More notes on rebirth

Thinking more about rebirth in Buddhism I thought of Rorty's description of the self in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth:

"Think of human minds as webs of beliefs and desires, of sentential attitudes - webs which continually reweave themselves so as to accommodate new sentential attitudes. Do not ask where the new beliefs and desires come from. Forget, for the moment, about the external world, as well as about that dubious interface between self and world called "perceptual experience." Just assume that new ones keep popping up, and that some of them put strains on old beliefs and desires. We call some of these strains "contradictions" and others "tensions." ....the web of belief should be regarded not just as a self-reweaving mechanism but as one which produces movements in the organism's muscles - movements which kick the organism itself into action. These actions, by shoving items in the environment around, produce new beliefs to be woven in, which in turn produce new actions, and so on for as long as the organism survives. I say "mechanism" because I want to emphasize that there is no self distinct from this self-reweaving web. All there is to the human self is just that web."

(Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, p93)

Using this definition of a self and applying it to a concept of transmigration one could say that samsāra can be understood as an uncontrollable 'rebirth' of beliefs and desires within each new situation. We are all familar with the short-lived quenching of desire which is soon followed by its resurgence, often in greater magnitude and potency. This cyclic arising, ceasing and re-arising of beliefs and desires is perhaps nothing short of the continuing rebirth of the self. Rorty is simply describing a process here for his own purposes but Buddhism pays attention to this process in the context of the suffering it entails when the same set of beliefs and desires, particularly those characterised by greed, hatred, and prejudice, are reborn again and again with less of the 'reweaving' occurring than perhaps should or could be.

To balance out my thoughts here, I have found a few articles which would view what I am saying with disdain. I copy below an example, taken from this link:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_06.html

The aim of the Buddhist path is liberation from suffering, and the Buddha makes it abundantly clear that the suffering from which liberation is needed is the suffering of bondage to samsara, the round of repeated birth and death. To be sure, the Dhamma does have an aspect which is directly visible and personally verifiable. By direct inspection of our own experience we can see that sorrow, tension, fear and grief always arise from our greed, aversion and ignorance, and thus can be eliminated with the removal of those defilements. The importance of this directly visible side of Dhamma practice cannot be underestimated, as it serves to confirm our confidence in the liberating efficacy of the Buddhist path. However, to downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced self-awareness is to deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy.

Notes on Psychological Essentialism

The basic tenet of psychological essentialism is the idea that key human cognitive processes, those which determine how we approach experience, reflect a basic belief that unobservable essences are causally responsible for the surface features we observe. As such, the world is divided up into essences from which preset associated properties can be inferred.

The concept seems to have been introduced by Douglas L. Medin (Psychological Essentialism, 1989) during his investigation into similarity-based and explanation-based categorisation processes. Medin argued that categorisation is theory-driven, whereby concepts must conform to an overall world-view, rather than just a delineation of phenomena by lists of observable attributes. He also suggested that psychological essentialism can function with "placeholders" in that one can believe that a given category possesses an essence without knowing what the essence is, thus supporting inductive generalisation under ignorance of 'true causes'. Seen this way psychological essentialism can be understood as a reasoning heuristic which, according to several studies, e.g., by Susan A. Gelman (Essentialism in Everyday Thought, 2005), is readily available to, and used by, preschool children and adults alike.

H. Clark Barrett (On the Functional Origins of Essentialism, 2001) argues that, scientifically speaking, it is not enough to see psychological essentialism as simply a useful strategy and argues that speaking of a propensity for humans to 'essentialize' entails making proposals about where such a propensity comes from and, in particular, the cognitive mechanisms by which it is subserved. He sees a process of natural selection, operating on competing representational and inferential systems, as a rich area for further investigation.

Gelman (2005) argues that the propensity for essentialization is influenced by the language that children hear. For example, she has some evidence that, to a child learning language, nouns imply that a category is relatively more stable and consistent over time and contexts than adjectives or verb phrases - e.g. "carrot-eater" was judged by a group of 5-7 year olds as being a more stable property of someone than if they are merely said to "eat carrots when they can."

Johannes Keller (In Genes We Trust, 2005) argues that, as well as epistemic motives, there are existential and ideological motives behind psychological essentialism which provide potential links to increased levels of prejudice and stereotyping.

I will look into some of this in more detail and I have made these notes simply to pull out some of the threads of what appears to be a burgeoning area of investigation. Despite the demise of essentialist metaphysics, it seems to me that essentialism nevertheless dominates laypeoples' beliefs and attitudes. Reading the likes of Keller there seem to be grounds for correlating essentialist beliefs and attitudes with some of the negative aspects of the present state of the world. This I need to do a lot more work on. As previously noted, I am currently most interested in seeing how far these contemporary studies of the ubiquity of essentialism underpin the understanding of perception held by Madhyamikan Buddhism and, consequently, how far Madhyamikan Buddhism offers an appropriate approach to moving away from its dominance, should that be desirable.

To wrap up these notes, I find it interesting that the propensity to essentialize may be best conceived as a successful evolutionary expedient. This fits well with a pragmatist perspective and curtails the scope of metaphysics (in its "How It Really Is" guise) somewhat. Also, it seems as though psychological essentialism could account for the ubiquity of folk theories of causation which I have touched upon recently and, perhaps, could be what was behind the beginning of philosophy when it first went behind appearances to unobservable true causes.

Buddhism without rebirth?

As the famous story goes, following a profound experience at the age of 35, Siddhartha Gautama professed to have penetrated through his ignorance and confusion to uproot the conditions of cyclic existence before proceeding to instruct those who followed him to do the same. As is also well known, he didn't write anything down. His teachings were 'preserved' orally for around 300 years before being committed to the written word. Despite the occasional claims of putative anthological eminence the sheer proliferation of 'Buddhist' texts makes any knowledge of what the Buddha taught a question of choosing a favoured school and interpretation*.

