[Buddha-l] Jung and Dignaga

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard the Lionhearted wrote:

> You cognize an absence, but from it you draw an unwarranted conclusion.
> You notice I do not mention something and then conclude that I am
> deliberately concealing it from view or somehow trying to pretend it
> does not exist. There is where you go too far (atiprasanga). You may
> have noticed that I also mentioned nothing at all about the current
> shortstop for the Minnesota Twins. Are you going to conclude that I am
> somehow trying to conceal from everyone that the Twins have a shortsop?

Had I known that Jung applied his notion of the collective unconscious to
the Minnesota Twins, and that was germane to the general thrust of the
argument, I might have mentioned that as well. Since he didn't, neither did
I.

You prefer to strip off the racial overtones and undertones of Jung's
collective unconscious, taking as your warrant for doing so that Jung
himself made similar efforts to rehabilitate it. You find a rehabilitated
theory of collective unconscious useful and appealing. I don't. I consider
it dangerous at worst, and fuzzy thinking at best.

But the issue was how "collective" is the collective unconscious, as opposed
to individual. You believe that for Jung it was the latter, not the former.
Actually, it is probably somewhere in between; for Jung the collective
unconscious is the communal soul from which individuals arise, or perhaps
more concisely, the inception of the individual from the collective soul.

In Jung's _Nietzsche's Zarathustra_ lectures (the full 2 vol ed), on pp.
986-89, and the surrounding discussion, dealing with the collective
unconscious, he makes it more than the individual (explicitly: he uses the
word "individual" as its antipode repeatedly). It is that into which, and
from which the individual is born. He explains that individuals only seem
separate when viewed two dimensionally, like separate fingers pressing on a
2-D surface. But add the vertical, and one sees they are unified. This comes
up in the context of mysticism, unity of spirit, Rudolph Otto, and a string
of explicit equivalences: hiranyagarbha = Golden Flower = philosopher's egg
= philosopher's stone = the mysticism of pseudo-Dionysius = "the self of
selves of selves of selves" = "the accumulated collective soul that includes
all individual souls" = circulus quadratus = "one can use the Buddhistic
phrase: Hiranyagarbha _is_ the selfhood of God."

Gee! How dumb do people have to be to confuse this with some notion of an
oversoul? It's easy to see how this sort of confused conflation can be
appealing to theosophers, new agers and perennial philosophers, but some of
us are made of sterner stuff. It also gives some insight into why Jung
preferred to rehabilitate the term, rather than abandon it. It was his
personal, copyrighted, patented addition to that string of equivalents, his
drop in the cosmic bucket, so to speak, one which could pretend to not only
unify them, but outsmart them by few inches.

> Let's
> move on to your completely unfounded views of Dignāga.

Let's. And let's keep calling them "unfounded," since you haven't found them
yet.

> > Again, reasons for his ecumenical system discussed previously. But he
does
> > have his own arguments, and does allow there is knowledge.
>
> Not as I read him. He sets the criteria for knowledge so impossibly
> high that nothing would we ordinarily think of as knowledge would
> qualify as knowledge. He was, in short, very much a skeptic.

This is indeed a VERY interesting issue, and worth pursuing. Here we have a
true, legitimate difference of opinion, one which could quickly become very
complicated. I agree he sets the bar high -- where it should be -- but not
so that knowledge becomes impossible, or to reify skepticism.

It becomes complicated because one thing we usually expect from careful
philosophers, especially logicians, is consistency, sufficient to satisfy
criteria of coherence. Dignaga is a careful thinker, but not "systematic" in
the way that Western philosophers such as Spinoza, Hegel, Schelling, etc., a
re. For instance, in Nyayamukha, the example he uses for something that
should not handled by inference, is the question of whether the moon is
round. Why? Because that is something to be settled by perception, not
inference. Makes sense. Until one examines carefully his discussion of
pratyaksa-pramana in the same text. Perception explicitly excludes all
kalpanaa. But the quality "roundness" would be a kalpanaa, no? So, in
support of your contention that the bar has been set too high, one might
argue that he has, in fact, left us no way to determine -- as a matter of
knowledge provided by a pramana -- whether or not the moon is round.

Put in more general terms, if kalpana is a much larger category-set than
'well-reasoned ideas' -- and it clearly is -- than even if anumana
(inference) is construed as a way of training and disciplining kalpana to
only cognize in a sound manner, there are still basic facts of ordinary
existence (such as the shape of the moon) that can never be counted as
knowledge.

This leads to the problem that (I would call) the proliferation of
sa.mv.rti, i.e., where a single term -- samvrti -- has to be deployed in so
many different ways, on so many different levels, with so many different
meanings and nuances, that it becomes overburdened, and breaks. And that
leads to the various attempts to stratify and differentiate different senses
of samvrti (e.g., Candrakirti, Tsongkhapa, etc.). In other words, it shifts
a lot of issues and problems into a single term, and then makes that term
the playground in which everything needs to be sorted out. Dignaga is
definitely a contributor this problem (his pratyaksa ch. in Pramanasamuccaya
is one of the key texts that created the problem).

Perhaps surprisingly, I agree with you, that this does create undue burdens,
and makes "ordinary" knowledge difficult. You will probably consider this
disingenuous, but I think that is precisely where we see his Yogacara agenda
in evidence. As Asanga explains at the beginning of the Tattvartha chapter
of the Bodhisattvabhumi, Yogacara would like to complicate not only naive
realism (loka-prasiddha), but also the realism and theories of the
philosophers (yukti-prasiddha). But these complications use skepticism to
see beyond it, to use the arthas to get to the tattvas, so to speak (and
Asanga insists that one doesn't abandon the arthas either).

>(I see you
> have not read my book on Dignāga.)

Who the hell can afford it? If you care to send me a complimentary copy (I
know, you have none left), or even a xerox or pdf version, I promise to read
it eventually. (Actually, I have snuck a few peeks over the years.)

But you haven't read my "Aporetic Ethics in Zhuangzi" (in _Hiding the World
in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi_, ed. by Scott Cook, SUNY
2003), in which I argue that Zhuangzi is not a skeptic, and use Dignaga as
an example of someone who uses skepticism as a transitional phase to
undermine entrenched assumptions in order to get to sounder knowledge, as I
claim is also the case for Zhuangzi.

Dan Lusthaus