[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Dan Lusthaus]

Compounding erroneous ideas on top of erroneous ideas, Erik. Let's try to 
clear some of this up before you drown.

----- >>>> The position that *one cannot know what, if anything, is going on 
outside
>>>> of
>>>> one's mind* is idealism,
>>> Wrong, this is called solipsism.
>> Wrong. That is epistemological idealism. Solipsism is an extreme form of
>> epistemological idealism,
> No, it is mostly ontological, see:
> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solipsism

Using non-specialized dictionaries to define philosophical terms is not a 
good idea, but to humor you this time, let's examine what merriam-webster 
has to say when defining "solipsism":

"a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications 
and that the self is the only existent thing; also : extreme egocentrism"

Please take careful note of the word "and" which links two related but 
distinct claims. The first, that one cannot know anything except mentally. 
That is epistemological idealism. The second, "the self is the only existent 
thing" is the extreme version known as solipsism -- exactly as I explained 
previously.

>> (Epistemological idealism can remain ontologically agnostic.
> You forget, as I already mentioned cases of objective idealism like
> Hegel or Vasubandhu (not your interpretation but it serves as an example)

agnostic means it desists from insisting on the ontological status beyond 
what is epistemically available. "Objective idealism" (which is precisely 
the sort of incoherent theorizing that Nagarjuna loved to expose) is not 
agnostic.

> Husserl would say that the e-mail is immanent in the computer as a
> noëma, but intentionally transcendent.

It's much more complicated than that. The noema is noetically constituted, a 
late endproduct of a noetic process that begins with hyle, objective and 
subject poles, intentionalities, etc.

>So yes, you can only know what is
> going on in the world, there is nothing else to know,

Really? You have no imagination? Or that is "in the world"? Can't tell the 
difference between fantasy and reality? Have you worked through Husserl's 
_Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925)_?

http://tinyurl.com/bpckbr7

I recommend it. Might clear up some of your misconceptions and is directly 
germane to the games you are trying to play.

>but you 'do' this
> with your mind, and in this sense you only know what is in your mind.

Husserl, almost as strongly as Buddhists, would remind you that there are 
senses at play -- the claim, as in the Samyutta Nikaya, that there is 
nothing beyond the 12 ayatanas (6 sense organs and six types of 
corresponding sensory fields) is a reminder that the "mind" is only one 
factor in a complex of cognitive processes (it is only one of the 12 
ayatanas). Making "mind" the end-all-be-all is too neoplatonic for Husserl 
or Indian Buddhists. One perhaps has to work through decades of Husserl's 
efforts in order to notice that he is struggling for a vocabulary that (as 
Merleau-Ponty might say) fleshes out the cognitive processes in a 
sufficiently accurate and rigorous way, so that virtually meaningless and 
misleading vague abstractions like "mind" are replaced by more carefully 
devised terminology and analysis.

>>> Merleau-Ponty's chiasma (crossing over) means the mutual
>>> interpenetration of the visible and invisible, which has of course
>>> nothing to do with nerves.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_chiasm
> I failed to read the name of Merleau-Ponty in the article, you just mix
> up unrelated items.

Just as you would fail to read the names of Augustine, Maimonides and 
Aquinas in the Bible, and yet it is obvious that they read and were 
influenced by the Bible. Merleau-Ponty himself discusses the optic chiasm; 
it contributed to his selecting that term for an important aspect of his 
later philosophy -- an "interleaving" (as some have translated it), not a 
simple "mutual interpenetration", which would describe Huayan perhaps, but 
not Merleau-Ponty. His sense of dialectic was always more complex than that. 
There might be some "ambiguity" when trying to differentiate between the 
lived body and perceptual field, but their difference is felt and primary.

>>Characterizing the project of Merleau-Ponty's last work as "a
>> mix of fact an[d] fiction" strikes me as terribly off the mark.
> Sorry, you just should read better, this not at all what I said,

It is a direct quote -- I only added the "d" you inadvertently omitted from 
"and."

> I don't
> agree with your view on the late Merleau-Ponty, the more because you
> don't mention any sources.

How much documentation on Merleau-Ponty is required on an e-list supposedly 
focused on Buddhism? Since you ask, here is some stuff to read, for 
starters:

By Merleau-Ponty:

_Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France_, compiled with notes by 
Dominique Séglard, tr. into English by Robert Vallier. Northwestern Univ 
Press, 2003 (from the 1995 French ed.)

_Les visible et l'invisible_, Editions Gallimard, 1964.
(Eng. tr. by Adolpho Lingis, _The Visible and the Invisible_, Northwestern, 
1968)

_Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl_, 
ed. by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, Northwestern. 2002.

_Texts and Dialogues: Merleau-Ponty_, edited by Hugh Silverman and James 
Barry, Jr., tr. by Michael Smith et al., Humanities Press, 1992.

_The World of Perception_ tr. by Oliver Davis, Routledge, 2004 (from French 
2002 edition, _Causeries 1948_).

Secondary works:

Low, Douglas. _Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of 
*The Visible and the Invisible*_, Northwestern, 2000. [The subtitle is 
self-explanatory]

_Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty_ ed. by Hugh Silverman, 
Northwestern, 1988. (includes an essay on Derrida by John Llewelyn and an 
essay by Derrida titled "The deaths of Roland Barthes")

_Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh_, ed. by Fred Evans and Leonard 
Lawlor, Northwestern, 2000.

And if reassurance is needed about Merleau-Ponty's engagement with 
biological and psychological sciences, cf. the essays in

_Merleau-Ponty and Psychology_, ed. by Keith Hoeller, Humanities Press, 
1993.

