Being and Nothing

The second chapter of 'The Uses of Paradox' is entitled 'Credo Quia Absurdum', and explores the notion of paradox as a practice of cognitive asceticism, explicated via the work of Soren Kirkegaard. Set against a statement by Hume - 'that the causal source of theological absurdity in human nature (fear) explains it's strange imperviousness to the basic principles of logic', Bagger introduces the idea of psychological cognitive dissonance as a way to view the cultivation of paradox as an ascetic practice.

Two cognitions, x and y, are dissonant if not-x follows from y, for example. Logical inconsistency, conflict with past experience, incompatibility between behaviour and cultural mores and conflicts in specific and general opinion all count as cognitive dissonances. Typically people will act to reduce the psychological discomfort of cognitive dissonance, and John Gager has proposed that it suffices as as an explanation for the success of early Christianity, reducing the dissonance occasioned by disappointed expectations of the coming of the Messiah. Reductions to dissonance are available through either changing the cognition, or adding cognitive elements - where adding can occur by converting other people to be of the same opinion, to diminish the importance of the dissonant cognition, or to reconcile the two cognitions.

The discomfort of cognitive dissonance can be exalted by a psychologically astute ascetic - and Soren Kirkegaard employs a character called Johannes Climacus to explicitly deny the notion that religious life involves physical self torment - rather it is the embracing of voluntary self-denial that is engaged with in a systematic pursuit of self-transformation. Religious existence in this view is essentially continual suffering, where the individual must renounce all finite ends to relate him or herself absolutely to the absolute. This necessitates the existential recognition that the individual is capable of doing nothing himself, but is nothing before God - rather the individual is passively transformed by God, so suffering becomes the pain of self-annihilation and passivity before God's activity.

A Hegelian lens, which would allow the operation of understanding through the Aristotelian principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, is juxtaposed against the exercise of dialectical reason which identifies the possibility that all concepts imply their own contradiction. Kirkegaard recounts that dialectical reason is crucial to understanding precisely because Aristotle's three principles cannot adequately define the natural and social worlds.

Hegel's 'pure being' represents a perfectly abstract and undetermined starting point, without form and without content. For the understanding, for Hegel, the identity of being and nothing is a paradox - but a paradox united in becoming. When something becomes it simultaneously is and is not. Becoming negates the absolute negativity of nothing by bringing the positivity of being and the negativity of nothing into (positive) union.

'Nowhere in heaven of on earth is there anything which does not contain within itself both being and nothing. Of course, since we are speaking here of an actual something, those determinations are no longer present in it in the complete untruth in which they are being and nothing, they are a more deoveloped determination, and are grasped as positive and negative'....

Kirkegaard actually objects to Hegel's language here of negativity (and speculation), but employs exactly the notion of negativity as the motive force in individual inward deepening. While Hegel has a final positive landing point in 'becoming', Kirkegaard adopts no such salvific notion, rather the deepest most inward expression of the religious sphere is found in the wound of negativity.

Kirkegaard gives examples of the positive being distinguished by the negative - revelation marked by mystery, eternal happiness by suffering, certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity, the infinite eternal and the finite temporal. We participate in timeless truths and ideals, but exist in a temporal world of becoming, and there is an infinite ethical task to be completed, uniting the contradictory elements into a synthesis.

For Kirkegaard then, faith in the Christian paradox, that an eternal God entered into the finite world in a human form culminates the religious project of self annihilation and effects a 'new birth'. Faith becomes a martyrdom, a crucifixion of the understanding. Faith ensures that the relation to the absolute is not relative. The faithful individual breaks from immanence - from the vain delusion that he is ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the truth. Kirkegaard's antipathy for Hegel arises because Hegel attempts to reconcile the paradox - speculation attempts to align itself with God, and Kirkegaard would prefer to maintain the heightened sense of prodigious contradiction in order to hold Christianity as an existence-communication that must be subjectively appropriated and then actively engaged with, in cognitive asceticism, nulling and voiding the sense of understanding that might be best described by a quote:

'For faith sees best in the dark'.

Paradox Without Piety

'When paradox entered the English language sometime in the sixteenth century, it simply meant 'an eccentric opinion'....In contemporary English the word refers to a more curious kind of doxastic anomaly....I stipulatively define paradox as an apparently absurd claim, i.e., a claim that apparently entails a self-contradiction (either formally, materially or performatively), to which one feels at least some inclination to assent because it is supported by at least one form of epistemic authority that one recognises.'

 'Paradoxes are not mere wordplay. Neither are they primarily exercises in logic....The two elements of my definition - the apparent self-contradiction and the epistemic authority - point to the two conventional ways that a paradox can be resolved...either: one eliminates a paradox by concluding that the appearance of the self contradiction is deceiving...or: one eliminates a paradox by subverting the epistemic authority that supports what one now views as a straightforward self-contradiction...one finds the flaw in the argument, rejects the testimony, repudiates tradition, concludes the master made a mistake.....'

