Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David R. Loy
Read between
December 3, 2018 - June 28, 2019
Perhaps the key metaphor in Being and Time is this need to “pull oneself together” out of the dispersion and disconnectedness of everyday, inauthentic existence, in which we are liable to be distracted by whatever the moment brings.
Becker perceives limits on how much death anxiety we can cope with, so our choices are stark: either the psychosis of those unable to forget their fate, or the repression that translates our death anxiety into transferences and other more socially acceptable symptoms. Such repression often manifests itself as a deep need for security, as part of the low-grade neurosis called normality, but it can also appear as the compulsiveness of the person who must become wealthy or famous or powerful.
Freud never analyzed his own fear of death, and therefore the psychoanalytic movement became his own immortality project,
Nāgārjuna’s critique of svabhāva, “self-existence,” implies that when we experience the world as a collection of things which are born and die, we are thinking as much as seeing.
For Heidegger too, each of us is a nullity whose never-ending project is trying to become our own ground.
Buddhism is more optimistic that we can end our sense of a lack and our flight from it into the future, by realizing that from the beginning nothing has ever been lacking.
The abiding nature of the self is grounded in the self-unifying nature of temporality.84
With inauthentic life, scattered by the distractions of everyday concerns, we experience and understand time as an interminable sequence of “nows” that consecutively arise and pass away. These nows have been leveled off, each shorn of its intrinsic relations with the others so that they simply line up one after the other to make a uniform succession.
“The ‘purposive’ man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time” (John Maynard Keynes).
If our root problem is not fear of death, which looms in the future, but an always gnawing sense of lack right now, the reason becomes obvious. Dwelling (in) the present is uncomfortable because it discloses our nothingness, our groundlessness, and time is the schema we construct to escape that sense of inadequacy.
those usually considered well-adjusted use the future to defend against the present. Time allows us to flee into the future (when, we believe, our sense of lack will finally be resolved) or the past (when, as we recollect, there was little or no lack).
Individually and collectively, we dream of the Golden Age to come, which will restore the dimly remembered Golden Age of the past (our childhood, Periclean Greece, the 1960s).91
Most of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato because it can be understood as various efforts to resolve the tension established by Plato’s dualism between eternal forms and temporal phenomena: the medieval God and his creation, Descartes’s mental and physical realms, Spinoza’s substance and its modes, Kant’s noumena and phenomena, and so forth. In each of these, the first term has explicit or implicit priority over the second, and Nietzsche was able to predict the nihilism of twentieth-century Western civilization because he realized that disappearance of that first term — God,
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The Greek debate between Heraclitean flux and Parmenidean Being has a striking parallel in the classical Indian controversy between the impermanence of early Buddhism and the immutable Brahman of Advaita Vedānta.
Nāgārjuna refutes both permanence and impermanence by demonstrating their interdependence,
According to Vedānta, Brahman in itself is nirguṇa, without any characteristics of its own, in effect a “no-thing” in itself which is why it can manifest as this-or-that — as all the things we perceive.
For both Buddhism and Vedānta, time is a problem, not an abstract one but a very personal and immediate one in which our desire for eternity clashes with our increasing awareness of aging and death.
It is not surprising that life becomes for us the futile project of trying to make ourselves real in one way or another.
According to Dōgen, time never arrives or passes away, yet it does flow. This apparent inconsistency gets at the heart of the matter, but in order to resolve it we must also notice the second prong of the dialectic. It
Without an objective past or future to contrast itself with, the no longer fleeting now cannot be grasped or retained, and I myself can never become aware of that now because I am not other than it.
the low-grade neurosis called normality,
a no-win game that the ego cannot stop playing because it is constituted by that game —
Buddhism traces human suffering back to desire and ignorance, and relates all of them to our lack of self. The sense of self is analyzed into sets of interacting mental and physical phenomena, whose relativity leads to poststructuralist conclusions: the supposedly simple self is an economy of forces.
According to Otto Rank, contemporary man is neurotic because he suffers from a consciousness of sin just as much as premodern man did, but without believing in the religious conception of sin, which leaves us without a means of expiation.
The evolution of Homo sapiens into self-consciousness alienated the human species from the rest of the world, which became objectified for us as we became subjects looking out at it. This original sin is passed down to every generation as the linguistically conditioned and socially maintained delusion that each of us is a consciousness existing separately from the world.
