| Writing for Posterity |
| Been a while since I've written in here, has it not? Well, I've been busy growing up, changing my opinions, gaining new arguments for old stances, and learning how to be a better person. I do not in any way believe I have reached the end of my journey, but I am amazed at how far I have come in less than a year. I don't believe that I can fully express my experiences to you, but I do think that I can at least attempt to describe what I've learned. The recent truth concerns two things: nihilism and concreteness. The first word refers to the belief that nothing can be known absolutely, and that there is no inherent value or meaning in life. Life, the universe and everything are totally unknowable, and human beings can never achieve understanding of anything, including ourselves. Nihilism is of great significance because science, reason, and human experience naturally lead toward this belief that we are fundamentally alone in the world. That's quite an accusation, but I will show it to you. Western philosophy, as you might guess, is anal-retentive and full of brilliant guys who spend nights worshipping reason. Pythagoras formed cults worshipping the gods that inspired geometry; Descartes attempted to use mathematics to prove the existence of the self, God, and ethics; Socrates and his followers believed that reason was the highest good that would reveal the true nature of reality and human beings. When Western philosophers attempted to show what human beings really knew, they kept narrowing our ability to know things. Empiricists and idealists reduced knowledge to what we could perceive through sense-perception. But, reason again showed that we couldn't trust our senses, since we could live in a dream reality (like the Matrix). Descartes realized that, and kept limiting what we knew further and further until he came to the ego, and he decided that we must know that the ego existed. Then, Kant, Wittgenstein, and a hundred other philosophers proved we didn't even know that. Reason then led to existentialism, and the belief that we could not be sure of anything. Then, humanity became deeply troubled. We were cold and alone in the night. Unsure that our fellow humans even existed, unsure that we ourselves existed, desperate for intimacy, but finding nothing but distance and apathy from equally isolated people. We slowly realized what we had become: nihilists. We no longer had any ethics, metaphysics, faith or human compassion, and our distance from each other led to indifference and complete apathy. This is where the East comes in. It took Western philosophy a solid 2500 more years to come to the same conclusion as Buddhist thinkers in India. Buddhists saw the extreme philosophies of skepticism and positivism, and knew that both had to be avoided. Skepticism, as I'm phrasing it, was a materialistic Hindu sect that denied the Hindu basis for believing in gods like Brahman and metaphysical principles like karma and dharma. A positivist, on the other hand, is one who posits ideas, like the Hindu gods and goddesses. Any idea the traditional Hindus posited, the skeptics would dispute because humans don't know enough to make such claims. The problem with skeptics is that they are inherently nihilistic, while the problems with the positivists was that their ideas had no rational basis. To counter this, Buddhism sought to understand the world through the "Middle Path" between these conflicting philosophies. They would draw positive conclusions about the world through negative logic. Buddhism operates by taking foreign assumptions and reducing them to their logical extremes. Buddhism took Hindu concepts and expressions and stripped them of unprovable metaphysics, reducing everything to the point where it can no longer be disputed. Naturally, it is enormously more complicated than this, but I just needed to show that Buddhism emerged as the Middle Path between skepticism and positivism. Enter the beginning of the twentieth century. Western philosophy was entrenched in existentialism, and Japanese Zen Buddhists were gaining international attention for the first time. They realized how Western philosophy and society was approaching nihilism, and that the West needed certain aspects of Buddhism to avoid those philosophical pitfalls. What we needed was, simply put, concreteness. The West is far too fond of categorizing, generalizing, classifying, and trying to put everything into a box. We do this to form representations that aid us in understanding things, but the end result is that we view all objects as inherently separate from us, turning ourselves into an observer of the world instead of a participant. As quantum physics has shown us, human beings are not mere observers, we fundamentally affect what we are observing. We affect the location of electrons and atoms all because we are trying to locate them. Buddhism shows why this happens: objects only exist when they are perceived, and our own personalities only exist because of our perceptions. This may seem to be a paradox, that the subject is created by objects while the objects are only perceived by the subject. However, the distinction between subject and object is only made by the creation of abstractions. It is reason that keeps us from unifying subjects and objects. Unification isn't as hard to imagine as you might think. A professional jazz musician is improvising in response to the other members of the band, but he makes decisions without conscious action. He responds to perception without consciously discriminating sounds because his mind works subconsciously. That is concrete experience. The state of mind associated by concrete experience is superior to abstraction because abstractions can never be experienced. The underlying problem of our science, philosophy, and logic is that we are moving towards abstraction instead of concreteness. When our civilization can consciously strive for concrete experience in all aspects of our lives: relationships, religion, and ethical behavior, we will reach a superior state of mind free of pointless abstractions and representations. This Middle Path is the only path that allows us to avoid apathy, isolation, and to embrace love and compassion. Just a thought for you to ponder :) The Dark Dachshund |