 'Faced with a contradiction that seems fundamentally irreconcilable, one can ignore it, or deny it, worship it or try to remove it...in religious contexts paradox can assume a holy or sacred mien.'

 'Religious thinkers venerate paradoxes….when a metaphysical doctrine that generates paradox is constitutive of religious beliefs or practices in which the thinkers are heavily invested. Paradox functions as a means of worship - not an object of worship - when it comes to inform cognitive practices. Cognitive practices are techniques of self transformation....They work to alter the individual's volitional complex - his or her beliefs, emotions, attitudes, perspectives and desires - in accord with a religious end.'

 '...pre-commitment strategies bind one through causal mechanisms one sets up in the world...some raise the stakes for failure..others restrict one's exposure to temptation...or opportunities for failure...yet others work directly to change one's volitional complex (e.g. taking cold showers to strengthen the will, working to develop habits)...Manuals of spiritual discipline advocate all the pre-commitment techniques, but also recommend a rich variety of techniques for rearranging inner space.'

 'Meditation takes many forms...the Buddhist monk engaged in 'mental culture' (bhavana) aims to appropriate the truth of Buddhist doctrine subjectively. Through vipassana or insight meditation he discerns the real by applying Buddhist doctrine to his own personal experience....Teresa of Avila continually implores her nuns to meditate on the humanity of Christ, to gaze at his beautiful face, to witness his suffering for their sakes...such a practice counters selfish reluctance to do his will. Shantideva similarly harnesses the imagination when he counsels that one plagued by lust should imagine the object of one's lust as a sack of excrement.'

 'Religiously motivated self-transformation texts sometimes describe argot of the idiom of detachment and union. That paradox can foster detachment from disfavoured affections and judgments and /or promote identification with a wider perspective, explains why religious texts sometimes seem to revel in paradox...'

 'Cognitive ascetics harness the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and hitch it to an ascetic regimen...in their hands paradox becomes a tool of ascetic self-transformation....a second type of religious response to paradox (is) mysticism...a mystic purports to attain ineffable superknowledge on the far side of paradox. For a mystic, paradox does not mark the limits of human cognition; rather, paradox opens out onto a plane of exceptional cognition...Mystical apprehension serves to refashion the perspective and attitudes composing the self...'

 'Reactions to paradox gain emotional force from their basis in attitudes toward social relations. To a thinker who feels his group threatened by outsiders, paradox will offend and horrify. If this thinker uses cognitive dissonance ascetically, these affects exacerbate the discomfort. To a thinker invested in bringing outsiders across the external boundary of the group, paradox will evoke awe and reverence. The mystic’s belief that he has attained ineffable superknowledge dispels the cognitive dissonance attendant in paradox, while these strong affects lend the doctrine that begat the paradox the vivacity to impel a change in his volitional complex….’

 ‘The very concept of absolute transcendence generates paradox. To characterise the transcendent as beyond all limited and describable things is to limit it and describe it as something in relation to all other limited things. The absolutely transcendent must, therefore, paradoxically be within all things as well as beyond them.’

Bagger, M. (2007). Ch1: 'Paradox Without Piety', The Uses of Paradox (Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd), New York: Columbia University Press, p 1 - 14.

The 'felt presence' of God - circa 5th century

The heart itself is only a small vessel,
yet dragons are there, and lions,
there are poisonous beasts,
and all the treasures of evil,
there are rough and uneven roads,
there are precipes;
but there too is God and the angels,
life is there, and the Kingdom,
there too is light, and there the apostles
and heavenly cities,
and treasures of grace.
All things lie within that little space.

St Makarios the Great.

Context

A lesson on the essential nature of context in deductive reasoning, as constructed within a conversation between a cognitive psychology researcher and a Liberian Kpelle tribal leader:


EXPERIMENTER: At one time spider went to a feast. He was told to answer this question before he could eat any food. The question is: Spider and black deer always eat together. Spider is eating. Is black deer eating?

LEADER: Were they in the bush?

EXPERIMENTER: Yes.

LEADER: They were eating together?

EXPERIMENTER: Spider and black deer always eat together. Spider is eating. Is black deer eating?

LEADER: But I was not there. How can I answer such a question?

EXPERMENTER: Can't you answer it? Even if you were not there, you can answer it.

LEADER: Ask the question again for me to hear.

EXPERMENTER: Spider and black deer always eat together. Spider is eating. Is black deer eating?

LEADER: Oh oh black dear was eating.

EXPERMENTER: Black dear was eating?

LEADER: Yes.

EXPERIMENTER: What is your reason for saying black deer was eating?

LEADER: The reason is that black deer walks about all day eating green leaves in the bush. When it rests for a while it gets up again and goes and eats in the bush.
(Cole, Gay, Glick & Sharp, 1971, P 187)



Reasoning on the basis of experience would seem to imply that one could not pursue decontextualised abstract logic too far away from the real world.

There's not just a smattering of wisdom there in terms of relevance and observation, to my mind, there's also recognition of the shared space, of a sensitivity to the deer's patterns of behaviour and the already present relationship, the dynamic, between the tribesman and the animal life.

That's cool.



