The second chapter of our 5 part series: Zenpolitik, in which Van Acker explores taoist practices and political pandemonium. Regardless of where one sit on the political spectrum, this read aims to push readers off their laurels by taking a grim look at contemporary America.
“Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
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“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
—Bertrand Russell
We have a problem with ambiguity. Ironically much of what drives our issues with disinformation comes out of an intolerance of ambiguity. People view ambiguity, particularly the sense of ambiguity that arises when dealing with issues that have multiple, very complex variables, as a mark of untruth rather than what it should be considered, an indication that you’re nearing truth external to your ability to know it. This isn’t to say that truth is relative, that anyone’s guess is as good as any other, or that we should trust any source of news that verifies our worldview. A quantum tuning fork in a vacuum will begin to “breathe” as it approaches absolute zero. The ambiguous breathing quality in this instance happens due to the fork’s proximity to the known limits of stable states of matter and, in a similar way, moral and political ambiguity signals our proximity to the limits of what we can know. A video of a riot and an article about a riot are both impoverished viewpoints if we hold either to be a “more real” account of what happened when isolated from one another. We want, of course, to gather as much context surrounding such an event as we can in order to get a clearer picture, but we arrive at the problem of realizing that there are an infinite amount of variables that we can plausibly consider. The more context we gather the more we come to see the gulf between representations of an event and the event itself the way it arrives flush with reality.
We are then liable to arrive at ambiguous conclusions about it. This is what Socrates means when he says he knows that he knows nothing. He knows enough to apprehend the outlines of what is possible to know and what isn’t possible to know. The sheer volume of information available today has put us on a fast-track to knowing that we don’t know. We feel it culturally. You don’t have to be a philosopher to directly experience the weight of the myriad different possible viewpoints—some saner than others—available online. Yet instead of embracing ambiguity many of us have disqualified the sense-making process all together or surrendered nuance for over-simplifications that distort rather than illuminate. Main-stream media has been in the certainty business for some time now. The large news networks are consensus-builders. They do not provide the service of provoking subtler insights or probing for a more accurate picture of reality. They alleviate anxiety caused by the gaps in our understanding by streamlining them into a “sense” of the situation according to a red or blue-colored narrative where the limits of human knowledge can be confidently ignored. You get two comforts for the price of one: assurance that clear-cut certainty is possible, and that what is certain conforms to your picture of reality.
Zen is, in some sense, ambiguity training. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Zen can seem mysterious or diffuse. One of the principle aims of Zen, insofar as I can tell, is to integrate the frailties of understanding without causing us to obsess over them. This is difficult from a Western philosophical context because up until Wittgenstien, understanding had a very Greek flavor wherein philosophical propositions were judged upon their symmetry and apparent harmony as well as their ability to stand for all of existences both physical and metaphysical. Wittgenstien showed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus that much of what characterized Western Philosophy up to that point was recursive systems of language that were incapable of illustrating sufficient pictures to capture all of reality. He concluded, after eliminating all metaphysical concepts, that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Around the same time Gödel worked out in his incompleteness theorems which showed that a mathematical system has to be necessarily flawed in order to constitute a mathematical system. Can you see the fork breathe? Discontinuity is a texture of what we understand as continuity. It is what Lao Tzu means in the opening of the Tao Te Ching:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
And yet he has told you.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
Which is to say, that if you are able to tolerate the limits of thought in language, the desire to control the mysteries of existence through concept and philosophical form, direct experience will begin to reveal itself to you in a more concrete and authentic way.
One technique for Zen training is the contemplation of koans, short parable-like stories that are deliberately baffling in order to break down one’s lust for over-interpretation. They act almost like jokes in that they don’t engage on the level of understanding but in the sense evoked by its content; that which suggests the meaning but escapes the reach of words, a meaning that would deflate and vanish if articulated in “regular” prose. It’s not for nothing that Wittgenstien believed that the most profound problems could only be explored in the form of jokes. One such koan goes like this:
A monk told Joshu: “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.”
Joshu asked: “Have you eaten your rice porridge?”
The monk replied: “I have eaten.”
Joshu said: “Then you had better wash your bowl.”
At that moment the monk was enlightened.
Mumon’s comment: Joshu is the man who opens his mouth and shows his heart.
I doubt if this monk really saw Joshu’s heart. I hope he did not mistake the bell for the pitcher.
It is too clear and so it is hard to see.
A dunce once searched for a fire with a lighted lantern
Had he known what fire was,
He could have cooked his rice much sooner.
Embrace ambiguity as a necessary condition of truth. Don’t be satisfied with simple answers but don’t be awed by the universe of particulars. Tolerate as much ambiguity as you can without getting discouraged or confused, then seek always to expand this tolerance.