I choose the school of Mādhyamika, and more specifically, Mādhyamika as interpreted by Garfield and Magliola. One important reason for this is that it is evident from sections of the Pali canon** that Siddhartha Gautama believed in karma as the process of rebirth, as was the dominant belief during his time. Indeed most biographies state that it was the experience of 'seeing' his previous lives and how they conditioned his present one that was the first of three insights leading to his enlightenment. For reasons stated above, just what the Buddha understood by 'rebirth' and how it differed from the prevailing world-view at the time is far from conclusive and would be an interesting topic to investigate - one which I may need to return to. However, like the majority of the Western world, I don't believe in rebirth in any literal sense and so my present concern is how Buddhism - in particular dependent origination and how it relates to samsāra and nirvāna - can be interpreted in the absence of what many consider to be the fundamental concept of rebirth. I believe Garfield's interpretation of Mādhyamikan Buddhism provides a good account of how this is possible.

He does this by distinguishing the psychological/philosophical aspects of Buddhism from the cosmological and soteriological aspects which may or may not have been directly inherited from the Vedic tradition. Transmigration (rebirth) is discussed when focussing on Chapter XXVI of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā - Examination of the Twelve Links.

One is caught in cyclic existence for a reason, Nāgārjuna asserts, because one acts. There are three general kinds of actions distinguished in Buddhist action theory - physical, verbal, and mental. These actions in turn have immediate psychological consequences for the agent. That is they give rise to new psychological dispositions. In the framework of Buddhist action theory, these dispositions are themselves conceived of as actions existing in a potential form, and of course when actualised, they emerge as new actions of body, speech, or mind. These in turn lead to a variety of new such consequences and to the continuation of cyclic existence. Transmigration - the continuation of samsāra - for Nāgārjuna is then simply a dependent consequence of one's actions.

Continuing through the traditional presentation of the twelve links, Nāgārjuna notes that consciousness is a consequence of dispositions and depends on them and that "name and form" follow as a consequence of consciousness. These, therefore, are obviously also dependent phenomena.

There are two ways to think of the twelve links, generating two parallel circles of explanation: One can approach them from the standpoint of transmigration, which provides a standard Buddhist explanation of the cycle of life. Or one can think of them as providing a phenomenological analysis of the nature of experience. In the former sense, we could say at this point in the story that actions performed in the past and dispositions inherited from one's previous history lead to new actions whose consequences are cyclic existence. In particular, the actions and dispositions from one's prior life, on this view, lead to the generation of a new consciousness, which upon entering the womb, gives rise to a body that will get a particular name.

Or, from a phenomenological perspective, we can see dispositions to attend to or to interpret particular phenomena in certain ways (perceptual or conceptual "sets") and actions upon them leading to our becoming aware of external or internal phenomena (consciousness), which leads to our representing them as having determinate locations and denominations (name and form). These two levels of analysis are obviously quite compatible, and while the former plays a central role in Buddhist cosmological and soteriological theory, the latter is important in Buddhist psychology and practice.

(Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, p336-337)

It is the latter understanding of the twelve links which I believe survives the transition to the contemporary Western world without much difficulty. I further believe that the Buddhist analysis of experience bears a strong resemblance to the contemporary study of what is termed psychological essentialism although I have only just started my reading on the subject. This is what I want to explore in more detail now.

* I should qualify this statement here and acknowledge that Zen Buddhism claims to be a "teaching beyond scriptures" and insists that what the Buddha taught can only be understood through direct experience.

** For example, in the Pali canon there are detailed descriptions of the six realms of rebirth, our human world being the most opportune for the achievement of nirvāna.

Enter the Dragon*

At around 5th century BCE in India there were those who considered the socio-religious Brahmanic structures maintained by the 'householders' to be oppressive. Such people wished to break free in order to seek an alternative understanding of the self and the world. These were the peripatetic 'renouncers' who attempted many different ways of gaining personal insight outside of any specific tradition, often subjecting themselves to extreme temperatures, hunger, thirst, and other forms of asceticism. They sought answers to the same big questions asked by the Vedas, the most important one being, What is the ontological status of the self? All possible answers to this question seemed to be held at the time:

The strong materialistic view in which there is no immaterial self at all.

The annihilationists who believed that, if there is a self, it is annihilated upon physical death anyway.

The eternalists, such as the Upanishadic brahmins, who held that the ultimate self is a permanent and unchanging essence, i.e., Atman (self) is Brahman (ultimate reality).

Others who, although rejecting an eternal self, believed in the existence of a self which survives physical death.

For those who did believe in some form of continuity of the self they would also have believed in karma and the transmigration of self which constituted samsāra and so the point of seeking answers to these questions was that knowledge of the nature of the self would have effected the moksha (liberation) from samsāra that they sought.

Such was the philosophical climate into which was born Siddhartha Gautama at around 485 BCE.

*In Ch'an Buddhist literature the enlightened are sometimes referred to as dragons. Also, of course, 'Enter the Dragon' is a definitive martial arts movie starring the legendary Bruce Lee.

Socio-morphic origins of causality in Indian Philosophy

As noted in previous posts with respect to the Orphic thread, in looking into the origins of causality in Indian philosophy one finds similar socio-morphic conceptions to those found in the writing of the early Western Presocratics. However, there are three significant differences I wish to comment on. The first is that causation seems to have initially been deeply intertwined with sacrifice, moreso than in anything I have found thus far in Western texts. The second is that causation is not itself within the dominion of a particular god or gods. The third is that causation is closely linked with a concept of rebirth.

