Hardcore for Nerds

“ What, after all, is the meaning of faith, if not an ultimate cessation of doubt or any inward inquiry? Isn’t that a selling point for faith?

—

Boatzone 3: Religion, Secularism and Multiculturalism

I think most intelligent people of a religious persuasion would disagree. Without being too mystical, as I understand it the purpose of faith is not to eliminate doubt (“Faith presupposes doubt while belief excludes it. The opposite of doubt isn’t faith, but belief.” - Jacques Ellul, h/t PhiLOLZophy) but to reconcile it with some transcendental view of human limitations. At least that’s what I’ve picked up from a couple of decade’s worth of exposure to Christianity (mostly of the moderate Protestant - Episcopal/Anglican - and Catholic kinds). I don’t share the belief in such a transcendence, or see the need for it in already post-modern and post-materialist world*, but I appreciate the role it plays in grounding people’s worldviews without necessarily closing off inquiry.

Conversely, when you talk about science it would be erroneous to say that the ultimate cessation of uncertainty or empirical inquiry was its aim, although this is a naive view of the “search for knowledge” often used by both its promoters and detractors - especially those of the latter wishing to replace its implicit relativism with their own non-explicit fundamentalism (e.g. evolution v. intelligent design). Science has no definitive end any more than proper religion does - and both operate on rules which are evolved if not completely arbitrary - with the chief distinction that it produces material results** and is, in theory at least, better at maintaining doubt than faith itself.

That distinction is why it occupies a privileged space in the secular sphere, and has done ever since capitalism saw the need for material progress. The idea that “individual faiths can and do see scientism as another competing individual faith” is one sense correct, except that science is the one truly collective human endeavour that religions have barely dreamed of (and that’s saying a lot); yet typically it is an attempt at continuing warring belief through the misconceptions outlined above. Secularism is an idea beyond the pluralism which would merely regulate that contest; it is an ethic which establishes a society in which faith, in the broadest and least dogmatic sense, and reason can both in their own ways be pursued and not merely tolerated.

In a sense then, I am of the opinion that we must do as Habermas suggests and accept the inputs of faith as a mode of thinking and expression, while insisting on reason as the only (explicit?) arbiter of outputs to society. What faith nor reason can fully tell us is, however, what society is: if, to quote my earlier phrase, society is not an allegory (but, yes, a signifier) then that implies it cannot possess transcendence (equally it is not a ‘thing’, amenable solely to scientific analysis). We are doomed to politics, just as we are doomed to our own minds.***

*In both these points of view I tend towards the Buddhist perspective that we are already transcendent, which helpfully allows us to get on with our daily lives and pursue scientific inquiry while knowing it’s all just maya.

**as a side note, considering the psychological context and add-ons to much of this discussion, has science ever conclusively produced immaterial results, i.e. an improvement in our immaterial lives above and beyond that produced by religion or unscientific philosophy? Of course there are many ways in which the material and immaterial interact, which technology has vastly improved - e.g. the internet - and thus the distinction may be false, but is it to be too sceptical of modern psychological understanding to restrict science’s achievement to ‘material results’?

***that’s not meant to sound quite so depressing, especially as I rather like politics. but that Dante-like vision is I think crucial to the intersection of the humanistic and existentialist worldviews, the point at which those of us without faith find our ethos and our purpose. there’s also an elusive quote from Gellner’s The Psychoanalytic Movement which describes the inextricable quality of human suffering and manages to make it sound positive (or perhaps I’m simply misremembering it, but I’ll take the illusion). not to forget, as well, the first truth of Buddhism…

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“ Past Life may have been cathartic to make, but it felt less like a personal statement and more like an acknowledgment of shared understanding. Anderson’s songs have blood and viscera and ache but they never feel like exhibitionism because we’ve felt these things, too. In “Red Star”, the narrator evokes the cosmos as a relationship disintegrates, and the song builds and builds until the “like a red star” refrain becomes “like a blue scar.” And then the album comes to an abrupt end. Blue scars are the ones that hurt, and the movement from infinite scale down into this small, private pain— the absurdity of that juxtaposition— is partly what gives Past Life its power.

