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About me: Nuffin much. Been laying low, avoiding the heat wave and whatnot. Keepin' busy. You know, a little gardening, a little noshing with friends, a little trying to figure out how to best launch a world-wide anti-fash movement against those ridiculous criminal f**tards in the RL Kremlin. Stuff like that.





So. Yeah.

Here's a couple of neither-here-nor-there bits-n-kibble for yiz to chew on today...






First, a little riddle for that far country where bankers are respected, gay marriage is no big deal, patriots are quietly impassioned, and big city mayors may be ridiculous crack heads, but at least they are wildly amusing...



Oh, Canada!
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My garberator was making a brutal kerfuffle, eh? "Geely kriley, old son, whadda'yat?" I says to the ol' Jean-Guy Pepper who'd dropped a Loonie in m'sink and proceeded to alarm the device.

"That's a regular tantoaster now. Keep that mess going and we'll lose the hydro!", I says.




Yup. OK. I am hereby offering a nifty prize for anyone who can translate that ^ into Murican.






Neither Here Nor There
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Secondly, for your pondering pleasure:

Let's say that our current lack of a country here in the good ol' e-US-of-A brought to my mind a perhaps understandable desire to revisit one of the great philosophic-dialectic explorations of all time (or I suppose, more accurately, of no time), to wit: What is the nature of the Negatum?



But I do want to be amusing. This is, after all, a game.

So... instead of (yet another -- yaaaaawn!) deep dive into the twists and turns of e-Hegelian logic, I thought it might be interesting instead to couch this topic within the framework of a fractured fairy tale version of some famous discourses on what has been called in certain circles the Intermediate doctrine.

This refers to an "intermediate" philosophical position between two obviously mistaken extremes, one being "the doctrine that everything is real" and the other being the "everything is only in your mind" school.


The foundational Intermediate position is that "All is Void". This is also often stated as "Everything is Empty." Note that is not the same thing as saying that "Everything is meaningless." A clear view of "Emptiness" recognizes that things come into being due to causes and conditions, and inevitably pass away due to causes and conditions.


* * *


The Intermediate interpretation of the meaning of things sees that the never-ending cosmic flux of momentarily interconnected events which we think of as reality cannot possibly be held to actually be real, nor could our consciousness perceiving it be real either, as it itself is part of this flux. In this sense, "real" means having a permanent, immutable character, a "thingness" that is immortal or unitary.


And if this e-world (or r-world) of constant change, of impermanence, cannot possibly be real, then neither can our serial migrations, our lifetimes, through it be real. Nor can the simple opposite of that, which is to say the immortality of an e-soul-being, or, as others have it, the 'permanent' dissolution of the wheel of e-rebirth, be real either.


According to the final analysis of the Intermediate School, only something entirely different from this, that is, something entirely different from all that is known, could be considered to be real.





Another way to phrase this view is that only Emptiness itself, only the Void, can be real.

Which is all fine and good, right?
But what, precisely, does that mean?



Perhaps it sounds silly to you. But that's what I would like to explore a bit. While waiting for my pretend country to re-appear on the pretend map. And fighting in a bunch of pretend wars against a pretend enemy to help to make it so.



PQ's Theory of the Ultimate: Fused Knowledge
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We can start by asking whether the Intermediate School has a position at all. This is not as silly as it sounds. Though, granted, it is a little silly.

Many serious practitioners of the Intermediate view claim that they arrive at this position as a meditative afterglow, not as the result of a dialectical process.

However, even if one accepts an emphasis on knowledge as key to any theory of understanding (and I do), then one can still maintain that ultimate reality lies beyond the one-splits-into-two fact of form and emptiness, since these two, this mirror-like set of endless reflections that make up our everyday consciousness, are themselves established only in a conventional sense.

The cultivation of the Intermediate view, I maintain, is not merely to cultivate the absence of misconception, but to pacify all elaborations. Some have referred to this as "quieting the monkey brain". Others as "getting the committee in my head to shut up." No doubt regular followers of the Intermediate School would agree on this point.

What I would especially emphasize, though, is that form and emptiness are not only "opposite sides of the same coin" nor merely, as our Zizekians and Badiouans might like to put it, "a unity of opposites", but they are actually fused together. Yes, this Great Fused Knowledge is, my friends, how we can combine the Intermediate School with the Lion's Roar.

Make no mistake. My focus is on results. And the way there is through Knowledge. And with respect to the Intermediate position, that means the Great Fused Knowledge. This contrasts with the unfortunately narrow view that interprets the Intermediate only in terms of where we are now vs. a mysterious, unobtainable 'Other' Emptiness. Think about it. If one attempted to explain all conventional presentations of the here and now solely in terms of what can be fathomed of the inconceivable subjectivity of an Ultimate Other, the resulting system would be completely chaotic, a never-ending guessing-game in which we mere mortals are pretending to divine the 'mind of God'. Ain't gonna happen because it doesn't make any sense.


* * *

Now, I will acknowledge that emptiness is known directly only by sublime beings whose nature we can speculate on, and I would even agree that humans can evolve into sublime creatures. What I am rejecting is the view that that is the only possible route to understanding emptiness. My take on the Intermediate point of view clearly recognizes that an inferential cognition of emptiness is not a definitive ultimate. In other words, the only possible emphasis that we non-sublime-ones have is the "here and now" -- emptiness as a conceptual image is the only emptiness perceivable to us. This cognition is, however, an absolute negation.

In the final analysis, the Negatum does not simply exist (or more accurately, it does not not exist) "out there somewhere".

The absolute negation is part and parcel of our conventional existence.

To summarize😛 the definitive meaning of emptiness is the object of a sublime equipoise which is free of discursive elaborations. It is an equilibrium, a balance, that is not amenable to any further conceptual reductions. Knowledge brings about a concordance between "is" and "is not"; it is part and parcel of the ultimate.

Emptiness is convention, like all other conventions. "The sky is blue" even though, in fact, there is no "sky" and there is no "blue".








Well, that's all there is. For now.

I hope this has been helpful. Or at least amusing.

Feel free to share your own trickle-down logonomics in the handy comment boxes below...



xoxoxxoxo,
PQ