In ancient Hinduism, sacrifices performed for the gods (devas) were crucial in obtaining the material benefits given to humans by the gods. The efficacy of these sacrifices was determined by their being performed in exactly the manner and order prescribed by the tradition and this proper order of a sacrifice was called rta (aka Rita).

In the Rig Veda, it is rta that controls all the changes and operations of the universe including the actions and thoughts of the gods. That is, the gods as well as humans were all subordinate to rta, so rta was conceived of as an eminent force in itself. The great Vedic deity Varuna, the guardian of the cosmic order, is the special guardian of rta punishing those who do not speak the truth or who commit improper actions, but not even Varuna created the rta. In the Vedas, it is rta that enables natural bodies to move rhythmically and in balance without undergoing the disorganizing and destructive effect otherwise implicit in motion*. It is because of rta that there is a cosmos, an ordered universe that undergoes change without becoming chaos. By adhering to rta the sun follows its daily path, rising and setting to support the world with its light. The stars fade at dawn but shine again at dusk. Rta is a dynamic principle of cosmic order, manifesting itself in change, not in rigidity.

In the Upanishads, rta is applied to the ethical realm of human society through the concept of karma. Karma entails that whatever you do determines what you become in this life and, by means of samsāra, in the next life. In relation to rta, karma means something like "the causal law of the deed" in which every act is the result of some previous act which caused it. Everything you do is caused by what you have done in the past and in turn will cause your future actions. In this sense the principle of rta implies a strict adherence to law and rule in conformity with the aim and purpose of the processes of the cosmos. Any action set in opposition to or incongruous with the universal order of rta sets in motion a natural reaction, endeavouring to set right the balance of cosmic equilibrium which has been disturbed by it. It is thus karma which subjects the doer of such action to metempsychosis (rebirth) in other conditions and environments than that in which the action has been done.

The Upanishads are most concerned with the freeing (moksha) of oneself from the suffering entailed by the causal processes of karma and samsāra, through identification of the self with the ultimate reality of Brahman. The nature of this suffering, the transformative means of its cessation, and of what this transformation consists, provide notable differences between Buddhism and the philosophical milieu out of which it emerged.

As a final note, one can see that, in ancient Indian philosophy, the impersonal causal principle of rta is applied to all aspects of activity in the cosmos, from the actions of an individual, to the movement of the stars, albeit operating over different timescales of relation. Thus, being equally impersonal from the outset, ethical and natural causal processes were ultimately no different in the Indian mind whereas, in the West, 'natural' causal processes left behind their ethical, personified origins, e.g., Ananke, as they were gradually depersonified by the later Presocratics, then by Plato and Aristotle and so forth. In doing so, the moral and physical processes of the world were gradually separated and the impersonal physical processes were eventually crowned 'reality'.

*The similarities of rta with the Chinese Tao should be apparent to those with an interest in Eastern philosopy in general.

Causation as Folk Science

I've found an interesting article on the role of causality in science written by John D. Norton (University of Pittsburgh). The abstract and conclusion, cited below, provide a good summary of his position. It seems to support my understanding that debates about the metaphysics of causation have largely given way to a pragmatism which is not at all incompatible with dependent origination. Indeed it is interesting to see that Norton talks about "recovering" causation from ontological inconclusiveness much as dependent origination "recovers" conventional reality from the same.

The full text is available at http://www.philosophersimprint.org/003004/

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to a loose collection of causal notions that form a folk science of causation. This recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces.

(John D. Norton, Causation as Folk Science, 2003, Ch.1)

On the one hand, causes play no fundamental role in our mature science. Those sciences are not manifestly about causation and they harbor no universally valid principle of causality. On the other, the actual practice of science is thoroughly permeated with causal talk: science is often glossed as the search for causes; and poor science or superstition is condemned because of its supposed failure to conform to a vaguely specified principle of causality. I have argued that we can have causes in the world of science in same way as we can retain the caloric. There is no caloric in the world; heat is not a material substance. However in many circumstances heat behaves just as if it were a material fluid and it can be very useful to think of heat this way. It is the same with cause and effect. At a fundamental level, there are no causes and effects in science and no overarching principle of causality. However in appropriately restricted domains our science tells us that the world behaves just as if it conformed to the sort of folk theory of causation outlined above. Finally I have suggested that we need not expect the exact same notion of cause to be invoked in each of these many domains. The proliferation of different account of the nature of causation suggests that there might be no single notion of causation, so that the best single account we can have is a loose folk theory, not all of whose elements will be accepted in every application.

(ibid, Ch.7)

Progress notes

Time for a quick review of where I am with all this. So far, I’ve glossed over the kind of Buddhism I’m interested in with particular reference to antiessentialism and alterity and pointed out some similarities with neo-pragmatism. I’ve said that dependent origination is the philosophical centrepiece of Buddhism which provides an alternative to essentialist causality and ontology. I then rattled through the socio-morphic origination and later significant development of the concept of causality in western philosophy. This exercise showed that, in Hume, the west had arguably “emptied out” the dominant essentialist conception of causation from a metaphysical point of view but that, nonetheless, it appears to remain as a central theoretical expedient in scientific practice. I would like to further understand how causality is actually treated by the scientific-community-at-large and whether it is generally either an explicit or tacit assumption going into the production and validation of theory. However, I’m not too sure how I can do this just yet. Also, I want to wrap up this rather cursory piece of historical analysis with a brief review of the philosophical climate in which Siddhartha Gautama formulated his teaching (which is the putative basis of Nāgārjuna’s exposition in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) and its relevance and/or dominance of today’s climate. The purpose of all this is to see what is actually being rejected by adopting dependent origination to avoid the unnecessary thrashing of a straw man.

