the start as the interplay of presence and absence, of that contrast and connection between them, at the root of perception.  

“For Derrida the idea of impossibility does not simply concern negations but a point of uncertainty between negation and position, life and death….we experience this impossibility not as an absence, but as a fundamental undecidability or uncertainty of meaning. [It] is not, therefore, simply a concept, but a state of affairs” (146). 

And it is in this impossible undecidability wherein resides “God” represented by the “X” and khora.  

With khora itself/herself, if one could at all speak thus about this X (x or khi) which must not have any proper determination, sensible or intelligible, material or formal, and therefore must not have any identity of its/her own, must not be identical with herself/itself (ON, 99). 

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And one more quote from Hartshorne to round out the day.  Here he is speaking of Whitehead's theory of creativity:

This philosophy is akin to Buddhism in the radical way it deprives self-interest theories of their specious rationale, but it is more clearly an affirmative (as opposed to “escapist”) doctrine than Buddhism, even in the Zen form.

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Catherine Keller says in the Introduction to Process and Difference (SUNY Press, 2003):

Nonetheless, some of us within the process trajectory have outgrown the terms and tenor of our own mistrust of “deconstructive postmodernism”…. I will suggest that his analysis [Griffin on decon] suffers from a “fallacy of misplaced opposition”…. He does not engage Derrida…nor Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva…. Instead he disputes with US philosophers like Popper, Sellars, Campbell. They are no doubt worthy opponents. Yet their…methods simply do not represent…deconstruction….he has mounted the argument against a deconstruction of his own invention (2-3).  
______

The book explores many of those similarities between process thought and difference to which some, like Griffin, are simply blind. Chapter 3 by Luis Pedraja, “Whitehead, deconstruction and postmodernism,” is available at this link.

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Thanks for this link, Edward; I'm enjoying the essay.  I've read lots of good stuff on Religion Online (mostly on Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Cobb), but I hadn't come across this one before.

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It's pretty good, except that Pedraja's prejudice comes through a bit too. As well the common, mistaken notion that Derrida is “just” about language. But not bad overall.

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In light of my previous posts, I'd like to now quote some excerpts from Faber's referenced article above:

Process theology…developed its de/constructive critique primarily from
Anglo-American thought—James, Dewey, Peirce, and, of course, Whitehead.
Whitehead and process theology replaced the hierarchical dualism with a cyclic duality of “’action and reaction’ [as] belong[ing] to the essence of being” (AI 120). God, then, is no absolute, transcendent, and self-sufficient actus purus, but relational, receptive, rhythmic activity of becoming. This God does not coerce, but persuade, lure, seduce.

In the Category of the Ultimate, ultimate reality appears as a triangle of generalities in process: unification of multiplicities; multiplication of unities; and their rhythmic togetherness as creative advance into novelty. Every unity becomes a unique unification of its prehensive relations within a virtually infinite multitude, and in its perishing it generates the multiplication of this multitude. In fact, in this fluent Chaosmos nothing is ultimate—neither unity nor multiplicity—there is only unification and multiplication immersed in the rhythm of an endlessly cyclical process of relational transcendence or of self-transcending relativity.

“Transcendence” may appear to be a startling term in the context of Whitehead's “insistence on immanence.” Nevertheless, by depriving it of imperialist connotations, it now signifies the polar and cyclical tension between unification and multiplication. On the one hand, any unification transcends the multiplicity it connects by its unique subjectivity. In this sense, Whitehead knows of the mutual transcendence of all actualities because of the novelty they exercise for another (PR 94). On the other hand, any unification, in being transient, transcends itself to become just one unit of a new multiplicity. In this rhythmic process that I want to call trans-unification, ultimate reality is
profoundly suspended; and this might be the most exiting aspect of Whitehead's creative resistance against imperial theologies.

In Whitehead's Category of the Ultimate, multiplicity is ultimate: It is the primordial condition for the subjective process of unification and its final aim in the transient process of multiplication. With this process of multiplication, Whitehead anticipates Derrida’s différance and Deleuze’s differenciation, as has already been recognized by process theologians. As in Derrida and Deleuze, the critical aspect of this insight is that unity is always only a finite element in an infinite, rhizomatic process.

