Archive for October 5, 2019
The Confusion in Reducing the Ineffable to the Effable
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The Western Culture (Misguided) ‘Solution’ to the Problem of Ineffabie-ness of the Tao
How do we Western culture adherents make the Tao ‘effable’ so that we can talk about and share (some semblance of) our experiences of inclusion within it? As Heraclitus and other philosophers have noted, this is challenging because ‘everything is in flux, including we who are included in it’.
Ok, we know the Eastern approach to rendering the ineffable effable, and it is the same as modern physics; i.e. it is the poetic inference approach, as in modern physics ’Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’. As Nietzsche also points out, we need to bring into connective confluence the views of many eyes and harvest the coherencies that develop in the confluence (the ‘holographic’ understanding). This is also the approach that is implicit in the ‘sharing circle’ of indigenous aboriginals.
NOW TO THE WESTERN APPROACH (i.e. the approach to rendering the ineffable Tao effable).
This approach, called ‘reasoning’ (popularized by Sir Francis Bacon in Novum Organum, sive indicia vera de Interpretatione Naturae), has been critiqued by Nietzsche, and well before him by Bishop Berkeley, in connection with the related development of differential calculus where we create a new foundation based on “the ghost of a departed quantity”. One can compare this to ‘forgiveness’ which, by annulling a hypothesized ‘wrong’ establishes, in a back-hand sort of way, the existence of the ‘wrong’. ‘Right’ versus ‘wrong’ is a binary concept that, while it is the foundation of ‘reason’ , is absolutist abstraction, which is why Nietzsche identifies ‘reason’ as a major source of social-relational dysfunction in Western culture adherency.
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