>Merleau-Ponty tried to develop a new ontology
> with two categories the visible and the invisible (this implies thoughts
> and feelings and also what is not yet or not anymore visible). You can
> see his thoughts develop through L'oeil et l'esprit' and 'La prose du
> monde'. I don't see which teloi he abandoned and which notions of being
> and my sources (Rénaud Barbaras and Marc Richir) are not mentioning any.

His "working notes" (Notes du travail) which constitute the second half of 
both the French and English editions of The Visible and Invisible [hereafter 
VI] spell out several different versions of where, at various times, he 
thought the project was supposed to lead. Even there, if read carefully, one 
can see the goals of the project changing. As the editors explain, what was 
"completed" (i.e., what was published as VI aside from the "chiasm" chap. 
and the working notes) was rudimentary, still preliminary, early-stage 
explanatory expositoin, and in the process of being revised, revisited when 
Merleau-Ponty died. Additional insights into what he was aiming at can be 
gathered from _Nature_ and _Husserl at the Limits_, which also represent 
some of his late thinking.

The "working notes", compiled and homogenized (sort of) by the editors, were 
in fact not his final outlines of where he was headed. For more details, see 
Douglas Low's book mentioned above.


> He may have inspired Derrida, but you will find no 'différance' in Le
> visible et l'invisible.

Meaningless sloganeering. In fact, you might catch more than a glimpse of 
differance in _Husserl at the Limits_. Derrida rarely mentioned 
Merleau-Ponty until late in his life when, in interviews, he began to 
express more explicitly his sense of huge indebtedness on multiple levels to 
Merleau-Ponty. Much secondary lit. since the 90s has documented and unpacked 
this as well, but this is enough bibliographizing for now -- if you are 
interested, explore, starting with the sources listed above.

> Do you have any support for your unconventional realistic reading of
> Nāgārjuna, or is it just based on personal inclination?

MMK, Ch. 26. (and my reading is anything but "realist")

>>>> 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'?
>> See the bhasya to v.10 of Vasubandhu's Vimsika.
> I did, but it doesn't make your point clear. I fail to see the word
> 'correspondence' in the text.

Explaining the word "kalpitātmanā" that ends v. 10, Vasubandhu writes:

yo bālair dharmāṇāṃ svabhāvo grāhyagrāhakādiḥ parikalpatas tena 
kalpitenātmanā teṣāṃ nairātmyaṃ na tv anabhilāpyenātmanā yo buddhānāṃ viṣaya 
iti |

"buddhānāṃ viṣaya" (buddhānāṃ is genitive) expresses correspondence, the 
viṣaya of the buddhas.

Kochumuttom's less than ideal translation renders the above passage thus:

"[The self and the objects are non-substantial]
With regard to their imagined nature.

The ignorant people imagine that dharmas are in the nature of being 
graspable and grasper etc. The non-substantiality of the dharmas is with 
regard to this imagined nature, not with regard to the ineffable nature, 
which is the object [of the knowledge] of the enlightened ones."

All this comes about as Vasubandhu responds to an objector who accuses the 
vijnapti-matra understanding of dharmanairātmya of entailing that no dharmas 
at all exist (yadi tarhi sarvathā dharmo nāsti tad api vijñaptimātraṃ 
nāstīti kathaṃ tarhi vyavasthāpyate), an interpretation Vasubandhu 
explicitly and forcefully rejects (na khalu sarvathā dharmo nāstīty evaṃ 
dharmanairātmyapraveśo bhavati | api tu | *kalpitātmanā*)

dharmanairātmya only deems parikalpita (grasper-grasped, etc.) as the 
rejectable nonexistent, not all dharmas. Buddhas, devoid of such parikalpa, 
still have viṣaya, but (as Dignaga would remind us) such a viṣaya is 
nonlinguistic, nonconceptual (anabhilāpya).

>A dog also gets mad when
> you take away his food, but this does not mean that he has a clear idea
> of possession.

His bark and bite demonstrate he does possess a VERY clear idea, one he is 
eager to act upon, and he is more than willing to share his idea with you 
should you try to take from him what is his. Only the self-blinded or 
masochistic fail to heed the demonstrative power of speeding trucks and dog 
bites.

Their innate sense of ownership is why dogs are good watchdogs, and why some 
people have them as pets, since they bark whenever a stranger or someone 
unexpected enters their orbit, announcing the territory belongs to them. One 
doesn't have to train (= socialize) them to bark; that is innate. On the 
contrary, if such barking is not wanted, one has to train them NOT to bark 
(and one is not always successful at that).

> We were not arguing about preconceptual concepts (I would love to do
> this some time, but not by e-mail and I would like some beer to go along
> with it)

Sounds good! (Even Asanga points out that intoxication is a mental byproduct 
of physical causes; Yogacarabhumi, second bhumi).

>I'm still waiting for
> this sociological evidence.

You are waiting for a sociologist to admit anything is outside his sphere? 
To quote Zhuangzi (sort of), using a horse to explain what is not a horse is 
not as good as using a non-horse to explain a non-horse.

To insist you will only entertain arguments and evidence first reduced to 
verbal abstractions, rather than dealing with physical evidence and 
demonstration (speeding trucks, dog bites) is to hide behind a 
self-fulfilling ideological closure, which proves nothing but intellectual 
insularity. To insist that only evidence first reduced to theory is 
admissible, and then conclude that all evidence is evidence of 
theoretization is to bind oneself in circularity while disowning the 
reductionism that enables and facilitates it.

Dan