Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy by Jay L. Garfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A World of Pure Particularity

Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism is an extraordinary book in several respects. At a basic level it is an attempt to show the relevance of Buddhist metaphysics to Western philosophical discussion. This it does very well. At another level, it is a demonstration of that same Buddhist metaphysics in practice through its constant emphasis on the power of basic vocabulary, our “cognitive architecture,” to isolate philosophical traditions from each other. And, finally, through its poetic suggestiveness, it makes perhaps the most significant contribution possible to those unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy, namely imagination.

My imagination in particular has been stimulated and provoked in a number of directions while reading the book. But it is the specific problem of universals, a constant theme of European philosophy since the 13th century, for which I find Buddhist metaphysics immediately apt. It is this issue of particulars (I, you, that-over-there, Vladimir Putin) and universals (person, thing, cow, psychopath) which is the inherent subject of the modern philosophy of language, particularly that of Wittgenstein. Most remarkably, Buddhism anticipated Wittgenstein and the Western philosophical turn toward language by several thousand years.

From Garfield I understand that Buddhism cannot be understood as a faith, but is rather constituted as a set of ‘commitments’ which vary among its schools and which have evolved over time. These commitments can be summarised as:

Suffering (dukkha)- as the basic fact of existence - certainly undesirable, it is not associated with evil but with an inaccurate appreciation of reality (the primal confusion). This is the foundation of Buddhist ontology, that is ideas about the nature of being itself.

Impermanence - there is no ‘intrinsic nature’ or essence, to anything. Failure to realise this is the primary cause of suffering. We project properties, including continuity, onto the world as a matter of linguistically enabled cognition. This is the fundamental principle of Buddhist epistemology, the connections between reality and language.

Beneficence - a commitment to the welfare of other sentient beings, who are fellow-sufferers. Buddhist metaphysics implies the necessity for an ethics of empathy.

It is impermanence, I think, which is the pivotal characteristic in Buddhist metaphysics since any lack of appreciation of its importance is the source of both suffering and the lack of empathy. Among other things, impermanence means that there is no ontological foundation. As the American pragmatist, Richard Rorty, said: “Everything is surface, all the way down.” That surface Rorty refers to is language. And as the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, expressed in a way that conforms perfectly with Buddhist thought, “Language about God [the Christian/Western ultimate reality] conceals more than it reveals.”

Buddhists agree with Barth. While language is essential, the best it can supply is some kind of conventional reality in which we live and work together. But language cannot describe or encompass ultimate reality:

“Conventional reality is the everyday world, with its own standards of truth and knowledge—the world of dependently originated phenomena we inhabit. Ultimate reality is emptiness. They sound entirely different. Nāgārjuna argues that they are entirely different, but also that they are identical.”

To appreciate this claim, it is essential to understand that Buddhist philosophy is a “world of pure particularity” That is to say, “Buddhist philosophers regard universals of all kinds as conceptual projections, and as entirely unreal.” Therefore conventional reality is a useful fiction but must never be used as a standard of ultimate truth.

The reason for this is that almost all of language consists of universals which actually have no existential content at all. They are abstractions that make a certain kind of logic (Western) possible but fatally misleading. So says Garfield,

“Buddhist commitments to interdependence and impermanence entail nominalism with respect to universals, and nominalism with respect to universals requires some fancy footwork in semantics and the theory of cognition. Apohais that tango.”

This key concept of apoha has its own complex meaning which is almost impossible to translate but which has a relatively straightforward logic of its own. Take the universal ‘cow.’ There is no such thing as ‘cowness’ which can identify a particular Daisy as a cow. Yet we all agree she’s a cow. In Buddhist philosophy, this feat of perception is not accomplished by reference to some set of properties assigned to the animal in question. Quite the opposite, as Garfield says, “apoha theory is, to a first—and startlingly unilluminating—approximation, that Daisy is not a non-cow. The double negation is the apoha.”

If I understand this correctly, an apoha, as in ‘not a non-cow’, is a particular which is arrived at by a process of rapid elimination of alternatives. This seems to be a sort of double classification, almost a linguistic cross-referencing which combines, for example, Owen Barfield’s beta and alpha-thinking and C.S. Peirce’s Second and Third into a single ‘representational moment’ in cognition. And as Garfield notes, this is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s logic of representation and the prototype categorisation theory of the influential cognitive psychologist, Eleanor Rosch.

The implications of this extreme Buddhist nominalism are wide-ranging. From the philosophy of language to theodicy, it provides an enormous number of possible paths for development. But it also does something else. The ultimate ‘emptiness’ referred to above in the citation from Garfield is a crucial reminder that language is always misleading when discussing reality, including the reality of language itself. Hence the idea of ultimate reality is a linguistic expression which cannot escape this constraint. Emptiness, too, is a universal. Therefore conventional and ultimate reality end up being identical, and identically ‘empty.’

Another way of saying this is that emptiness is a lack of intrinsic nature. But emptiness, like existence, is not a property.* Perhaps, indeed, emptiness is another name for existence, for being, which might well be the inspiration for Heidegger’s idea of language as the House of Being. And as Garfield says, “language—designation—is indispensible for expressing that inexpressible truth. This is not an irrational mysticism, but rather a rational, analytically grounded embrace of inconsistency.” In short: the world of language is paradoxical, get over it!

* Another important implication of the lack of intrinsic properties in reality arises for the theory of measurement. See here for a discussion of what might well be a Buddhist theory of measurement: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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