—

Pitchfork: Top 50 Albums of 2011 - 13. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints by Mark Richardson

Apropos of what I said yesterday, this is some really good writing - and thinking - about EMA. ‘Red Star’, which I wrote about at length originally here (and posted the early tape-recorded acoustic version here) contains two of my favourite sections from EMA’s lyrics:

“Got a strange fascination

I been holdin on the one

for that strange revelation

I been holdin on too long”

and

“…if you don’t love me

someone will”

which I think are a pretty profound illustration of the juxtaposition mentioned above. They’re practically Buddhist in their acceptance of worldly pain and suffering and the inability to grasp transcendence rather than simply being it.

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“ How do we get out of relationships of cruel optimism, out of this prolonged sense of crisis, this sustained and boring code red?

— The New Inquiry - No Resolution

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“ One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958

(via scattershotsuns)

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Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“No school should consider itself a separate school. It should just be one tentative form of Buddhism. But as long as the various schools do not accept this kind of understanding, as long as they continue calling themselves by their particular names, we must accept the tentative name of Soto. But I want to make this point clear. Actually we are not the Soto school at all. We are just Buddhists. We are not even Zen Buddhists; we are just Buddhists. If we understand this point we are truly Buddhists.

Buddha’s teaching is everywhere. Today it is raining. This is Buddha’s teaching. People think their own way or their own religious understanding is Buddha’s way, without knowing what they are hearing, or what they are doing, or where they are. Religion is not any particular teaching. Religion is everywhere. We have to understand our teaching in this way. We should forget all about some particular teaching; we should not ask which is good or bad. There should not be any particular teaching. Teaching is in each moment, in every existence. That is the true teaching.”

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“ We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. We should find perfection in imperfection. For us, complete perfection is not different from imperfection. The eternal exists because of non-eternal existence. In Buddhism, it is a heretical view to expect something outside this world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves. We should find the truth in this world, through our difficulties, through our suffering. This is the basic teaching of Buddhism. Pleasure is not different from difficulty. Good is not different from bad. Bad is good; good is bad. They are two sides of one coin.

— Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind - ‘Transiency’, p. 103

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Jawbreaker - ‘Save Your Generation’ from Live 4-30-96

I tried glossing this song as a Zen text - or a text with Zen parallels, depending on how authorial-intentional you want to get - before, but I only got through three lines: “”I have a present – it is the present”, “You’ve got to – to learn to – to find it within you”, and “If you could save yourself, you could save us all”. As a continuation of that post, hopefully here concision will win out over indecision, by fitting all the lines into one longish post:

“If you can learn to love it, you just might like it.” It’s a typical example of Blake Schwarzenbach wordplay, but the inversion of normal priorities perhaps has something more important to say: what if the precursor to enjoyment was absolute commitment, or human generosity of spirit, and not the other way round? “You can’t live without it” - ‘it’ still standing for the present of the present, of course; no vision for the future or understanding of the past is worth much without an acceptance of present, as all the really is, in its timelessness.

“There’s a million open windows. I’m passing these open windows.” I have to confess I’ve never seen very deeply into this one, as although I’m assuming the windows imply some sort of opportunity I don’t know what the particular significance of them being open is - except, perhaps, as a way of saying there’s more to the world than meets the eye. That there is a million of them is perhaps a reflection of American largeness, or it could be an echo of the Indian, and thus Buddhist, philosophical obsession with large numbers; but the fact that he is passing them indicates the transitory nature of the present.

“There is plenty to criticize. It gets so easy to narrow these eyes” is a very nice phrase, but says nothing much that hasn’t also been said in, say, ‘Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault’, and is followed by the counterpoint: “But these eyes will stay wide. I will stay young.” The essence of youth is idealism and openness to new experiences and knowledge. “Young and dumb inside.” More important, in a Zen sense, is avoiding a sense of self-satisfaction with knowledge, whether it be old or new, and thus achieving that mixture of irrationality and humility that characterises the popular image of the term.

“I have just begun to forget my lines” is another typical Blakean comment on the act and difficulties of authorship, but perhaps it’s a good thing, an escape from language and its authoritarian regularity. And aside from the irony of it being in a song - like the Ramones’ lines “Second verse, same as the first/Third verse, different from the first” in ‘Judy Is A Punk’ - the ‘lines’ could be taken to stand for the roles and rules of life that the “young and dumb” naturally tend to free themselves from, as do the dharma bums of Zen, with stricter monasticism.

