Tao and Trinity: Notes on Self-Reference and the Unity of Opposites in Philosophy

Notes on Self-Reference and the Unity of Opposites in Philosophy

S. Austin

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349505579, 9781137501585
• eBook ISBN: 9781137498144
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The Chinese Tao and the Western Trinity have a fundamental unity of theme: the unity of opposites. Both are connected with problems as broad and diverse as how to describe the entire universe, how a system can talk about itself, the relationship between symbols and realities, and the nature of signs and sacraments.

1

The Being of Illusion

Abstract: Particular problems connected with the notion of a ground for appearance, if Being is taken to be all there is.

Keywords: appearance; Being; ground; monism

Austin, Scott. Tao and Trinity: Notes on Self-Reference and the Unity of Opposites in Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137498144.0005.

In this essay, I shall attempt to connect some of the details in the introductory chapter, in a meditation on the problem, in philosophy, of whether there is a basic groundedness in reality in the first place. Parmenides here functions as a philosopher of the One Being, but even if Parmenides was a pluralist, rather than a monist, it is not clear why there is anything other than Parmenidean Being in the universe. Why is there Appearance? Who is it that sees it? Are the deluded “mortals” themselves beings? Are they other than being? Or are they illusory? To whom does Appearance appear? What is the difference between Being and Appearance? And, finally, why is Being such that it can be believed to be otherwise than it is?

This chapter attempts to at least raise these questions, if perhaps not to answer them, and to compare Parmenides on the subject of Being and Appearance with Plato; with medieval creationism; with postmodernism; with Nietzsche. Reality (be it single or multiple, or, if you prefer, the zone of reality, “what is,” “what counts and is significant as far as the way things are”) is to be distinguished from the way mortals take reality to be, from what they accept, recognize, countenance, from what passes muster with them—from their Opinions. So there is then the problem of how the distinction arises, of how the mortals become persuaded by deceptive views of the universe, of why what they think is different from the way they should think. There is also the (closely related, if not identical) problem of what it is about reality that lends itself to being taken unsuccessfully as well as successfully. For one could imagine a kind of reality about which it would be impossible even for mortals to be mistaken. And yet this does not seem to be the case with the Parmenidean Being, whatever it turns out to be. Is there Appearance, and, if so, why?

For Heidegger the big question was a different one, of course: why is there something rather than nothing? I regard this question as tantalizing, but unanswerable, at least for Parmenides, who appears to view the fact that there is something as basic. I am instead interested in a different question: if Being or Truth is all there is, why is there Opinion as well? Related questions in the history of philosophy are many and perhaps equally difficult: if Plato’s Forms have true reality, why are there particulars at all? Why are we in the cave? (A question left unanswered in the Phaedo and perhaps approached only later, in the Timaeus.) Or: if God is good, how is it that a good world created by God comes to contain evil? Or, from a completely different perspective: if the proletariat is our species-being, how is it that the proletariat is oppressed in the first place?

But the question is particularly acute for Parmenides. I take it that, for him, what is is all there is, whether it be one or many—there are no degrees of reality—and so the question of the origin and ontological status of Appearance is a particularly acute one. It will not do to attempt to say, right off the bat, that Appearance is the way things look to us deluded mortals, clinging to the raft of our opinions after a shipwreck. For we, of course, are also part of Appearance—our embryology and epistemology are discussed in the remaining fragments—and our origin would have to be accounted for first, a hermeneutical circle: the question “Why is there mortal opinion?” would simply have become the question “Why are there persons, distinct from Being, who have these opinions in the first place?” And yet there is nothing distinct from Being—no one, distinct from Being, to whom Appearance could appear. Appearance itself, moreover, is not a thing, a reality in the full sense—it does not itself have reality, in spite of the fact that it sometimes stubbornly refuses to disappear. Thus it is not the case that there is Appearance, besides Being, because Being appears to us, or for that matter, to anything besides Being, nor does Appearance itself have Being in the full sense of the word. What then is the origin of Appearance? I am aware that Parmenides’s word “Doxa” means “Opinion” rather than “Appearance.” And yet it is hard to avoid relating the question “Why is there Doxa?” to the question “Why is there Appearance?” For, if there are to be mortals who have (presumably) deluded opinions, whatever the content of those opinions may be, these mortals, as beings capable of such opinions, must be other than Being, if it is not to be the case that Being misperceives itself. And yet there is nothing other than Being.