While his whole philosophy stands up against substantialism, the dual/cyclic process of trans-unification precisely attacks this “substantial pluralism” by de/constructing it as a process of unification of relations and of multiplication by self-transcendence. In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead invokes Plato’s Khora, the Receptacle of existence, to articulate this cyclic/relational process. The world is not a pluralistic chaos, but a relational “matrix” of all processes, a “medium of intercommunication” (AI 134) in which everything is in “mutual immanence” (AI 168).

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Both Faber and Keller (in PD) talk about Deleuze’s use of Whitehead, and both reference The Fold (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006) in this regard. Recall how I said the meditative traditions were actually contacting and laterally developing lower hierarchical structures? And if we “fold” Wilber’s states in the lattice under in inverse order we could understand this process? And that by integrating the so-called states via higher structures this “folding” transforms them from what they were, “pre,” (or immanent) into something else, “trans” (or transcendent). Hence causation is not only bottom-up, which sets determinate limits on what we can become, but also top-down, in that cognition transforms (transcends) what came before. Hence we get that quasi-transcendence as a temporary creative, novel unity in diversity, but which then itself become another immanent part (multiplicity) is the next movement’s new quasi-unity. This is where Wilber gets it mostly right, except for the states (absolute transcendence) part, but folding them in “place” contextualizes them better. 

In other words, extend and curve the ends of the X and you get the 8, the sign for infinity. But it is an infinity within finitude due to the fold. The fold itself reiterates/ruptures to new levels. Graphically it’s 8s all the way up (and down) connected as a “spiral dynamic.” (Where have I heard that term before? Better not forget the trademark…) 

From The Fold: 

The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds…. Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other….the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter, and the folds of the soul. Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are “differently folded and more or less developed.” Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them, since ‘this communication stretches out indefinitely.’ 

Clearly the two levels are connected (this being why continuity rises up to the soul)…. A fold between the two folds? (3-4)

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'The Fold' is one of my favortie Deleuze books. Thanks for bringing that up again.

I feel like I should read way more of this stuff before I can take part in a discussion with you guys… Ah so much books so little time :(

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Deleuze talks about the “continuity” between levels. And Faber talks about how process theology inherits much from the American pragmatists like Dewey. Along the lines of my argument remember this from the Mead thread, describing Dewey on continuity in “We are live creatures” by Johnson, M. and Rohrer, T. (“We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive Organism.” In Body, Language and Mind, vol. 1, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 17-54 limited preview from Google Books). 

Another way of expressing this rootedness of thinking in bodily experience and its connection with the environment is to say that there is no rupture in experience between perceiving, feeling and thinking. In explaining ever more complex “higher” functions, such as consciousness, self-reflection and language use, we do not postulate new ontological kinds of entities, events, or processes that are non-natural or super-natural. More complex levels of organic functioning are just that - levels - and nothing more, although there are emergent properties of “higher” levels of functioning. Dewey names this connectedness of all cognition the principle of continuity, which states that “there is no breach of continuity between operations of inquiry and biological operations and physical operations. ‘Continuity'…means that rational operations grow out of organic activities, without being identical with that from which they emerge.”
 
What the continuity thesis entails is that any explanation of the nature and workings of mind, even the most abstract conceptualization and reasoning, must have its roots in our organismic capacities for perception, feeling, object manipulation and bodily movement. Furthermore, social and cultural forces are required to develop these capacities to their full potential, including language and symbolic reasoning. Infants do not speak or discover mathematical proofs at birth; Dewey's continuity thesis requires both evolutionary and developmental explanations (22-3).

[My note: Here they use the term “rupture” to denote that the mind is not of a different kind, or separate from, the body, while acknowleging that the former in its evolutionary development is not identical with the later. This is different from how I (and the pomoers generally) use the term “rupture,” in that it is the advance in a creative, evolutionary and novel structure, while still being grounded in (continuous with) the body.]

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OK. Who else did a double-take when they read “organismic capacities” ? 

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Here we see continuity supported by Lakoff  & Johnson in Philosophy of the Flesh:

“The embodied mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perceptual/conceptual distinction. In an embodied mind it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movement) plays a central role in conception. That is, the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements and object manipulation could be responsible for conception and reasoning” (37-8).

Yet the relationship is not just bottom up; it goes both ways. Hence although conception is embodied (immanent) the body can then be “conceptualized” (ruptured or transcendent):

“Descriptions at the neural level alone…are not sufficient to explain all aspects of the mind…. Truth claims at one level may be inconsistent with those at another”(104).