“If you could save yourself, you could save us all. Go on living, prove us wrong.” The first line I discussed at length in the previous post, as mirroring the concept of the bodhisattva, but in a more literal sense it matches the second statement. It is the existential proof against suicide: if all we’re living for is our own existence - morals and ties of family and friendship to other people being extremely important but not, perhaps, in the final analysis, having the deciding power over one’s own actions - and if it’s our own life to take, then it’s the greater choice to continue it, to reaffirm one’s existence as a kind of two fingers up against the universe. Of course, more subtly from the Buddhist perspective the ‘one’ of the self, held against the universe or the ‘us’ of separated others, is a false distinction and to take any life is as perverse as taking one’s own.

“Your leap of faith could be a well-timed smile.” There’s a rather good Wikipedia article about what Søren Kierkegaard apparently only ever referred to as “a leap to faith”; there’s also a lot of complex argument about what exactly faith is, which I won’t get into here (though it pertains quite a lot to the boundaries between what I regard as rationality and various potential non-rational views of the world). Suffice to say here it’s largely a phrase, almost a figure of speech, spun into what must be considered a beautiful lyric and thought. Jawbreaker were always unabashed romantics at heart: in our emoticonoclastic age I’m not sure if we have the same room.

“Survival never goes out of style.” As above, except punchier and more cutting (in the argumentative sense; bonus points for the irony in being so modish). “I have a message: save your generation.” The crux of the song, with ‘message’ mirroring the ‘present’ of the opening line. “We’re killing each other by sleeping in.” To be honest, in my current period of (un)funemployment, I’d feel rather hypocritical about endorsing that line too enthusiastically; but aside from it serving as a metaphor, when I have a reason to rise early in the morning I do enjoy the discipline, the sometimes masochism, and the outer stillness of it all. Again, note the reflexive karma of the ironical sentence; what we do as individuals does have a profound and inescapable social effect.

“Finnegan, begin again.” Shout-out to Joyce. The master - or at least the foremost 20th-century pioneer - at manipulating language, at least in the West and in English. It also sounds to me here as if he’s saying “Binnegan, figin again”; the circularity and endlessly parodiable endlessness of words. And as a command to the dreamlike Finnegan, “begin again” also works as a Buddhist exhortation, to live every moment anew in the present. “This one can be won. One can become two. Two can pick and choose. You could be the first.” Here there seems to be, in the language play, some investigation into the nature of the self and intersubjective relationships, culminating in the encouragement that you too could be a innovator.

“You have to learn to learn from your mistakes. You can afford to lose a little face.” Not just the traditional moral platitudes - though as with the part antithetical, part symbiotic relationship of Zen and Confucianism, those are important too - but a meta-stipulation. You have to learn to learn, as in the education begins before the lesson itself is learnt; you can afford to bear the cost of a slight humiliation, which is a way of saying that the positive capability of forbearance is prior to the ability of sufferance.

“The things you break, some can’t be replaced. A simple rule: every day be sure you wake.” Impermanence. Enlightenment.

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raelmozo:

“An object of interest near the rear of the monks quarters is the carved stone receptacle into which water for ritual purification continuously flows. This is the Ryōan-ji tsukubai (蹲踞?), which translates literally as “crouch;” and the lower elevation of the basin requires the user to bend a little bit to reach the water, which suggests supplication and reverence.[2] The kanji written on the surface of the stone are without significance when read alone. If each is read in combination with 口 (kuchi), which the central bowl is meant to represent, then the characters become 吾, 唯, 足, 知. This is read as “ware tada taru (wo) shiru” and translates literally as “I only know plenty” (吾 = ware = I, 唯 = tada = only, 足 = taru = plenty, 知 = shiru = know). The meaning of the phrase carved into the top of the tsukubai is simply that “what one has is all one needs” and is meant to reinforce the basic anti-materialistic teachings of Buddhism.”

Ryōan-ji

photo by bubba

(via fuckyeahzenmind1)

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Koan

stephenluban:

Two monks were standing in the Temple grounds, arguing about a flag that was flapping wildly in the strong winds that were blowing that day.

One said, ”The flag is moving.”

The other replied, “No, it is the wind that is moving.”