Ref: HolyOak, K.J., Morrison, R.G., (2005).The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning

Cambridge University Press, pg 676

Prophets of Sophia

Yet Sophia is justified by all her children. 

Luke 7:35

You are the Bread, and You the Table, the Love

Who serves at our feast. Tou are the Leaven of 

promise among us, the Life in every seed.

God of the galaxies, of time and space,

Wisdom at play in our world,

bear our fragile, living earth

upon your wings of peace. 

Monks of Weston Priory, Vermont

Fiorenza, E.S. (1995) Chapter 5. Prophets of Sophia: Searching for Divine Wisdom. Jesus: Miriam's child, Sophia's prophet: critical issues in feminist Christology, NY: Continuum Publishing, p 131-162.

The Problem of Paradox

Excerpt taken from an interview on the ABC wireless show, the Philosopher's Zone, with Huw Price, author of 'Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point', and Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University:

'Alan Saunders: There's a question here that relates I suppose to philosophy of science. I have a great deal of sympathy with Einstein because he is facing a situation which seems to mean that the prevailing theories have unacceptably paradoxical consequences, and it seems to me that it is reasonable in a situation like that, to say Well the paradoxes can't be reality, that's what a paradox is, it is something that is not describing reality. And the point about paradoxes is that they draw our attention to some failure in our understanding of the world, or our understanding of our thought processes, or whatever. Therefore, even if we haven't got the answer yet, there has to be a better answer than this. I mean that's a reasonable position for Einstein to adopt, isn't it?

Huw Price: Yes, I agree. I think it's a completely reasonable position. One of the difficulties, however, is that the issue as to whether something is actually paradoxical in the sense of a true logical paradox which simply can't be true, or whether it's merely something counter-intuitive that we have to live with, is a very difficult one. And in effect, Einstein's opponents were saying, Look, we've just discovered something new about the world.

Alan Saunders: Well when do we know that we've got something counter-intuitive that we have to live with and when do we know that we have something like Schrodinger's cat, which just shows that reality can't be like that?

Huw Price: It's very difficult. The problem that we were talking about before, the problem of where you draw the division between, as it were, the small stuff and the big stuff, the microscopic and the macroscopic, that problem emerges in a slightly different form as the problem as to what constitutes a measurement, because the view that there was that split between the microscopic and the macroscopic, tended to go a long with the view that the macroscopic things were the things like measuring devices, and the microscopic stuff became sharp in particular ways when it encountered these measuring devices.

Now if that's your view, then it becomes an important issue to say what it takes to be a measuring device. And that problem has come to be called the Measurement Problem. It is one which is still hotly debated and so one of the things that a proponent of any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics has to do, is to say what their answer to the Measurement Problem is.'

I honestly hadn't thought that paradoxes could be conceived of as a failure. That we have to live with them, sure. That they're problematic, on some level? Absolutely. That they are insufficient, a non-performance that does not meet desired ends? Hmm. Is it paradox itself, or is it us with our human limitations of understanding that is really at issue?

Dolkar

Of course, I should be blase about this.

This afternoon, I took refuge at the Vajrayana Institute in Ashfield, with Geshe Samten. The ceremony was long, and the teachings were not trivial, and the undertaking, itself, is a somewhat serious one. 

Which does naught to explain my childlike elation this afternoon. I've just made a vow to pray three times twice a day, to revere my guru, and to follow the five precepts and ten moral values of the lay Buddhist practitioner. I should be at least, sobered by these responsibilities. I should be at least a little pained, perhaps, sitting for three hours straight during satsang (yeah, that's right, me, sitting that still. Three hours. Go figure). 

And I feel blessed. 

Partly, this comes from the unexpected part of the proceedings, over and above learning about the causes, objects, motivations, benefits and advice in refuge from Geshe Samten.

Many years ago, when I was just getting my toehold on the form and emptiness mind-gizmo, I picked out White Tara as my deity - or, you could say that she kind of picked me. I've got a copy of an old thangka painting, which has formed the basis of my meditation 'shrine' that has moved with me across 10 suburbs in the 7 directions (well, not qute, but you get the idea). 

Her compassion speaks to longevity - Green Tara can be called on when you need help, now, but White Tara, manifested from the tear of Avalokiteshavara (the Dalai Lama is the incarnation of the same, as Chenrezig), White Tara is a little more full bodied, and her maternal compassion is the mercy of those who are wounded, either physically or psychically.

It's her picture on this blog, as 'The Divine Mother'.

So really, it's no surprise at all, that when it comes to being given a refuge name today by Geshe Samten, a monk for whom I've paid reverent audience once before but certainly have never personally spoken to, before today, when it comes to this, in my prayerbook, written in there by Geshe-la, I've been given the name:

Dolkar.

It means White Tara.

There are times when you can look another human being in the eye, and for a flash of a second, there's a connection that speaks to an out-of-this-world space, but of a connection that's absolutely grounded in the depth of the other's worldview. A flash. It lasts less than an instant. It may well be worth far less than that - my mind is inevitably the eternal storyteller. 

I live for these moments.