“The paradigm is physicalist in that it does not claim that any mystical, nonphysical entities such as a soul, or spirit, or a disembodied Cartesian mind exist…. But it is noneliminative in two ways. First, each level is taken as real, as having a theoretical ontology necessary to explain phenomenon. Second, explanation and motivation flow in both directions” (112-13).

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This thread has become unmanageable.

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I just started reading this thread…and could not get past my excitement at this…

To the degree that spiritual traditions aim towards absolute transcendence of limitations, towards 'ultimate' conditions or states (timelessness, omniscience, absolute freedom, unconditioned existence, etc), are they engaged in a project that is self-defeating?  Are these actually desirable conditions for a meaningful, fulfilled human life? 


and this…

“What my argument urges us to reject as incoherent is the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity, and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being – as if it were a higher and better life for us.”



that pretty much says it for me…but will go back now and read…

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

oohlala…love, love, love these…


Shunryu Suzuki:  “We should be very grateful to have a limited body… like mine, or like yours.  If you had a limitless life it would be a real problem for you.”

Nietzsche:  “The riddle that the human being is supposed to solve can be solved only in being what he or she is, and not in being something else, in the immutable.”

Thomas Merton:  “Coercion from outside, strong temperamental inclinations and passions within ourselves, do nothing to affect the essence of our freedom.  They simply define its action by imposing limits.  They give it a peculiar character of its own.”

T.S. Eliot:  “Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place / I rejoice that things are as they are.”

Tarthang Tulku:  “The idea of 'transcending' limitations or conditions is actually its own trap.  Once we accept the need to transcend, we have to reject all present experience in favor of something ultimate or absolute or 'transcendent.' We don't know what it is; we can't really imagine it; all we have is the idea of an idea – yet we let this idea convince us that where we are right now is incomplete and unsatisfactory.  Somehow we expect to make a sharp break with the past.  How can we do it?  How can we ever go beyond where we are?  Aren't we condemning ourselves to failure?  In TSK, being trapped is potentially very valuable – the door to liberation.  If we investigate, maybe there is no trap in the first place.  Our understanding comes from time-space-knowledge, and goes to time-space-knowledge, and the coming and going reflect time, space, knowledge.  Why insist on 'trapped' as the right description for what is happening?  Why not allow for other possibilities?”


I might put these in the TSK pod…it is so dead…and i want so to bring it to life…i am so bored with all this old stuff we keep talking about…

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

I'm glad you're enjoying this thread, Star, and I think posting some of this over to the TSK pod is a great idea.

Concerning your belief that “old stuff” is boring, limited, or a waste of time, check out the TSK exercise, “Pastness Knowledge.”

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

can't find it…but my first reaction is oh no…please not that…gol*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Bruce, why r u so touchy when it comes to me and a few others here speaking out against what we see as the same old same old?

R u taking these statements personal?  U should be honored that such brilliant minds such as ours always seem to have to flutter back here for any sustance…lmao*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Bruce, here is the question u asked…


What do you think?  What is the 'place' of transcendence and transcendental aspiration in an evolutionary post-metaphysical spirituality?


i think it is all in our heads…we b jackin off to our own illusions…while humanity is falling thru the cracks…instead of comin up with new solutions like tsk speaks of, we are battling old wars…and it pisses me off…esp. that someone with your knowledge of tsk would still play around in these ways…i feel strongly about this…that u have so much more to offer…and u don't…i would love to see u break away from integral and focus on tsk…that's how i feel about it…that u are wasting ur potential…


now i know that u don't like hearin that…but that is honestly what i think…


lovy dovy hugs and integral cheek smoochies…*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Hey Sister Star!
I just posted the 'Pastness Knowledge' exercise over on the TSK site.  Just trying to help, and now I will get out of the way.  :-)
Best
David

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Bruce musta called u on the tele and said…”bro…check is in da mail…pls. get star off my threads”…lmao*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Hey David, Bruce, Star, & other TSKers –

I will probably re-join that pod at some point. You might remember when I was a member of that pod, a total neophyte,  and had started reading Love of Knowledge, which I enjoyed greatly – but I had a couple of major work projects and travels that interrupted my reading of it, and I figured it would be better to return to that book when I had more time. I also really wanted to do the exercises and keep a journal as I read that book, and figured it would be best to wait until I had a bigger expanse of free time to do so.

And so I “de-podded” TSK, solely because I had joined so many pods / groups at that point (around 2 - 3 years ago) and wanted to cut down on my online distractions and my podophilia, which had started to get over the top.