Moving forward I want to explore the relevance of all of this to contemporary concerns. One of the first questions I have with respect to this is, Is naïve/psychological essentialism the salient condition of metaphysical essentialism or vice versa? In doing this I want to explore what is meant by naïve/psychological essentialism and my working hypothesis is that it equates to what Buddhism refers to as the “ignorance” which compounds the twelve links of samsāra and that, whilst being a successful cognitive expedient, its tendency for reification can lead to such problems as diminished cognitive flexibility, stereotyping, racism, fundamentalism, hopelessness and more. I want to see if the best elements of Buddhism and neo-pragmatism can or should be combined to address the alleged negative effects of essentialism.

The emptiness of causation in western metaphysics?

The Aristotelian conception of causality is a generative theory in that a specific cause generates a necessary effect by triggering an inherent potency. All effects are determined by the essence of the thing in which the effect occurs. So in consequence of their essence, entities follow certain laws of action and have no alternative to doing so.

This concept of causality as arising from the metaphysical essence of things dominated the west in one form or another until it was abandoned by Galileo (1564-1642) who reconceptualized causes and effects not as inherently determined properties of substances or things but as the consequence of the laws of motion. Thus, he disregarded the properties of the objects he was looking at and focussed instead on their positions as they varied across time. He connected cause and effect relationships only to the motions or states of things and consequently disconnected them from the putative essences of the things themselves.

In this model actions are conceptualised as necessary reactions to some previous action or motion or force. This position was stripped of its generative heritage even further by the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711-1776) who originated the use of the term succession with respect to causality thereby heralding the beginning of a successionist theory of causation. Hume pointed out that we observe nothing but the regular succession of events and argued that the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect is thus derived from habitually felt expectation and has no other foundation. Causes merely occur prior to and contiguous with effects. The relationship is not one between objects but between experiences. Causation to Hume, in other words, was no more than a predictive expedient.

Kant, Hegel, Whitehead and others attempted other metaphysical conceptions of causality but if I may be so bold as to say that, with Hume, we see causation effectively leaving the realm of significant metaphysical development whilst remaining woven into the development of scientific formulae and statistical probability, as well as into lay beliefs. If this is the case, then after over 2000 years of metaphysical development, causation effectively amounts to something like:

These give rise to those,
So these are called conditions.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (I:5)

Or in more words:

To assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse and explanatory practice, but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in reference to causal powers or as demanding such grounding. Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that.

(Garfield, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness, Ch.2)

Aontic metaphysics

I've coined a term to describe the type of philosophy I'm promoting here: aontic. It's an attempt to convey a repudiation of the Being/Non-Being division which is generally assumed to be the starting point of metaphysics. I think anti-ontological is more or less the same thing but aontic is not necessarily implying a dialectically opposed doctrine nor simply a critique of ontology but can also be just a philosophy with a different starting point to the question of Being.

Buddhism is aontic in that it neither affirms nor denies the 'existence' of the self and the world. Its starting point is the process of experience in the context of human suffering. The relative absence of aontic philosophy in the western canon is what I think has often led to an erroneous interpretation of Buddhism as a form of nihilism, which is, of course, based on the tacit assumption that existence/non-existence is a fundamental category. However, the Buddhist metaphysical* concept of the dependent origination of phenomena is not coextensive with a categorisation of phenomena into existing/nonexisting.

* Is aontic metaphysics an oxymoron? Certainly if we accept the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics as the science of being qua being it is a contradiction in terms. However, we can also define metaphysics as the elucidation of general principles and assumptions and in this sense there is no problem.

Aristotelian causality

After Plato we get to the most elaborate treatment of causality in Ancient Greek thought - from Plato's student, Aristotle (384-322 BCE).

Aristotle famously distinguished four kinds of “cause”*: the material out of which things come; the form which things eventually have when they are perfected; that which brings about this completion, the efficient cause; and finally the purpose or function of such things, the final cause.

Being a quasi-empiricist, he opposed, even ridiculed, Plato's conception of transcendent Essences. As far as he was concerned the invisible realm of Essences was merely a hypothesis that could never be verified. However, following Plato, he developed a doctrine of categories which he believed defined the essence of an object. He argued that these essences could be identified on the basis of inductive arguments based on the observation of the phenomenal realm and that the phenomenal realm, despite always being in flux, moves towards specific ends. In this sense the phenomenal realm demonstrates a certain telos and as such physical matter is ordered according to its telos and substance. In other words, matter does not have the potential to become just anything but is ordered according to what it can, will and should become.

So while Plato contrasted the inherent structure of Essences with the flux of all phenomenal things, Aristotle taught that, from a condition of potentiality, each phenomenal thing necessarily strives toward achievement of a full reality in which its inherent essence is actualised. Thus, according to Aristotle, the phenomenal realm itself contains an inherent structure which allows observation from which logical principles can be deduced and induced. Enter science.

So the inherent potentiality and subsequent actuality of phenonema become the key characteristics of an Aristotelian notion of causality and the regularity of nature. To return to an example used in an earlier post, the phenomena of ice becoming water when heated is explained in Aristotelian terms as the actualisation of ice's potential to become water. The heat is the efficient cause of this change in state but unlike Platonic causality there is no fundamental transition from "iceness" to "waterness" because the "waterness" was already the potency of the block of ice itself. However, like Plato, Aristotle maintains that the cause of change must be assumed as an absolute necessity. Everything which undergoes change is made to do so necessarily by something. What undergoes change is what has a potency or capacity to do so and this actualization of mere potency, by definition, requires an actual agent; nothing which just has a capacity to undergo change can bring about that change by itself**. However, unlike Plato, the efficient cause is normally another phenomenal object, and not a transcendental Essence.

