Nothing Is Hidden by Barry Magid

Author:Barry Magid
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781614291022
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

MUTUAL RECOGNITION

YÜN-MEN’S MEDICINE AND DISEASE

Yün-men (Jap. Unmon) said, “Medicine and disease quell each other. The whole world is medicine. What is your self?”

One strand of Western philosophy, exemplified by Descartes, grounds our sense of self on the absolute reality of our inner experience. The only thing I can be sure that exists is the thinking self that is investigating its own existence. Our knowledge of other people and of the world itself is secondary. The question for philosophy then becomes how does this fundamentally inner self connect to and gain knowledge of the world? How reliable can that knowledge be? How can we ever be sure that we actually know what is going on outside of our inner subjective world, that other people exist, or if they do, that their experience is in any reliable way commensurable with our own?

This way of thinking gives rise to what philosophers call the problem of intentionality, which has a technical philosophical sense of aboutness. How can words and concepts reliably hook on to things in the world? If one starts, as Descartes did, with the idea of an isolated mind attempting to prove its own existence and the existence of other minds and an outer world, one is almost automatically condemned to an inescapable existential alienation from what Buddhism calls our essential interconnectedness. This position has, from the psychoanalytic perspective of intersubjectivity, been called the myth of the isolated mind.

Robert Stolorow and George Atwood (who significantly always coauthored their papers) outlined three main areas of alienation from our natural embeddedness in all life. First, alienation from nature, including the illusion that “there is a sphere of inner freedom from the constraints of animal existence and mortality.” Second, alienation from social life, including the illusion that “each individual knows only his own consciousness and thus is forever barred from direct access to experiences belonging to other people … which ignores the constitutive role of relationship to the other in a person’s having any experience at all.” And third, alienation from subjectivity itself, so that the contents of the mind are reified so as to appear to possess the properties of material things of the outer world (e.g., as psychic structures with “localization, extension, enduring substantiality”) and that the mind itself constitutes a kind of inner space from which we look out, as through a window, at the outer world.

Thomas Kuhn, the renowned philosopher of science, who coined the notion of paradigm shifts as a model for scientific revolution, claimed that the systems of thought before and after a paradigm shift were incommensurable. That is to say, scientists after the shift lived in a different world than their predecessors. For instance, if someone believes that the earth is the immovable center of the universe, and they are told that no, in fact the earth revolves around the sun, they are not simply receiving an isolated new bit of scientific information, their whole world is undergoing a change. The meaning of the word “earth” itself is no longer the same.

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