Lots of nice stuff here, including: a spiel for my book Garcian Meditations, some cool analytic/continental crossover material, a half-joking suggestion that logical positivism and phenomenology were really the same thing,* a defense of the positive hoopla surrounding speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy, a presentation of some of the innovations of Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman, and finally some possible mystical implications of Graham Priest's work.**
It's fun stuff. Joe Bob says check it out.
[Notes:
*I'm pretty sure it's just a fact A.J. Ayer and Jean Paul Sartre were in fact never seen together, not even once! Hmm.
**As far as I know, implications which he does not endorse! Priest is one of the most informed and relevant great Western philosophers whose work intersects with and interacts with Eastern Philosophy (and, in his case, Zen Buddhism in particular). Perhaps only Schopenhauer and Heidegger are comparable thinkers in this regard. However, Priest's sometimes offhanded endorsements of the standard kind of contemporary philosophical materialism we get after removing the offending half of Descartes' cosmos is likely to strike the reader as odds with the kind of Zen non-dualism described in Toshihiko Izutsu's Towards a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Again, non-dualism is not materialism, which (like its complement, basically theistic idealism) is just dualism with one of the halves collapsed.
On the other hand, the mystical apprehension of the world as entirely object is described by Izutsu as one of the four progressive states of the Lin Chin school, states both realized in meditation and expressed in philosophical systems and basic orientations towards the world. Perhaps viewing the Cartesian version of the 'mind-body problem' as solvable in favor of the Cartesian body should be understood as a dialectical moment? Perhaps it works that way in Priest's texts? I don't know. In any case we could all do worse than let the Lin Chin Lu have the last word here:
Once at the time of the evening lesson, the Master told the monks under his guidance the following:
'Sometimes the person (e.e. the 'subject') is snatched away (i.e. totally negated) while the environment (i.e. the 'object') is left intact. Sometimes the environment is snatched away, while the person is left intact. Sometime the person and the environment are both snatched away. Sometimes the person and the environment are both left intact'.
Thereupon one of the monks came forward and asked, 'What kind of a thing is the-person-being-snatched-away and the-environment-being-left-intact?'
The Master answered, 'As the mild sunshine of the springtime covers the entire earth, the earth weaves out a variegated brocade. The new-born baby has long-trailing hair: the hair is as white as a bundle of yarns'.
The monk asked, 'What kind of a thing is the-environment-being snatched-away and the-man-being-left-intact?'
The Master answered, 'The royal command pervades the whole world; the generals stationed on the frontiers do not raise the tumult of war'.
The monk asked, 'What kind of a thing is the-person-and-the-enviornoment-being-both-snatched-away?'
The Master answered, 'The two remote provinces have lost contact with the central Government'.
The monk asked, 'What kind of a thing is the -person-and-the-environment-being-both-left-intact?'
The Master answered, 'As the King looks down from the top of his palace, he sees the people in the field enjoying their peaceful life'.
]
glad to hear yer thoughts as always JC but this could use a bit of editing out of the host’s stoner ramblings.
Ha! Yeah, people clearly have different levels of tolerance for ramblings. To some extent it’s just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. My understanding is that most podcasts have these kinds of ramblings, but as you note, the art is in the editing, differentiating what’s really sticking from what’s slid down and laying on the floor in a sticky lump.
Anyhow, thanks for having a listen and it’s great to hear from you.
The host is actually a really interesting and sympathetic guy, an autodidact from a very working-class area of Cajun country who both writes some pretty good poetry and taught himself an enormous amount of psychology and philosophy before attending college as an adult, ultimately getting an MA in philosophy. He listens to Spinoza and Eastern Philosophy while running his own painting company. The room he runs his podcast from is an old shotgun shack that he got for free on Craig’s list, paid to have hauled to his own property, and then comprehensively rebuilt.
He’s interviewed a couple of other philosophers [Istvan Berkeley (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94docQQk3ps) and Rachel Williams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPSqtNCbNU&t=4597s)] as well as a variety of other people from various backgrounds.
I think the field of academic philosophy would be much better served if we weren’t so quick to condescend to popular philosophical views that get denigrated as “new age”. But given the scientism and Western insularity of the vast majority of academic philosophy, that’s clearly not going to happen!
There’s enough overlap in Asian thought and new age stuff to get a conversation going, but I clearly didn’t have the facility to do so in the interview when he hit me with the multiple dimensions and “Eternity in every moment. Divinity in every particle. All is one organism.” The dimensions stuff was, as far as I can tell, mistaken because by “dimension” in physics doesn’t at all mean what mystics say when they talk about different dimensions. This is a very common mistake when people try to buttress spiritual beliefs with science. But, after talking with the host off camera about the mantra, I came to see that this actually comes out of Eastern traditions with which he’s familiar and encodes non-trivial and plausible basically Buddhist views about time and the nature of reality. For example, Thich Nhat Hahn’s reading of the Heart Sutra is part of a tradition that interprets the claim that form is nothingness as the claim that each entity in some manner includes or radically depends upon its relation to every other entity, a position theme we sort of associate in the west with Leibniz, Whitehead, and Latour. Hahn also interprets the claim as entailing that beginnings and ends are in some sense artificial boundaries, a view we associate with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. There’s also a strong Spinozistic strain.
[Look what I’m doing, only validating Asian thinking to the extent that I can package it into versions of what Western thinkers say. This is inevitable at first, but it’s clear to me that: (a) it’s not all bad, because you both focus on different Western thinkers as a result of the engagement, and interpret those Western thinkers differently, and (b) as the process continues you can transcend that. I’m nowhere near there!]
Off camera, the host turned me on to some of the literature htat informed his claim, and I hope to actually teach a class on Asian philosophy next year. But in the interview, I really didn’t know what to make of it and I’m sure my bemusement comes through. If the editing were a little tighter, it might have been a bit comic. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be very good at editing a podcast myself. . . How does one develop that skill?
hey JC nice to have you back (even briefly) in the blogosphere, sorry if that came across a harsh not at all interested in pedigrees just noting the sorts of con-fusions you highlight with “Eternity in every moment. Divinity in every particle. All is one organism.”
I find the buddhistish folks to be of interest on experience/phenomenology but not much else (have been doing zazen for a couple of decades now), my favorite western spin on Taoism comes from the ex physicist:
https://syntheticzero.net/2014/11/25/andrew-pickering-being-in-an-environment/
” surely one can think broadly in terms of how Cogburn analyses Garcia’s claim that the universe is never an object”
http://anarchai.blogspot.com/2018/05/paradoxical-transcendental-philosophy.html