Finally, it's not completely clear to me what place necessity has in Aristotle's conception of causality. Given the identification of an effect on something with its inherent potency, then with any given efficient cause one can assume a necessary effect. Also, Aristotle's definition of knowledge makes use of a necessity condition by which that which is deemed knowledge is knowledge of that which necessarily holds in all cases. However, Aristotle's use of the inductive technique, and use of phrases such as "for the most part" when talking about the validity of the conclusions of deductive statements, seems at odds with a concept of unwavering necessity. For the moment at least, it seems to me with my limited reading that, with Aristotle, necessity became entangled with scientific generalisations as a mode of explanation and had left the domain of Ananke behind.

* The Greek word is aition which it seems is just whatever one can cite in answer to a “why?” question. So an aition is best thought of as an explanation or an explanatory factor. This understanding of "cause" is just what Nāgārjuna seems to mean by condition, yet Aristotle's exposition of causality doesn't seem to have entirely followed through in this rather pragmatic vein.

** This brings about an infinite regress which Aristotle "solves" by positing an "Uncaused Cause" which was later seen, by the likes of Aquinas, as another name for God. This infinfite regress, and the avoidance of Aristotelian-type solutions, is important to understanding Nāgārjuna's rejection of inherent causality.

More on the Orphic thread

I don't want to get too side-tracked by this but my research into the origins of causality has shined a light on some interesting connections between the Presocratics, Orphism and the Vedic tradition and the apparent ubiquity of mysticism. There is plenty of material, a flavour of which is copied below. Note the reference to rta which is where my reading on the origins of causal order in Indian philosophy seem to be leading. (Pirsig readers will no doubt recognise rta from LILA.)

In dealing with pre-Socratic thought, we constantly find ourselves in an atmosphere more akin to that of the Orient than to that of the West. As the late professor F. H. Smith pointed out, the apeiron of Anaximander is almost exactly the Hindu nirvikalpa, the nameless and formless, called Aditi, the unlimited, in the Rg Veda. Moreover, this Aditi which is nirvikalpa, is ordered by the immanent Rta or dharma, just as in Anaximander an immanent dike ensures that all things shall eventually return to the apeiron whence they came: "From which all things take their rise, and by necessity (PT: Ananke) they are destroyed into these; for all things render just atonement to one another for their injustice according to the due ordering of time."

There may even be an echo of the monism of the Upanishads in Empedocles, which, like many other features of his philosophy, seems to have been mediated through Orphism....A distinct tradition of mysticism runs through Orphism, Pythagoras, and Plato which is as unlike anything in Greek thought as it is like the Hindu mysticism of the Upanishads....Reality is not now what is perceived by the senses but what lies beyond them....Orphism and Hinduism have much in common. Just as the Brahmins kept the belief of the shamans or medicine men of the Vedas that man could become a god, but attempted to achieve this union not by drinking the intoxicating soma but by abstinence and ascetic practices so Orpheus purified the old Dionysiac religion and substituted asceticism for drunkenness. The aim of Orphism seems to be the liberation of the soul from the chains of the body, and this is to be achieved by asceticism but man must pass through many lives before he achieves final freedom. This is very far, indeed, from genuine Greek religion of any period, but almost exactly the predominant view of the Upanishads. Even the metaphors in which this conception is clothed are the stock Hindu and Buddhist metaphors - the wheel of life in the Upanishads appears as the "sorrowful weary wheel" of Orpheus.

(Hinduism and Buddhism in Greek Philosophy, A. N. Marlow, Philosophy East and West 4, no. 1, APRIL 1954)

Necessity and the Orphic creation myth

Going back to the Presocratics and their appeal to the force of Necessity I have read a little more and picked up a thread which leads back to the Orphic Mystery Cult. The Necessity that frequents the Presocratic fragments is actually Ananke/Adrasteia, partner of Khronos in the Orphic Creation Myth. I am aware of the danger of going too far and committing a genetic fallacy here but it is nonetheless interesting to think that any theories which incorporate a concept of necessity, such as the laws of physics, are indebted, in however small a measure, to the secret wisdom of a mystery cult.

A point I wish to make is that, looking back on these stories, we can easily imagine how one may have taken an abstract concept such as 'necessity' and 'personified' it yet we have little reason to favour that interpretation over its opposite, i.e., that the abstract concept of necessity was derived from the story of Ananke. I say this because I will be looking at the Indian origins of causation and it will be interesting to see if they have an exact equivalent of Ananke in their mythos.

This is a brief introduction to the Orphic creation myth, the full article is referenced by a url below.

In the beginning, there was Time, which the Greeks called Chronus or Khronos. This was a period called the Unaging Time, when nothing existed and nothing grew old; indeterminate and (almost) limitless time, which some people would call Aeon. Existing at the same time as Chronus was Adrasteia, or Ananke, meaning "Necessity".

Chronus and Adrasteia combined to create primordial Spirit and Matter, which were called Aether and Chaos. (Hesiod had referred to Aether as the upper atmosphere, where the air was clean and pure; he referred to Aether as male entity, while in the Orphic myth, Aether was seen as female being. Chaos was fathomless void, abyss or the yawning gap. With Hesiod, Chaos was a male primordial being, whereas in Orphic myth, the role had changed.) A third primordial being came out of Time and Necessity, Erebus – "Darkness". Chronus then combined with Aether, or possibly with Chaos and Aether, so the primeval beings caused mists to form and solidify into a Cosmic Egg.

http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/creation.html#Orphic

Placeholder: Plato and Nāgārjuna

A couple of thoughts about Nāgārjuna and Plato. Plato believes that there are no causal powers in the merely apparent realm of things. Insofar as Plato's world of things corresponds to Nāgārjuna's conventional reality, this agrees with Nāgārjuna when he says that no powers of causation can be found in conventional reality, only correlation of phenomena. They would also agree that in conventional reality things have no inherent existence. There would be no argument that Essences cannot themselves be subject to causation because they are immutable and that only Essences can provide a generative cause of phenomena. Nor would they disagree that Being can only be ascribed to Essence.

