Nonduality, Plato, Computers and All That Jazz

[Guest guest]

We call it " the problem of the self, " first, because it is one of the

great--perhaps the great--puzzle in Western philosophy and a central

issue in non-western traditions as well.

This problem of the self inevitably begins with Plato and his

dialogue Phaedrus, which has for some two millennia been a central

text in discussions of truth, philosophy, rhetoric, and writing.

Ultimately, it is Plato's sustained interest in defining and

attaining Truth (the capital " T " is intentional) that drives the

Phaedrus, the purpose here is to examine how that interest in Truth

gives rise to a conception of self that becomes the foundational

conception of self in Western culture.

 

In the Phaedrus, the vehicle for Plato's journey to Truth is an

extended discussion between Socrates and his young protégé Phaedrus

ostensibly about a speech given by their colleague Lysias regarding

the nature of love, though it is a wide-ranging discussion in which

Socrates discusses the nature of truth and defines a " true " rhetoric.

 

But Plato's key move in this text was in locating truth in a

metaphysical world and in conceptualizing the human self as a

thinking being capable of accessing that metaphysical world through

the method of dialectic. Plato believed that " truth is to be attained

by a partnership of two like-minded people . . . in the common

pursuit of the beauty not of this world which is ultimately to be

identified with the Form of Good, and which gives meaning and

coherence to the whole of reality "

 

With this formulation, Plato establishes two enduring binaries: the

metaphysical realm as distinct from the physical world; and, more

important for our purposes here, the essential human self and the

physical world, which becomes the mind/body split. This human self is

fundamentally an intellectual entity whose " true " or essential nature

exists as separate from the physical world.

 

Descartes' famous line is perhaps the best-known expression of this

view of the self: Cogito Ergo Sum.The mind is what matters.

 

Despite challenges from alternative perspectives(Emerson and the

Transcendentalists), this view of the self as an autonomous thinking

being separate from the physical world has become the central way of

understanding the self in Western culture. And it is a way of

understanding the self that, many scholars have argued, depends upon

literacy or, more specifically, on what Marshall McLuhan has called

the sensual reconfiguration of communication that the technology of

writing makes possible.

 

However, even if the claims made about the effects of literacy on

human cognition are specious, literacy is central to how we exist in

the world and how we understand ourselves as beings-in-the-world. As

such, it has the power to reify our implicit sense of disconnection

from the physical world and reinforce a dualistic view of reality

 

Marshall McLuhan's analysis of the effects of writing on the human

mind--and on the organization of human societies--is an extremely

complex one that draws on cultural anthropology and rests in large

measure on a problematic dichotomy between the oral and the literate.

But at the heart of this analysis is the idea that writing changes

human communication from a primarily oral and aural phenomenon to one

that is primarly visual. " For writing is a visual enclosure of non-

visual spaces and senses. It is, therefore, an abstraction of the

visual from the ordinary sense interplay. And whereas speech is an

outering (utterance) of all our senses at once, writing abstracts

from speech. . . . The phonetic alphabet reduced the use of all the

senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code. " This

fundamental change has profound implications for how humans

understand themselves, their relationships to each other, and their

relation to the physical world they inhabit " .

 

Many scholars--notably Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and David Olson--

have pursued that line of inquiry to explore what literacy might have

meant for human culture as well as for how humans understand the

self. In his study of the impact of writing on what he describes as

the primarily oral culture of ancient Greece, for instance, Havelock

argues that writing--specifically, Plato's writings--made possible

the " discovery of intellection, " which gives rise to " a 'subject,'

a 'me' " with a " separate identity " distinct from others and the world

around us. Walter Ong draws on Havelock's study in his own famous

analysis to make the point that " writing makes possible increasingly

articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not

only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but

also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set " .

This is essentially Plato's binary: the autonomous self vs. the

external world. Significantly, it is a literate self. As philosopher

David Abram writes, " The Socratic-Platonic psyche . . . is none other

than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and

strengthened in relation to written letters. " Abram subtly but

importantly shifts the focus of the analysis of the effects of

literacy from the intellectual to the physical: " The fact that one's

scripted words can be returned to and pondered at any time that one

chooses, regardless of when, or in what situation, they were first

recorded, grants a timeless quality to this new reflective self, a

sense of the relative independence of one's verbal, speaking self

from the breathing body with its shifting needs. The literate self

cannot help but feel its own transcendence and timelessness relative

to the fleeting world of corporeal existence " .

