Apologia Pro Vita Sua
by John Henry Newman
Zen and Japanese Culture
by D. T. Suzuki
I've been reading through Suzuki, and he's been making some points about logic which both intrigue and infuriate me. I'll try to cover why he is (at times) so anti-logic, the points at which I have my sympathies, and the points at which I think he is way off.
The first reason why Suzuki is against intellectualizing the world is nothing terribly particular to Zen. He claims that in conceptualizing things, we can lose track of the things themselves; what we really need is direct acquaintance with reality. I call this the practical anti-logic thesis: avoid logic if it is causing you to get caught up in the words instead of the reality. Ok, fine; but I find that to be pretty obvious advice. That's not to say that I don't get caught up in concept fixation at times, but I already recognize that as less than ideal. Any church I walk into will stress the need for a personal involvement instead of just a "head knowledge" of the faith.
So, there has to be more to Suzuki's position than this, though the above plays a pretty significant role (I may do a post sometime on his view of subjectivity). And this is were what I call the ontological anti-logic thesis steps in: the world just is not conducive to logical analysis. Note that, as I have been saying in previous posts, this does not entail that the law of non-contradiction is false. Suzuki doesn't care enough about abstracta to deal with that question. All that has to hold is that any application of logic distorts the world. The world is a totality, but not in a pantheistic way; full of particulars which each possess their source equally. I'm not quite sure what he's talking about either, but I don't see anything prima facie wrong with stating that reality is neither one nor many. Sure, such a reality would not fit into any nice categories of ours, but why should I assume that it would?
In connection with this, there seems to be two main places where logic breaks down throughout different philosophical schools, and upon which I think Suzuki and the Buddhist tradition draw. One is when dealing with human conceptual constructions. Of course, if we create the conceptual scheme, then there is no guarantee that it will prove consistent. Further, the scheme may end up being practical even if it fails logical tests; it may even be conducive to learning the truth about the way the world is (I should hope so; I doubt that my thoughts ever will be fully coherent, but I would like to think that I'll achieve something in my searches). So it may even make sense to hold to a contradiction, because although it is imperfect, it could be better than any other option we see. This is even more true if reality simply isn't conducive to logical analysis, in which case we need something (however imperfect) by which to communicate to others with our feeble attempts. The second area where logic seems to break down is with the will; but that is a different series.
So, given all of this, where do I have problems with Suzuki? With his emphasis on creative freedom instead of order. If conceptual schemata are all under a curse, it seems that there should be a place for form as well as formlessness (as in Mahayana Buddhism, form is formlessness, and vice versa). Zen monasteries are some of the most rigid out there. And my particular beef with Suzuki is the prioritizing of the creative artist's approach to an intuitive grasp of reality, while denigrating the analytic approach. As a former mathematician and a wannabe mediaevalist, I firmly disagree. Much of my life is about reaching and expressing my intuitive insights through logic. At times I fall apart into an illogical muddle, but this is hardly when I am at my best and when I have the clearest intuitions about reality. Rather, it is in the midst of Galois theory when I have a mystical vision of the beguiling, entrancing wholeness of all form, or in the subtleties of the Doctor Subtilis that I have my most encompassing vision of the reality of God as the ultimate final, efficient, and exemplar cause of all, the source of all harmony and diversity within unity. To posit such a sharp distinction between logical analysis and intuitive feeling is opposed to Suzuki's very project of removing dualities.
4 comments:
Two thoughts to share here:
(1) Good for you for attempting to express your intuitive insights in logical form.
(2) You write:
"So it may even make sense to hold to a contradiction, because although it is imperfect, it could be better than any other option we see."
I respond:
A logical contradiction has to be of the form "Both A and not-A", and presupposes a commitment to "A=A" (i.e. there is no equivocation on "A"), and also a commitment to a strict definition of negation. I think we could hold to a rough conception of reality that we cannot successfully logicize or sharply conceptualize or symbolize without creating a contradiction (maybe 'antinomy' would be a good word here; I am thinking of J. I. Packer's sense but am not 100% sure he really knows what an 'antinomy' is), but I do not think we can assent to the contradiction itself. (I am meaning to make both a normative and a descriptive/psychological claim that we cannot assent to a logical contradiction).
