THE TANGLE OF KAKOL & HARTSHORNE (for Balder and a few others) Hogwash! Flummery! This article (concrescence.org/index.php/ajpt/article/download/148/102) is a castle built upon a swamp. The problem in such situations is not with the architecture but rather its unstable underpinnings. Hartshorne (as presented therein -- for I know nothing of the man) well understands that Integralites are in love with both the Madhyamika & Process Philosophy. And he correctly points out that the conventional presentation of the tetralemma does not clearly refer to any unfolding, enfolding or other asymmetrical dependence of the kind necessary to envision an evolutionary progress of creative novelty. That is fine as far as it goes -- except that it is based on the usual completely fictitious reading of Lord Whitesnake. Academics from the East and West have always been ridiculously eager to misinterpret those writings as a logicians attempt to categorize the formal dependencies of the world. The only error worse than that is translating shunyata as emptiness. An additional problem with Kakols Hartshorne is that contingent objects and actual absolutes are not distinguished clearly -- both are grouped as a-terms which undermines the meaning of that category. Kakol observes -- based on a few small elements (i.e. if... then remarks) and the lack of any logic to necessarily forbid developmental relations -- that we can legitimately read asymmetrical dependence into the logistics of Lord Whitesnake. In fact, he says, the original Buddhist concept of dependent co-arising may not have meant an equivalent reliance of all identities upon each other but rather, specifically, the way in which a holon is dependent upon its enfolded junior components. In this sense we can say that the Madhyamika is (potentially) strongly aligned with Process Philosophy. Okay. He is unfolding a vision-logic model by inscribing it into these readings. Fine. But, again, these interesting speculations about logic & causation are essentially unrelated to the writings of Lord Whitesnake. They miss the key element of the Middle-Way entirely... which is NOT the search for a balanced compromise but rather an awareness of the generative power of approximation of in-betweens & thresholds. This middle is the vanishing point at which sameness and difference converge into a luminous fact whereby the sharp mind (prajna) operates as though it were contemplative mind (samadhi). There are no argument therein about how reality is empty (either of itself or of other things) nor is there any affirmation of open-endedness through the infinite regress produced by attempting to stabilize conceptual elements with their symmetrical opposites. Open-endlessness of this kind is more properly an MOA-1 reading whereas we should probably assume that Lord Whitesnake, like his Zen grandchildren, was making an MOA-3 communication.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 18:17:47 +0000
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