 

Writing as a technology seems to have helped shape this Western sense

of self in subtle but powerful ways that perhaps go beyond the

influence of technologies like the telephone,the technology that

enables you to experience yourself and the other person as together

or proximate even though your bodies are not, in a physical sense,

proximate. In this way, technologies like the telephone and writing

can implicitly underscore your sense of self as an autonomous,

thinking being, because your physical presence becomes unnecessary

for " you " to interact with the other person.

But the computer, which is both a technology for writing and a

technology that differs from writing, may be as important as writing

itself in terms of its ability to shape our sense of self and our

ways of being-in-the-world. As an incredibly powerful and

increasingly ubiquitous technology that is becoming ever more fully

integrated into our lives, the computer may have the capacity to

affect our sense of self to an extent that no other technology can

do. The primary effect of our uses of these computer technologies is

to reify the Western sense of self as an autonomous, thinking being

that exists fundamentally separate from the physical world.

 

Because technologies like print and audio have become so common and

so thoroughly integrated into our ways of reading, writing, and

communicating, they can also become invisible to us as we use them;

that is, they become so fully a part of the experience of reading or

listening or communicating that we stop noticing them over time. But

this " invisibility " of technology goes beyond these rather obvious

effects in our day-to-day activities. It is also implicated in how we

understand ourselves as beings-in-the-world. This capacity of

technology to become " invisible " has important implications, for it

means that technology becomes central to how we experience and live

in the world in a way that eventually comes to be seen as " natural. "

In this sense, the technology influences how we understand ourselves

as beings-in-the-world and our relationships to each other and to the

larger world we inhabit.

 

Education critic C. A. Bowers suggests that the potential of the

computer as a technology to shape experience is vast. Considering the

power of computer technology, how multi-faceted its uses, and the

astonishing speed with which it has been integrated into economic and

cultural life in the past two decades, it is reasonable to expect

that computers, in their various manifestations, will become ever

more invisible to us even as they become ever more central to how we

live in and experience the world.

 

Alternatives: Nonduality, Interconnectedness, Being-in-the-

World.......

 

In referring to Platonism and to the Judeo-Christian religious

tradition, philosopher David Loy writes that both these " dualisms "

understand the self " to be the source of awareness and therefore of

all meaning and value, which is to devalue the world/nature into

merely that field of activity wherein the self labors to fulfill

itself.In making this assertion, Loy opens up a range of complex

issues that are central to longstanding philosophical debates about

the nature of the self and experience. But there are two crucial

points to make about Loy's observation for our purposes:

 

First, this self to which Loy refers is the Cartesian self: the

autonomous thinking self that is brought into being by thought; the

Platonic self able to transcend the physical and find Truth in the

metaphysical; the prevailing Western self that is understood to be

fundamentally separate from other selves and from the physical world.

 

Second, how we understand the self matters. As Loy points out, in the

West, the self resides at the center of how we make meaning of the

world and our experience of it. The implications of our prevailing

Western sense of self are vast, and one of those implications is a

fundamental disconnection between " us " as human beings and the

physical world we perceive around us.

 

An alternative version of the self is one based on David Loy's notion

of nonduality. Loy draws on Asian philosophical and spiritual

traditions to inquire into nonduality as an alternative to Western

modes of philosophical inquiry and their dualistic ways of

understanding experience. This is complex terrain , a description of

a sense self that arises from the idea of nonduality. This

nondualistic self, which is central to the Eastern traditions Loy

draws on but which exists in various guises in the Western tradition

as well, must, I believe, become a crucial component of the effort to

re-imagine ourselves in relation to each other and to the world we

inhabit in order to create sustainable communities and ways of being

in the world.

 

Loy's primary goal in his study is to " extract and elucidate a 'core

doctrine' of nonduality " from three major Asian traditions

or " nondualist systems " : Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism. In pursuing

this goal, Loy confronts the question of how to understand the self

(and the prior question of the very existence of a self) within a

nondualist framework. Juxtaposing his stance to modern Western

philosophy, which he says begins with " Descartes' postulation of the

subject which functions autonomously as its own criterion of truth " ,

Loy presents " the nondualist's claim that there is no autonomous self

('I . . .') distinguishable from its experience ('I am aware

of . . .') " . Whereas the Cartesian view holds that " the act of

thinking requires a thinker, an 'I' to be doing it " , Loy describes an

alternative experience of experience, a non-intellectual way of being

in which the distinctions between subject and object, " I "

and " world, " disappear:

 

Originally, there is no distinction between " internal " (mental)

and " external " (physical), which means that trees and rocks and

clouds, if they are not juxtaposed in memory with the " I " concept,

will be experienced to be as much " my " mind as thought and feelings.