I guess that I would say that I am concerned about 'antinomies' here. I am not saying that we should assert contradictories without care; I would rather have consistency, but what I am getting at is that consistency is not the highest goal. It may be that I cannot tell whether A or ~A is true, and whichever one is false at least has enough going for it to create that tension. In such a case, I am practically justified in holding to A and ~A simultaneously for the moment, and charges of logical contradiction miss the point.
What I want to do is to get rid of the notion that "I have a sound argument for a position, so I am safe," as well as "I have a sound argument against a position, so it must be false." The criticism that one has cut up reality wrongly is always a possibility, and the tools one had used to build the argument may have had practical relevance then but need to be revised for the current situation. So, I want to have an argument, or at least a more precise view, concerning why we must always be reviewing the data. For example, I think that theological words like "faith," "works," "flesh," "grace," "justification," and so on have become almost unrecognizable due to such over-logicizing, and yet are taken as being so transparent in contemporary discussion.
(1) "It may be that I cannot tell whether A or ~A is true, and whichever one is false at least has enough going for it to create that tension. In such a case, I am practically justified in holding to A and ~A simultaneously for the moment, and charges of logical contradiction miss the point."
I don't see how you could hold to both A and ~A simultaneously. I can see how you could suspend judgment between A and ~A and be agnostic. I can see how you could opt for A over ~A (or vice versa) for pragmatic reasons (a la James or Peirce in a vital occasion). Getting rid of bivalence/LEM only makes sense to me if we are adopting an epistemic notion of truth--but why should we do that? It seems unfaithful to ordinary langauge.
(2) "What I want to do is to get rid of the notion that "I have a sound argument for a position, so I am safe," as well as "I have a sound argument against a position, so it must be false." The criticism that one has cut up reality wrongly is always a possibility, ..."
I think I agree, but it depends on terminology. I take it you are using the term "safe" in the technical epistemological sense? If you do mean by "sound" what logic textbooks do--the premise are true and the argument is unconditionally valid--I'm not sure how I could agree. But it would be easy to replace "soundness" with a weaker notion or term. How can we ever *know* for certain that a premise is true?
It basically sounds to me like you're trying to give a pragmatic rationale for fallibilism. In which case, you should probably go read C. S. Peirce now. :) First James, then Peirce! Maybe you should find a course in Classical American Pragmatic Philosophy! :)
I'm coming at this more from a practical angle; even if everything could be fine from a theoretical view, I can never reach that. Although, for the present, what I'm writing is to be taken as if no theoretical view exists, while practical views do get at something and so are not completely relative. So, with that said,
(1) "I don't see how you could hold to both A and ~A simultaneously. I can see how you could suspend judgment between A and ~A and be agnostic."
What I mean to say is that I may be in a position where holding contradictory views simultaneously, as holding on to both is the closest thing I know to the actual truth; both have substantial truth to them, and I don't know what to drop, though I know that in the end I would like to hold A* and A**, non-contradictory beliefs which capture what I saw in A and not-A. I don't mean to say that I can imagine A and not-A at the same time; maybe what I mean to say is that I would have simultaneous dispositions toward assenting to A and not-A.
(2) "If you do mean by "sound" what logic textbooks do--the premise are true and the argument is unconditionally valid--I'm not sure how I could agree. But it would be easy to replace "soundness" with a weaker notion or term. How can we ever *know* for certain that a premise is true?"
This may be what I mean. I am considering arguments in which the premises are to some degree true; following the pragmatic view of thought and language, they are getting at something, but I am doubtful as to a once-for-all cut of reality. So, maybe I would also state that no sentence in a human language unambiguously entails a single proposition. If this is true, then for any given stated premise, the premise could collapse to one proposition at time A, in which case it would be true, but to another proposition at time B, in which case it would be false. Or maybe even both at once. Further, this would be due to our own confused understanding of reality which can never be completely unconfused, and not some problem of interpretation. I'm going to have to pound that all out some more, I think.
(3) "In which case, you should probably go read C. S. Peirce now. :) First James, then Peirce! Maybe you should find a course in Classical American Pragmatic Philosophy! :)"
If only I had the time; it seems like an interesting field. I feel like I putting aside my thesis studies all too much as it is in order to study what feel to be more pressing issues at the time. . . .
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