Where they depart, and it is a fundamental departure, is that Nāgārjuna completely denies Plato's Essences and hence the possibility of generative causality and the question of Being/Non-Being. The basis of this denial will come later.

Platonic causality

Reading on into the Phaedo, we get to Socrates' exposition of causality.

There is nothing new, [Socrates] said, in what I am about to tell you; but only what I have been always and everywhere repeating in the previous discussion and on other occasions: I want to show you the nature of that cause which has occupied my thoughts, and I shall have to go back to those familiar words which are in the mouth of everyone, and first of all assume that there is an absolute beauty and goodness and greatness, and the like; grant me this, and I hope to be able to show you the nature of the cause, and to prove the immortality of the soul.

Cebes said: You may proceed at once with the proof, as I readily grant you this.

Well, he said, then I should like to know whether you agree with me in the next step; for I cannot help thinking that if there be anything beautiful other than absolute beauty, that can only be beautiful in as far as it partakes of absolute beauty - and this I should say of everything. Do you agree in this notion of the cause?

Yes, he said, I agree.

He proceeded: I know nothing and can understand nothing of any other of those wise causes which are alleged; and if a person says to me that the bloom of color, or form, or anything else of that sort is a source of beauty, I leave all that, which is only confusing to me, and simply and singly, and perhaps foolishly, hold and am assured in my own mind that nothing makes a thing beautiful but the presence and participation of beauty in whatever way or manner obtained; for as to the manner I am uncertain, but I stoutly contend that by beauty all beautiful things become beautiful. That appears to me to be the only safe answer that I can give, either to myself or to any other, and to that I cling, in the persuasion that I shall never be overthrown, and that I may safely answer to myself or any other that by beauty beautiful things become beautiful.

(Plato, Phaedo:100b-e)

So something is only insofar as it partakes of its Eidos i.e., Essence or Form. Put another way, the causes of the phenomena that appear to our senses are their Essences. This provides an account of generative, ontological, causality but what about the more mundane occurrences of cause and effect such as melting ice by applying heat?

There is a thing which you term heat, and another thing which you term cold?

Certainly.

But are they the same as fire and snow?

Most assuredly not.

Heat is not the same as fire, nor is cold the same as snow?

No.

And yet you will surely admit that when snow, as before said, is under the influence of heat, they will not remain snow and heat; but at the advance of the heat the snow will either retire or perish?

Very true, he replied.

And the fire too at the advance of the cold will either retire or perish; and when the fire is under the influence of the cold, they will not remain, as before, fire and cold.

That is true, he said.

(Plato, Phaedo:103c-d)

So ice becomes water when its 'iceness' retires at the advance of heat and it presumably partakes in 'waterness' in its stead. Therefore, causality does not, and cannot, occur amongst Essences because they never change but their relationships between each other and the phenomena in which they are instantiated are defined such that causality is merely the appearance of a phenomenon's changing participation in the immutable Essences.

More notes on causality in early western philosophy

The socio-morphic understanding of causation (and the consequent regularity of nature) as being the product of a divine system of retributive justice is found to some extent in the works of many of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus (535-475 BCE)...

The Sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes [Furies], the handmaids of Justice, will find him out. (Diels, Fragmente, 94b)

...and Parmenides (b. 510 BCE), who states that Justice holds Being in its place by the "pronouned" force of Necessity:

"Necessity holds [being] fast in the chains of limit" (Fragment VIII 31)

But when we get to the likes of Anaximenes (of Miletus, 585 - 525 BCE) we see the emergence of somewhat depersonalised forces of necessity and causation drawn from more natural and observable connections, the state-changes of air in this case. This is in accordance with a generally recognised transition in Greek thinking from mythos to logos.

Finally we come to Plato, in which the principles of causation are fully expressed without reference to divine systems of retribution.

Socrates. ...for does not everything which comes into being, of necessity come into being through a cause?

Protarchus. Yes, certainly; for how can there be anything which has no cause?

Soc. And is not the agent the same as the cause in all except name; the agent and the cause may be rightly called one?

Pro. Very true.

Soc. And the same may be said of the patient, or effect; we shall find that they too differ, as I was saying, only in name - shall we not?

Pro. We shall.

Soc. The agent or cause always naturally leads, and the patient or effect naturally follows it?

Pro. Certainly.

Soc. Then the cause and what is subordinate to it in generation are not the same, but different?

Pro. True.

(Plato, Philebus:26)

Predictably, for Plato, causation applies to the creation of the world of sensible appearance whilst the world of Forms, being eternal and immutable, requires no causality for its existence, as we can see in the Timaeus.

Timaeus: First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created.

(Plato, Timaeus:28a-29d)

Interestingly, in the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates distinguish between causes and conditions, as, if you recall, does Nāgārjuna. However, I'm not yet sure if the distinction is the same one. Certainly, there is a prima facie resemblance between Nāgārjuna's "conditions" and those described by Plato below. Of course, if the distinction is the same, Nāgārjuna rejects the "causes" that Plato seeks to elevate. I want to ponder the Phaedo in more depth but for now I want to "bookmark" the following:

There was a time when I thought that I understood the meaning of greater and less pretty well; and when I saw a great man standing by a little one I fancied that one was taller than the other by a head; or one horse would appear to be greater than another horse: and still more clearly did I seem to perceive that ten is two more than eight, and that two cubits are more than one, because two is twice one.