For Kierkegaard, the greater one’s genius the more profoundly one discovers guilt, because guilt is “the opposite of freedom.” “The relation of freedom to guilt is anxiety, because freedom and guilt are still only possibilities.” His understanding of their relationship is striking: freedom and guilt polarizing out of anxiety — in the same way that the sense of self and sense of lack polarize?
Perhaps even the “purest” guilt is a device whereby ontological anxiety escapes from its dread of nothingness by finding an object to worry about — in this instance, one’s own objectified sense of self. If so, even ontological guilt can be deconstructed back into something more primordial — anxiety (an issue taken up in the next section). If depth of ontological guilt is proportional to sense of self, such pure unprojected anxiety may be so difficult to endure because it consumes the sense of self; even ontological guilt is preferable, for to feel bad about the sense of self is another way to
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the Buddhist path is not resoluteness but simple awareness, which Buddhist meditation cultivates.
One does not do anything with that anguish except develop the ability to dwell in it or rather as it; then the anguish, having nowhere else to direct itself, consumes the sense of self.
The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression.”
When, due to a variety of possible influences, a child is not permitted to grow according to his own needs and possibilities, he may develop “a profound insecurity and vague apprehensiveness, for which I use the term basic anxiety. It is his feeling of being isolated and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile.” Living in a competitive society, such a child will usually develop an urgent need to rise above others. His idealized image of himself is transformed into an idealized self, which becomes more real to him than his real self, resulting in “the search for glory.” The other
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A more individualistic society produces people with a stronger sense of self, therefore with stronger anxiety, and it provides fewer effective ways to cope with that anxiety.
All that psychotherapy can do is remove the more compulsive forms of anxiety and control the frequency and intensity of fear.
The Concept of Anxiety. In a few unforgettable pages Kierkegaard delineates the paradox that, if there is to be an end to anxiety, it can be found only through anxiety.
Freedom makes us dizzy because as the opposite of causal determination it is by definition groundless, hence absolute — literally, “unconditioned.”
How does the unconscious become conscious? Freud suggests that “anything arising from within that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perceptions.”
To constitute the world as an empirical world means to constitute it as something independent of ourselves.
Each of us dreams a world, and if our socially constituted symbols are the true archetypes of our collective unconscious, our fascination with manipulating them amounts to a collective dream, maintained by each of us striving in these symbolic ways to secure or realize oneself within that dream.
The social contract and the challenge of finding right view in social activism
Bodhisattva’s Vow of Torei Enji, often chanted by Zen students: “If someone becomes a sworn enemy of me, abuses and persecutes me, I will bow down to him with humble language, in reverent belief that he is a merciful incarnation of Buddha, come to liberate me from sinful karma that has been produced and accumulated over countless kalpas. . . .”
Efforts to real-ize myself symbolically mean I give power over myself to those persons and situations that can grant or refuse the symbolic reality that I hope will fill up my lack.
Metaphysicians have been the great optimists of reason. In them, mankind’s search for a synthesis of reality, truth, and meaning reaches an apogee. The order of things being revealed, the problem of life is also solved.
Schopenhauer would have none of that. The inner reality of life and nature is blind, insatiable will, and the only alternative is nothingness.
Will is the essence of everything, manifesting itself in all the animate and even the inanimate forms of the universe. The questionable advantage of humanity’s exalted status is that we are able to know that our nature is unfulfillable will.
When we stop trying to push the river, we realize that the now flows by itself. I suspect we appreciate music so much because it has become one of our main ways of attuning ourselves to that now. Although we may not experience such moments often, they are the most cherished.
Other creatures are neither alive nor dead, neither real nor unreal, which means they have nothing to gain or lose. Since they do not search for a meaning to vindicate their existence, the meaninglessness of their world is no burden. Purposelessness allows their lives to be a dance.
Whether we fear and shun nothingness or embrace it as the extinction of our suffering, we miss something about its nature, insofar as both cases presuppose the usual duality between being and nothingness. From the Buddhist perspective, that duality is the one which most needs to be deconstructed.
The important insight is that the ego-self is mentally constructed by the vain attempt of consciousness to reflect back upon itself and grasp itself. The moment I become aware that I am reading a book is very different from being absorbed in the book.
Kenshō is not a matter of me grasping my true nature, but realizing why I can never grasp that true nature: because when I do not try to grasp myself, or anything else, I am that star, that mountain, that sound.
Buddhism finds an integral relationship between our duḥkha and our delusive sense of self. In order to end duḥkha, the sense of self must be deconstructed.
The Buddha emphasized that these five do not constitute the self; their interaction creates the illusion of self.
