[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Op 8-8-2012 11:41, Dan Lusthaus schreef:
> The position that *one cannot know what, if anything, is going on outside of
> one's mind* is idealism,
Wrong, this is called solipsism. And it is not about knowing but about 
being, in fact it is very difficult to know what is going on outside you 
mind, because the mind is the knowing thing. It would be like seeing on 
your computer screen what is not in your computer. Locke already knew 
this, but he considered a matter of common sense to trust that the world 
outside is like the one you know. Let me clarify:
Reality is according to some two substances (dualism; like Plato, 
Descartes, empiricism) and according to others one (monism; like 
Aristotle, Leucippos, Stoa, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc.) . 
There are two types of monism: materialism and idealism.
Of course there are many more refined categories, but this is already 
enough to clear things up. Idealists think that reality consists of 
consciousness, this does not have to be just your own but it can be a 
shared knowledge between persons or an encompassing consciousness (like 
f.i. Hegel thought).
> That's because you are only thinking about them after reducing them to ideas
> rather than considering them as actual experiments. Unfortunately for the
> poor unfortunate who takes the position you espouse (whether it is yours or
> not) and actually stands in front of the speeding truck, by the time s/he
> realizes the fallacy in the assumptions, there will be little time left on
> planet earth to enjoy that new-found wisdom.
If refuting idealism would be that simple it would not exist. Already 
Berkeley's opponents made this argument, which never impressed any 
philosopher.
>
>> If everything is ideas me getting killed and
>> getting hit by your pedagogical treatment and all the consequences will
>> also be ideas.
> That's exactly what the slap argument disabuses one of. The *idea* of pain
> is not the same as actual pain -- or as Dignaga, et al. pointed out long
> ago, there is a difference between sensation (pratyaksa, which serves up
> reality) and conceptualization about reality (anumana, etc.). You are
> mistaken to insist -- for Buddhists or for Husserl, et al. -- that
> everything is reducible to the latter.
You still don't get it, this time you use the word 'idea' in an 
different sense. Hegel, Schopenhauer Berkeley, Kant no idealist ever 
doubted physics. They knew very well that the idea of a hammer cannot 
drive a nail into the wood. They just said that physical events cannot 
be explained by supposing something like matter, because there is no way 
you can make matter think or perceive.
>   Husserl and
> Merleau-Ponty were both fascinated by an answer to the famous claim
> stretching back to Nagarjuna and beyond, namely that the eye can't see
> itself (and the knife can't cut itself). Yes, they say, but one finger/hand
> can touch the other. The touching finger is not the touchee and vice versa
> at the same moment, though they can reverse roles. That was the foundation
> on which Merleau-Ponty fashioned his notion of the chiasm (using the
> chiasmic crossovers the optic nerves make when traveling from the eye to the
> brain). In short, neither would contemplate standing in front of a moving
> truck or being silly enough to advance an argument for that.
Husserl's main occupation was grounding philosophy on the phenomena of 
daily life (die Lebenswelt) and giving meaning to a meaningless science 
(Philosphie als strenge Wissenschaft , 1910: Die Krise der europäischen 
Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, 1936)
He was convinced that nothing can be known without the intentional 
consciousness, the things you know are inside your mind, but your 
knowledge points to a transcendent reality. He is very close to Kant and 
sometimes called neo-Kantian.
Merleau-Ponty's chiasma (crossing over) means the mutual 
interpenetration of the visible and invisible, which has of course 
nothing to do with nerves. His late work contains the beginningsn of an 
ontologie based on the 'wild being' which for a change is not rational 
and a mix of fact an fiction.
> Nagarjuna challenged the idea that language and its intrinsic
> conceptualizations accurately and coherently mirrored reality, and, in fact,
> he exposed language's own pretense to coherency as insupportable.
Look at the last verses of chapter 7 and 17 of the MMK where he 
explicitly states that the world is an illusion conjured up by an 
illusionary self.
>   Yogacara pressed the point that
> cognition (unless one is fully enlightened) is representational, and
> karmically constructivist. For that, the correspondence theorists, trying to
> cling as much as possible to their realism, accused Yogacaras of being
> unrealistic idealists. Even for the Yogacaras, ultimately tathata as
> cognized by a Buddha comes down to a higher form of correspondence.
With what? What is a 'higher form of correspondence'?
>
>> I beats me how you can say that theft is not a social construction when
>> it is defined in law books.
> I explained the difference between theft and legal systems.
>
>> Theft is when someone takes something in his
>> possession against the rules and we are not born with rules.
> No. Theft is taking something possessed by another and making it one's own
> without the consent of the original possessor.

Possession is a social concept. Find me a sociologist who thinks that 
people are born with possessions, or that you can have possessions 
without a society.

Erik