One could, of course, attempt to evade the question altogether, by claiming, with Nietzsche, that it is not Appearance, but instead Being, which needs to be accounted for. For, I take it, the eternal recurrence was an attempt to show that the world of time and change was the only world, and that Being—or, indeed, any static abstraction—was not. Consider the following quotation from Twilight of the Idols, written near the end of Nietzsche’s career as an author: “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.”¹ (Note the paradox: it is the truth that Truth is not the truth.) Here it is not appearance, time, and change which pose a problem. Instead, it is our stubborn Parmenidean nostalgia for Being, truth, stability which poses the problem.

Another way out would be to appeal to the notion of a creative divine will, whether this will is taken to be necessary, as in Plotinus and the Timaeus, or free, as in Aquinas. One might say that there is, within Appearance, precisely no reason why Appearance should appear—that is, the question is unanswerable—but that we can appeal to a decision made elsewhere, on the level of Reality, which would account for the origin of time and change: either the Divine is so generous that it cannot help giving rise to floating images of itself, or it freely makes the decision to create a world, a decision made with some good end in view.

A different way is posed by Plato in the Sophist, for the question about how to define this slippery, sophistical character becomes the question how to avoid the Eleatic ontology which had given the sophist room to move around in, and this, very rapidly, becomes the question of negation, difference, otherness. Perhaps—the story goes—it is the rigidity of the original Parmenidean strictures which had made the problem unanswerable. We need a softer ontology, more tolerant of the formal preconditions for human discourse, one in which it does make sense to allow non-identity, if this be taken, not as non-existence, but as participation in the existing form of Difference. Then we can have many different, non-identical forms, participated in on many levels, and thus a weaving-together of forms in a rational discourse adequate to explaining nature and natural kinds. Identity remains, in a sense, at the apex of the system—for even the form of Difference is the same with itself—but identity is now allowed to radiate into diversity and thus, ultimately, into change and time, and so the sophist can be captured.

It would not be fair in this enumeration to omit Derrida, who attempts, heroically, to turn Plato upside-down and, with Nietzsche, to make difference, time, and change the fundamental categories. And the critique of the Sophist might go as follows: once you admit difference into the system, it is impossible to tame it, to make it into just one among a number of self-identical forms. We must not make half-hearted compromises with Eleatic criteria. Indeed, difference is so radical, so disruptive, that it is different even from itself, and so it is now time, rather than eternity—a river of difference—which is the human dwelling place, advantage, and inescapable predicament.

This brief survey of some alternatives in the history of philosophy should indicate just how deep the problem of Appearance goes. For all seem to agree in the opinion that the question is, on Eleatic criteria, unanswerable: we must instead substitute the notion of creation through divine will or, perhaps, modify the criteria, declare them inapplicable, or invert them.

What I would like to propose is that there is in fact an Eleatic answer to the problem available, but that the answer is so radical that one would not expect it to have wide appeal. The key to the answer, I think, is in Long’s 1996 article,² which revives the old Neoplatonic interpretation of Parmenides’s Fragment 3, and takes that fragment to mean that Being and the mind that cognizes it are the same. (I shall not here be concerned to evaluate the details of Long’s case.) Compare this fragment with the description of mortal mind in Fragment 6, lines 5–6, where that mind, in a situation of time and change, is wandering instead of stable.

But why would Parmenides want to identify successful thought, thought that understands its object, with that object? And what meaning can we give to the corollary: Being thinks itself?