(Guess I'm showing my attachment to “Zaadz” here. I don't think Gaia groups are called “pods” anymore, are they?)

Anyway, see you around, here, there, and even elsewhere –  :-)

Mary

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

oohlala Mary…that would be way cool…but your fellow Catholics might be forced to have a roast…haha…and revert back to the dark ages of burning u asa steak 4 sure…LOL*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

:D

Well, cooked rare, I may prove to be tasty…   ;-)

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well, just let me know it they try and i'll come and kick their asses…gol*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Hi, Star, I do recognize I've been touchy with you lately, especially around Integral subjects.  I'm sorry about that.  We don't have any “relationship problems” :-) when we talk TSK, do we?  The impression I've gotten from some of your posts to me is that you are resentful of me even being interested in this stuff, and I feel like I keep having to explain and defend my interest in these things to you.  As you know, I am also a student of TSK and I deeply appreciate its message and “get” what it's saying, so I guess I have expected you to “trust” me or give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to my involvement in some of these other subjects.  After all we've shared on blogs and such, I have been disappointed that you have seen me doing things that are so out of keeping with that – such as “being a dogmatic follower” or “being an Integral cultist or groupie” or “jackin' off to belief systems” or “choking on my beliefs,” and so on.  I am not approaching this stuff as a believer or a groupie, but as an appreciator of “the play of knowledge,” in a TSK sense.  I do not draw a sharp line between inside and outside or mine and not-mine in relation to knowledge, nor translate those inside/outside divisions into an absolute authentic/inauthentic dichotomy.  I feel you have been asking me to close the door on things that hold their own forms of beauty for me, and have been berating me when I don't comply – that, because you do not particularly appreciate the “Integral” or “Buddhist” or “Christian” or “postmodern” or “postmetaphysical” expressions of knowledge in time and space (which I can understand), you want me to abandon them too.  But I don't see them simply as closed systems or ways opposed to the better “way” of TSK.  I don't find such an approach useful or attractive (or necessary).  In my eyes, all fields of knowledge have gifts to offer; I see them all as creative enactments, which means I don't see any as closed or final; each, in its own way, invites free play and open (critical, appreciative) inquiry.  And that's what I'm trying to do.

So, while I appreciate your call for me to speak from my own voice (and your lovingly delivered butt-kicking [don't get jealous, Kela!]), and I have taken your call to heart, I hope you will also consider what I've said here (and maybe cut me a little slack!).

Warm wishes, sister Star.

Bruce

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Well now that wasn't so hard was it?  I mean all I needed really was an explanation…that is really all I have wanted…after all…I cannot read your mind, dang, I appreciate that you think of me as 'all-knowing', gol, but I can assure you that I am not…just a human being…and I have to admit I do feel like you introduced me to this awesome vision, then you deserted me for IT…and I just think that you have so much more to offer…but, now that I am a little clearer on what you are doing I will cut you some slack…I cannot say that I will like it any more or less…but at least I have a better idea of what it is you are doing…so I appreciate you taking the time and explaining your position…maybe I'm just jealous…LOL*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

 Once I saw an episode of the Twilight zone where a guy thought he had gone to heaven. 
A fat angel with a white suite told him he could have anything he wanted. 
He played pool and beat the hell out of everyone over and over.
He got all  the woman he wanted. ALl the liquer he desired, etc. Everything he did he succeeded at.
But after a while he started to complain that it wasn’t fun that he got everything he wanted. Now he was miserable and asked to go to hell. 
Then the fat angel with a white suit began laughing and said to him, what makes you think you were in heaven, you are in hell fool!  

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

hey Zak, if u had a point, it flew over my head…gol*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Well then think about it a little.
Star u tend somtimes to depend TOO much on intuition. Intuition is my beloved but contemplation is my mistress, dont forget her.
 Some times contemplation serves a purpose.
 

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

i really have no desire to fornicate with ur mistresses…so, if u have a point pls. make it…i have no patience for ur zenkoans…i'd rather have a wack…pimpfunny…

if ur always in contemplation, there is no need to get into it…*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

And you call yourself a poet, and a fan of Rumi.
Rumi, the Moslem cleric and Sufi Sheik who taught all people of all faiths.

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

so, iow, i cannot be all that and still be me???  pffffffttt…ubsillyreally*

Re: Paradoxes of Transcendence

Thtas pretty fast, one day u could known as the fastest woman in the west, maybe!