Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism by Brook Ziporyn

Author:Brook Ziporyn [Ziporyn, Brook]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699272
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2015-10-27T23:00:00+00:00

Krug’s Pen Revisited

We must be unequivocal about this. The claim here is that the terms “necessary contradiction” and “identity” are interchangeable, and that for any coherence whatsoever to “be there” is for some necessary contradiction to be there. No necessary contradiction, no coherence. This is our version of “the Real is the Rational”—and perhaps (in itself if not for itself) this is all Hegel meant by that infamous phrase, although he may have understood himself to be saying just the opposite, namely, that only where there is finally no contradiction is there something that qualifies as real. His practice, however, belies this understanding. Even so, the Tiantai position on this point differs from Hegel’s, even if liberally construed, in two crucial, related respects. First, here we have no derivations and transitions from one constitutive contradiction to another, where one breaks down into another in a determinate order. Rather, we have here a polymorphous interpervasion of omnipresences, where anything randomly picked up or “encountered,” to be seen as any identity at all, ends up being some necessary contradiction of itself, but where these are connected via breakdowns that proceed in every direction at once. Indeed, as we shall see in more detail below, to become the constitutive contradiction, to make it one’s self, is to presence it precisely as freedom. To be fully X is to be non-X, that is, to be X as Global Incoherence, to manifest the inherent impossibility of X; a moment of freedom ensues wherever anything is fully realized in this manner, wherefrom its interchangeability is unimpeded, and it can be anything. Second, in the Tiantai view, nothing whatsoever that appears in experience can fail to be a necessary contradiction in its own right; everything we called a coherence, which, it will be recalled, included every possible possible as well as any part of any possible possible (any part of a “one” being another “one”).

Hegel considered the existence of “contingency as such” as a necessary moment in the structure of rationality and necessity, in his peculiar sense of these terms (which we would translate, in our own terms, precisely as constitutive impossibility). But he did not grant this status to each particular contingent fact and event, considered separately. Hegel’s stance on this question is made abundantly clear in his rather petulant response to Krug’s challenge, in a hostile review, for Hegel to “deduce” the very pen with which Krug was writing the hostile review. Krug’s assumption was that Hegel meant to show the rationality of each individual object and fact in the natural and social worlds, in the sense that each is deducible from the self-elucidation of the categories of Hegel’s system. Hegel responds that something as inconsequential as Krug’s pen cannot and should not be of any interest to philosophy, which deduces only the universals which subsume and actively express themselves in all these particular facts, to which all their specifiable characteristics turn out to be reducible. Philosophy can deduce pens in general, perhaps, thus demonstrating

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