Loy acknowledges that this way of explaining the self, or, more

accurately, the lack of self, what Buddhism calls " no-self " ,

is " incompatible with our usual way of . . . understanding

experience " , which rests on the assumption of an " I " that can

perceive the physical world as separate from itself, as an object

that is not part of that " I. " But he points out that the subject-

object duality that he wishes to deconstruct arises not only from a

simple bifurcation between grasper and grasped. The subject must also

be 'grasped' in an objectification whereby I identify my

consciousness with thought (including memory), a body, and its

possessions, all of which are objects lacking the most essential

characteristic of Self, consciousness.

In other words, we must separate the self, objectify it, from

everything else in order to bring it into being and be aware of it.

Loy argues that such a self is illusory, and he bases that argument

on the idea of the fundamental unity of all things: " the world itself

is nonplural, because all the things 'in' the world are not really

distinct from each other but together constitute some integral

whole " . Zen teacher John Daido Loori sums up in somewhat simpler

terms the implications of this idea of wholeness for understanding

the self in the Buddhist tradition, on which Loy relies: " In a sense,

the 'person' in Buddhism is the totality of the universe. And it

responds to the whole universe and takes care of it as if it was

taking care of its own body " .

 

This sense of nonduality as wholeness actually informs the curricular

and pedagogical proposals of a number of scholars working in diverse

fields. Donald A. McAndrew describes an " ecofeminist whole " that " is

not the traditional transcendent and abstract biotic oneness, the old

masculinist dodge of mystics and poets. It is a new sense of

wholeness based on revaluing the whole person in the natural

world. . . .This whole of wo/man/nature must be revalued " . He quotes

Marti Kheel to underscore not just the idea of interdependence that

informs the concept of wholeness but also the understanding of

dynamic beings as existing only in relation to other beings: When

ecofeminists talk of all inclusive wholes, they speak of holistic

awareness of the interconnectedness of all particular beings in the

lived experience of the individual-in-whole. In a similar vein,

educator Steven Glazer, complaining that " in our schools, we learn to

approach the world as an assortment of objects, rather than as an

interconnected whole " , defines wholeness as the inherent, seamless,

interdependent quality of the world. Wholeness, indeed, is the fact

of the matter: the things of this world (including us) are already

connected, are already in relationship, are already in union.

 

We can draw on the idea of nonduality to address two problematic

versions of the enduring Platonic binary that informs Western thought:

 

the mind-body split, in which the self is equated with mind and thus

subordinates the body (the physical) to the intellectual; and the

subject-object split, in which the self is defined in opposition to

Other, that " Other " being other humans or physical objects,

including " Nature. "

 

Nonduality encourages us to view ourselves as whole beings whose

intellects or minds are not only inseparable from our bodies but in a

sense equivalent (that is, not subordinate) to them; furthermore, it

encourages us to see ourselves as inextricably and fundamentally

interconnected to each other and to the physical world, as of rather

than in the world.

 

As described this notion of nonduality, avoids sounding mystical in a

simplistic way or, worse, naïve. It would be easy to dismiss this

idea of nonduality as naïve idealism lacking in intellectual or

philosophical rigor in the traditional academic sense. But that kind

of criticism reflects the strength of our conventional (academic)

ways of knowing-and underscores the rigidity of our analytical

categories for knowledge.

 

To put it another way, how we understand ourselves as beings-in-the-

world matters, because we act on that understanding. As environmental

ethicist Nicholas Sosa reminds us, " Human behavior is responsive to

and guided by human perception " . Sosa goes on to argue that " a

profound change in perception is a necessary condition for solving

the problems of climate change, population growth, wholesale

deforestation, municipal and industrial pollution, the erosion of

biological diversity, grinding poverty, unjust social institutions,

and international equality " .

 

The idea of nonduality briefly presented here serves this very

purpose.

 

Now another Sunday morning is comin' down, and the aroma of breakfast

is in the air. I think I'll join the family at table and enjoy the

newborn day......bob