Certainly, if true Being is caught in the lens of a thought that is successful, a thought which focuses on a completely stable object, the thought must share certain features with the object, unless the thought is not absolutely and globally. In particular, it must be ungenerable, unperishing, whole, immovable, and perfect; otherwise it will capture Being only temporarily and in part. It would follow, first, that this thinking is not individuated according to human persons, as our normal human thinking is individuated—it is not empirical thinking, performed by a constantly changing human, legal, or cybernetic individual, defined by a constellation of ever-varying accidents. Second, it would follow that there is no distance, no non-identity, between the thinking and the object, because there is only one object (or only one kind of object) that is ungenerable, unperishing, and so on, and this object or kind of object is Being. Thus, to the extent that our thinking is successful, we are identical with Being, or, to put it differently, our true mind—mind that has really reached Being—is nothing other than Being thinking itself without intervention. Or, as Phillips wrote long ago: “If everything that is, thinks, and the only thing that is, is, in fact, the One Being, then that Being can think of nothing but itself, so that it will indeed be both subject and object in experience.”³ Thus, in a sense, we are Being, and this fact is revealed by the fact that successful thinking is possible. But the Being that we are is correctly described only by the transcendental predicates or road-markers, not by a social security number, driver’s license, proper name, or any set of personal characteristics. And for this Being to cognize itself is just for it to be what it is. Patricia Curd has recently laid stress on the immateriality of Parmenidean thought, and this would at least locate such a mind in the same ontological range as Being, if perhaps not yet necessarily, for that reason, making the two identical.⁴ Being thinking itself is an actuality, a fully realized mind, which cannot be divorced from itself and which goes on all the time, or rather in the Now of eternity. And our thinking of this Being is not other than the Being which does its thinking of itself through us and in us, but in a way which our normal consciousness tends to conceal, as it goes through the twists and turns of audiovisual fact, with its echoing sensibility and shipwrecked cognitions. To follow the route of the goddess is, then, to find the lighthouse of a thought that is always operative, a thought that is deep within us, the thought involved in Being thinking itself. The route leads to a place where we have always been. Or, as Meister Eckhart once put it from a different perspective: “The eye with which I see God is the same as the eye with which God sees me.”⁵

It is, in Parmenides, then, not a first primary mover, distinct from us, but we ourselves, who are thought thinking itself, being completing its identity with itself as the mind that it is. And—contra Nietzsche—it is not the concept of Being which is alienated from our most basic experience. Instead, Being is our most basic experience, and it is the confused world of mortals, in which birth and death play at random, which represents alienation and a failed voyage away from our true selves and from the Being which is our true Ithaka.

But, then, to return to the question at hand, how does this alienation occur? What, especially if we are Being thinking itself in an eternal embrace, is the origin of Appearance? It is clear what the alienation consists in—to identify myself with a spatiotemporally localized individual subject in a sensing of changing appearances in space and time. But how does this arise? And how to escape from it?

To recapitulate right away, there is a sense in which the question is misconceived. Appearance is not a real thing, distinct from Being, which somehow arises from Being, a situation declared impossible in Fragment 8, lines 36–38. Indeed, it is a mistake to use a noun to refer to it or to make it into a logical subject. It is more like the Platonic particulars in the Timaeus, which have their play only as transitory copies, imitations of Forms on the material background of the Receptacle, but without any enduring reality, so that a tree is nothing but an ephemeral combination of copies of oneness, treeness, greenness, and so on.⁶ (If particulars are taken as logical subjects, then of course Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato in Book Zeta of the Metaphysics go through. But, as Findlay once observed, the decision to treat them as logical subjects is already an Aristotelian decision, not a Platonic one. For Plato, the Forms are the only real logical subjects.)

But then, if Appearance is not a real thing, what mistake in particular are the mortals making when they treat Fire and Night as the first principles of their ontology? It is, perhaps, that the picture of the cosmos in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Being of Illusion
• 2  The Greeks and Greek Issues
• 3  Plato and Followers
• 4  Aquinas
• 5  Being and Appearance
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1:  Why Triads?
• Appendix 2:  Eriugena
• Bibliography
• Index