And what is now your notion of such matters? said Cebes.

I should be far enough from imagining, he replied, that I knew the cause of any of them, indeed I should, for I cannot satisfy myself that when one is added to one, the one to which the addition is made becomes two, or that the two units added together make two by reason of the addition. For I cannot understand how, when separated from the other, each of them was one and not two, and now, when they are brought together, the mere juxtaposition of them can be the cause of their becoming two: nor can I understand how the division of one is the way to make two; for then a different cause would produce the same effect-as in the former instance the addition and juxtaposition of one to one was the cause of two, in this the separation and subtraction of one from the other would be the cause.

Nor am I any longer satisfied that I understand the reason why one or anything else either is generated or destroyed or is at all, but I have in my mind some confused notion of another method, and can never admit this. Then I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was quite delighted at the notion of this, which appeared admirable,and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if anyone desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of anything, he must find out what state of being or suffering or doing was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, for that the same science comprised both. And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and then he would further explain the cause and the necessity of this, and would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre, he would explain that this position was the best, and I should be satisfied if this were shown to me, and not want any other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go and ask him about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, and how their several affections, active and passive, were all for the best. For I could not imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would give any other account of their being as they are, except that this was best; and I thought when he had explained to me in detail the cause of each and the cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was best for each and what was best for all. I had hopes which I would not have sold for much, and I seized the books and read them as fast as I could in my eagerness to know the better and the worse.

What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture: that is what he would say.

He would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia - by the dog of Egypt they would, if they had been guided only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the State inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming. And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in disposing them as they are disposes them for the best never enters into their minds, nor do they imagine that there is any superhuman strength in that; they rather expect to find another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good is, and are clearly of opinion that the obligatory and containing power of the good is as nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach me.

(Plato, Phaedo:96e-99d)

An oracle of Necessity: Western origins of causation

But where things have their origin, there too their passing away occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly established time.

(Anaximander, Hermann Diels "Fragments")

With respect to the Presocratics, the idea of natural laws emerged as an analogue of social laws. In what many consider to be the oldest surviving fragment of western written philosophy (see above) Anaximander (of Miletus, c. 610-546 BCE) talks of the necessity of the cessation of a thing's existence as recompense for its coming into being. What seems to be at stake here is a cosmic balance which, following its "reckless" disruption, is restored by necessity. Of just what this "necessity" comprises is not clear from the single Anaximander fragment above but a cursory glance at fragments from the Presocratic philosopher and mystic, Empedocles (of Acagras in Sicily, c. 492-432 BC), predictably, locates it within the authority of the gods:

There is an oracle of Necessity, ancient decree of the gods, eternal and sealed with broad oaths...

(Empedocles, Fragment 115)

These views are generally described as “socio-morphic” because they explain things like the origins and present state of the cosmos or the regular/periodic routine of nature as being the result of decrees and/or arrangements made by the gods. These divine decrees were predominantly conceived in the context of the regular arrangement of society or the edict of a law giver. In particular, social systems of retributive justice were applied to explain the phenomena of orderly nature.

More to follow.

Rebel Without A Cause

These give rise to those,
So these are called conditions.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (I: 5)

Pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination) is the Buddhist alternative to a theory of inherent causality. It recognises the everyday experience of regularity and correlation without investing philosophical capital in an ultimately real force, or power, linking essential causes to necessary effects. In other words, causation, from a Mādhyamikan perspective, is empty; and as such we talk of conditions. As Garfield says in Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness:

To assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse and explanatory practice, but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in reference to causal powers or as demanding such grounding. Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that.

(Garfield, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness, Ch.2)

It may be "simple" but I think the "explicability and coherence of the universe," and/or lack thereof, is the undercurrent that has pulled all the thinkers into an ocean of mythological, philosophical and scientific creativity. Causality is a major product of this creativity and before examining what it means to reject it, and how and why, I think it will be useful and interesting to investigate its historical development and variation to provide some background, shared and diverse, to the development of pratītya-samutpāda. This will be the main focus for the next couple of weeks.

Notes on the tetralemma

The tetralemma is the 'four-cornered logic' employed in Buddhist philosophy which can appear odd to those of us with a western heritage of Aristotelian syllogisms. As I will probably use the tetralemma at some point it is worth posting some notes which I have already written which relate it to some of the things I've been writing about in this weblog.

I think the tetralemma is best understood within the context of the Buddhist doctrine of two truths, the satyadvaya. As previously described, the two truths are typically designated ‘conventional’ and ‘ultimate’. Conventional truth applies to facts about the everyday reality of things, people and events. It is designated conventional in the sense of being the product of human interests and dispositions and does not correspond to anything independently or inherently true. Ultimate truth is deemed inexpressible in the sense that, in the absence of convention, there is no candidate for metaphysics-strength predication, including the ascription of existence/non-existence itself. Significantly, both conventional and ultimate truth has the same consequence – nothing can be said to exist by virtue of its own essence.