Just then the Zen master Hui Neng happened to pass by.

He told them,

”Not the wind, not the flag. Mind is moving.”

(via fuckyeahzenmind1)

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philolzophy replied to your post: philolzophy replied to your post:this is a REALLY…

Yeah, not that philosophical. This is how I personally feel about meta things heavily influenced by my own experience (being too close to see whats wrong w something doesn’t work on me) and The Sacred Canopy by Peter Berger.

oh and also Faith and Belief by Jacques Ellul.

Of course, arguing that one can never view something critically that one is very close to would be kind of asinine. But as an atheist I see the call to suspend critical judgement as tantamount to, well, believing in God. And the only theology that appears plausible to me is Buddhist, especially Zen, which is no theology of the sort that includes a God as understood in Western or traditional terms, but is a radical and difficult to fully understand philosophy.

As someone who went to a ‘multi-denominational’ primary school, a secondary school that was Protestant by patronage, chaplaincy and little else (generally liberal and secularised, by Irish standards), and a university that was historically Catholic but now nominally, and mostly effectively, secular, I’m well secularised despite exposure to many aspects of faith. I’m even a confirmed Anglican (that would be Episcopalian in American terms), but the joke goes that those in the Church of England or Ireland are half-atheist anyway, and it was really only one of the closing stages in a process of disengaging the moral, ethical and cultural parts of the religion from the metaphysical beliefs - which became, as De Valera might have put it, an empty formula.*

I’m suspicious not only of religion (and I think the forces of secularism have won that battle, intellectually at least, to create something between parity of esteem and personal freedom to make rational choices about belief) but also of spirituality in general. Which is probably why I’ve never gone very far with Buddhism, but equally I think that my scepticism is justified in and through it. The idea that rationality alone is not enough, while not untrue, seems to me as something of a category error in the way it is usually presented. It’s not that there’s any extra-rational truth to the world, but that our rational understanding of the world is necessarily limited by aspects both of ourselves and our surroundings. Which is what makes life difficult, but is also what makes irony useful in reflecting and reiterating those limitations.

You can’t live life by Zen koans alone**, at least not by any normal human sense, and you have to engage emotionally and with an acceptance of sincerity as a measure of basic personal trust. I’m cool with that, but whenever my brain is engaged it’s kinda hard to leave thought behind.

*a term - extended in some sources to an “empty political formula” - he used as an Irish Republican to justify taking the Oath of Allegiance to the King, in order to attend the parliament of the Irish Free State and end his party’s previous policy of abstentionism. Though there was considerable philosophy in the politics, as described in Diarmaid Ferriter’s Judging Dev (Dublin, 2007), p. 103:

“On 11 August 1927 the president of Fianna Fáil and his colleagues took the oath, simultaneously dismissing it as an empty formality. As Travers put it, ‘On such fine distinctions rest the foundation of modern Irish political democracy’. Behind the scenes, de Valera went to considerable trouble to find a solution to the dilemma of the oath, seeking theological interpretations of it, views as to the quality of an oath taken under duress, and whether an oath taken in a qualified way had actually been sworn. He corresponded with a number of people, including Michael Browne, Professor of Moral Theology at Maynooth who went on to become Bishop of Galway. In a letter dated 6 October 1927 Browne wrote the following (this section of the letter was highlighted by vertical lines added either by de Valera or a colleague):

In regard to duress: the obligation of an oath taken under duress or fear holds. Fear does not invalidate an oath. It does however justify the swearer in taking the oath in a qualified or restricted sense that will make it compatible with his rights, provided the reservation is not purely mental but such as a prudent man would suspect to exist. If the swearer makes public the sense in which he takes the oath and is allowed to swear then there is no question at all that he is bound only in this sense and to its extent.”

The fact that the reply comes a month later rather emphasises the academic quality of the question, despite how seriously it may have been taken. But what really excites me about history and politics is the way that is both so cynical and, ultimately, real. Unlike the purely natural sciences, or the entirely liberal arts (and I might include philosophy in that), it perhaps is irony and sincerity mixed, not separate?

** this is of course a most slanderous portrayal of Zen koans, which exist as much to deconstruct and stymie rational thought as they do to challenge sentimental belief in same, but with the ultimate purpose of liberating the mind from questions of faith and reason in favour of simply being.

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