I remember, nearly 25years ago, coming home on the bus from one of the first lectures of my philosophy degree in a state of existential distress (which has actually never really left me!). Id taken the course, principally because I was too chicken to do what I really wanted (and probably should have done) which was acting. The lecture was on Descartes and his doubt- meditation; doubting the reality of everything until he reached his own thinking-self, whereupon he doubted no further. I think, therefore I am. Believe it or not, I was that insecure and easily swayed that I couldn’t not take the problems discussed in that lecture to heart as my problems! I brought that world-shaking doubt away with me. It followed me home, to my workplace, to my clubbing life, to....everywhere. Unpleasant to say the least
Descartes’s doubt went to a borderline, his own experience of ‘thinking’, the discursive mind which he had separated from the material world, and no further. He hit the wall of ego and turned back. His discursive thinking could not countenance it’s own limitation within itself, and so to re-establish the reality of the world, he was lead to appeal to a supernatural entity. Fair enough. This admitting of the total impossibility of human ability and subsequent reliance on the power of a great Other is not totally alien to some schools of Buddhism either. Shin, or Pure land Buddhism for instance, appeals to the Other Power as the dedicated force of Amida, the personification of the enlightened and infinitely compassionate aspect of reality, which is always inherent even in our deluded state. Trusting in this transcendental yet immanent Other-power of Amida, or of the Divine, of God, of Brahma, of Heaven, of Providence, provides/reveals a ground for hope amid the tangles of the world of experience. That is an immensely powerful path that, not only would I not disparage, but that I’m often tempted to embrace.
However, if we go with Descartes through his method of doubting and to his border where he ceases to doubt more – namely to the ego, or the subject of discursive thinking – we could push further. Both Vedantic Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as many other subsequent western philosophers, do go further. I'm not an expert, but I believe the immensely rich traditions of Islamic mysticism and Sufism also pursue this course of self-negation. So too I believe with Meister Eckhart. The ego itself is looked at and seen to be insubstantial, or better – the ego is looked at objectively and hence is revealed to not be the real subjective ground. The ego is a necessary function of logical, discursive thinking. But itself it appears as merely a provisional product within consciousness. And what consciousness may be is far from self-evident.
We normally assume the world to be that in which we, as experiencing/thinking embodied subjects exist among myriad objects- including other experiencing/thinking embodied subjects, and the totality of the objective field which we call the ‘world’. That is our ordinary, functional understanding. And it’s fit for practical purpose.
However, if we want to ask questions about the ultimate nature of reality, this ordinary understanding is seen to be insufficient. For example. The world of our waking experience can be broken down into elementary particles and their interactive dynamic processes, a flux of energy and mass and patterned change, which is what (admittedly my crude understanding of) a scientific worldview is. So we have here at least two versions of ‘the world’. If one alone is the real, then the other is illusion. But which? The world of ordinary experience is real. The scientific worldview is illusion. The scientific worldview is real, the world of ordinary experience is illusion. We could say they are both real. But that simply means that neither is absolutely real and both are relatively illusory. We could say (in fact we normally do say) they are both incomplete in themselves aspects of the whole reality. But then we are assuming an understanding of the whole reality of which they are aspects. Then we are assuming a third position, a third worldview of how the ‘objective’ world sees itself from it’s own subjective position. Yet another attempted objectification that will simply not be able to account for its own ground of subjectivity without appeal to yet another - on and on ad infinitum.
No matter which way we look, if we try to find a purely objective and absolute view of reality (from within reality) we come up against the limitations of discursive or object-oriented or logical thinking. I emphasize ‘limitations’, not impotence. Science is our intellectual capacity properly and hence practically used. I have nothing but respect for science, or good science. I’m certainly not a proponent of woo or the seriously dangerous ‘alternative’ pseudo-science that has burgeoned in recent years. But limitations when reached are not necessarily cause for existential despair.
When we look to find a ground for discursive thinking we normally refer to an entity called ‘mind’. What is it? We could say that it is awareness as opposed to oblivion. It is identified by negation, or by pointing to what it is not. What is it that points? What makes this distinction? We would have to say, the mind itself makes this distinction. But what is it? Does it not vanish away at every attempt to objectify it? If we say that ‘my’ mind can be objectified by ‘your’ mind and visa versa, does that not simply add a few more mirrors to this hall? We have already seen that simply appealing to a physicalist or purely materialist scientific view runs up against the problem that it is only ever partial and relative. It can but present coherence of a worldview related to another without being able to give the mark of absolute reality solely to either. Explaining anything by appealing to something else just pushes the goalposts further. Here is where if you keep your nerve and don’t end up like my 19year old self on that bus you may find the door to a radically freer and yet radically realistic ‘new’ worldview.
And it sounds at first extremely disappointing! In short, the view can be thus stated; “ the ultimate reality is not this (let’s say, the world of ordinary experience), nor is it this (the scientific worldview), nor is it not these, as in, if it is ultimate then it must account for each of these, in some sense include them, while being neither. Nor is it any other view that seems to appear if we try to compare and hence objectify these worldviews (because then that worldview itself would have to be explained in contrast to the other two, and hence yet another vista would open from which such objectification could take place). What appears in all of these statements is the functioning of the mind, or the function we call ‘ordinary’ mind. That function which is to make distinctions and analyse relationships.
There we have it! The problem of trying to grasp ultimate reality with the mind, the function of distinction making and analysing of relationships, is that it simply cannot. To use a very leaky analogy; a fork is no use for eating soup. A camera does not take photos of itself by itself. Fire does not burn fire. To put it as Bodhidharma did “using the mind to understand the world; you will understand neither the world nor the mind”.
The reality is all and none of these views. To grasp it is necessary to cease grasping. To cease grasping while acknowledging grasping as a part of reality. It means, if anything, to understand that ultimately understanding in logical, discursive thinking and argument is not understanding. It means to allow reality to be itself, to be itself of which we are all (to put it in problematic terms) part and to accept – not to celebrate or fetishise by any means- uncertainty and unknowing as intellectual limits while being aware that neither reality, nor us, are purely limited to the intellectual.