The tetralemma is comprised of four propositional formulations expressed positively or negatively.* Where x is any proposition and –x is its negation, a positive tetralemma takes the form of:

x
-x
Both x and -x
Neither x nor -x

I think the positive tetralemma is an expression of the conventional validity of the two truths. The positive import of the two truths is that whilst it is stated that nothing is inherently real, i.e., nothing exists by virtue of its own independent essence, the familiar everyday world is, nonetheless, conventionally real and exists in a way which does not contradict experience. With this acceptance of conventional truth we are not left with an absurd conception of reality in which nothing exists in any sense whatsoever. Thus the contradictory standpoints of (naïve or philosophical) reification and nihilism are repudiated in favour of a ‘middle way’. The four formulations of propositions are traditionally presented in an order in which each view presents a progressively better expression of the middle way perspective whilst each is valid with qualification. Constrained by usual proofs, then, a positive tetralemma therefore permits and commits one to state that, e.g.:

The self is real (conventionally true, i.e., it exists in a dependent reality along with everything else we derive from experience)
The self is not real (ultimately true, i.e., it has no essence)
The self is both real and not real (conventionally real but ultimately unreal)
The self is neither real nor not real (neither ultimately real nor completely nonexistent)

A negative tetralemma takes the form of:

Not x
Not -x
Not (x and -x)
Not (neither x nor -x)

The negative tetralemma is the self-destructing logic of the ultimate truth (the emptiness of emptiness!) which denies the validity of any philosophical assertion of any kind including that of the attribution of existence and non-existence to anything. The import of the negative tetralemma is that it ultimately denies the validity of the doctrine of two truths which is itself designated a conventional truth.

An example would be its treatment of the proposition that "śūnyatā exists in time."

"Śūnyatā exists in time" should not be asserted.
"Śūnyatā does not exist in time" should not be asserted.
"Śūnyatā both does and does not exist in time" should not be asserted.
"Śūnyatā neither does nor does not exist in time" should not be asserted.

The negative tetralemma is purely about what can't be said about śūnyatā and, ultimately, nothing can be said. But even one who is aware of that may make mistakes. I think the fourth lemma is the most common mistake that even the most dedicated mystic may make but is avoided by a thoroughgoing application of the negative tetralemma. In this case the fourth lemma falsely implies the independent existence of time to which śūnyatā can be propositionally related.

*There is some dispute over whether Siddhartha Gautama endorsed the use of the positive tetralemma, but Nāgārjuna is less controversially interpreted as doing so.

Alterity

Jay Garfield's systematic exposition of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is my most referenced source for interpreting Mādhyamikan Buddhism but I have found the work of Robert Magliola valuable too. In particular, Magliola's interpretation highlights the differential mysticism of Mādhyamika in opposition to the more popular strand of centric mysticism which often characterises Buddhism and older Hindu thought, such as the philosophy of the Upanishads. Central to differential mysticism is the characterisation of reality as an implacable process of alterity. It is through this alterity that any candidate for identity is thoroughly negated. This, Magliola states, is in stark contrast to the self-identity implied by the undifferentiated center one finds in centric mysticism. Citing Frederick Streng, Magliola begins to make this contrast clear in Derrida on the Mend:

"A major difference between Nāgārjuna's negative dialectic and the Upanishadic analogic use of words, however, is that unlike the 'Neti, Neti' (not [this], not [that]) expression in the Upanishads there is no inexpressible essential substratum which the negations attempt to describe. For Nāgārjuna, in place of the Brahman-Atman is anātman (no individual identity). The purpose of Nāgārjuna's negations is not to describe via negativa an absolute which cannot be expressed, but to deny the illusion that such a self-existent reality exists." Nāgārjuna "is not saying that the true eternal state of reality is a blank; the calmness of nirvāna does not refer to an ontological stratum beneath or behind the flux of experienced existence."

(Streng, cited in Magliola, Derrida on the Mend, p93-94)

He also elaborates on the origins and rise of the ultimate self-identity implicit in centric mysticism, its adoption by some schools of Zen Buddhism, and its subsequent dominance of Western perceptions of mysticism. It is an interesting section on Buddhism's history which I may return to but here I will refer only to its concluding comments which I think are important as they serve to accentuate a conception of reality that could easily be mistaken for Nāgārjuna's position but which is, in fact, rejected.

Westerners, through the good offices of Zen's great missionary to the West, D.T. Suzuki, know only of logocentric (and thus absolutist) Zen, and indeed there is no question that logocentric Zen has been for quite some time now Zen's most popular form. Or, to avoid needless confusion, let us call it "centric Zen," since its whole effort is to transcend logos understood as the language of is and is not and to achieve the 'undifferentiated center'. Thus Suzuki declares that "The meaning of the proposition 'A is A' is realized only when 'A is not-A'," that Buddhist philosophy is the "philosophy of self-identity," and that in this self-identity "there are no contradictions whatsoever." The supreme self-identity, indeed the only self-identity in the ultimate sense, is centric Zen's śūnyatā: "Emptiness is not a vacancy - it holds in it infinite rays of light and swallows all the multiplicities there are in this world."

(ibid., p97)

So, the point being made here is that, in the differential mysticism of Mādhyamika, śūnyatā, i.e., emptiness, is not an Upanishadic substratum nor a frame in which the entire multiplicity of phenomena is contained, or held, as it is in the 'absolutised Zen' described above. Instead, recalling from an earlier post that emptiness is dependent arising, it is characterised as a process of ongoing, ever-altering dependency and is thus always other than what is framed by any fixed term of reference or singular gnostic experience, hence the significance of the term 'alterity'. Therefore, the idea of enlightenment as a centering of awareness upon an immutable reality is untenable to the differential mystic. Rather, as Misra, cited in Derrida on the Mend, puts it:

[E]nlightenment itself is reality, in my view, not anything about which one is enlightened. And this is, according to me, the basic distinction between the Vedanta and the Mādhyamika: that in Vedanta enlightenment is enlightenment of Brahman, the awareness of Brahman as the Absolute, and in Mādhyamika enlightenment, or prajñā, does not mean the awareness of any reality. It means the awareness that things are essenceless or śūnya (empty of essence)....and this is freedom.

(ibid., p95)

Bullshit detector

David Skillicorn at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, has developed an algorithm which analyses the usage patterns of 88 "deception-linked" words to rate the level of spin in political speeches. It should be installed in the House of Commons with a certain level set for immediate disqualification.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8615