Buddhism has its “Two Truths” and its “Three Truths“: the “Two” were made famous by Indian philosopher Nagarjuna; the “Three” a little less famous by Chinese philosopher Zhiyi. About a year ago, I offered up four perspectives on mortality, and here I want to make the case that they could be seen as a kind of “Four Truths” formula — in effect, the four suits in the card deck of reality (a card deck that remains, however, triadic). Let me explain.
On one level, an individual life is a precious and remarkable thing, especially if you’re fortunate enough to live a full one. How you live it matters.
On another, we are of the same substance as all things in the universe, continuous with everything. We just happen to find ourselves at a particular fold in the fabric, but that fabric unfolds on its own and there won’t be much of us around when (and where) most of that unfolding happens.
These are the “truths” expressed by my first two options, but on their own neither is very satisfactory. Your life is all you have, and so it matters; it’s all that matters. But does it really matter, if it will be over and come to nothing? Heidegger believed that our being-toward-death confers a seriousness onto our our life. But Heidegger is gone, and we now know better about his own life than to take his thinking as seriously as he wanted it taken. Conversely, what matter to me if I am subsumed within everything? Lost in the universe, the weightiness of our lives becomes an unbearable lightness. Life, after all, is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Where those two truths meet is in relationship: in the active making of new folds, new and precious matterings, which bind us into connections that make our actions real, and that will outlive us. The real is this moment, when you can reach out, connect with another, change another, and bring something new into being. (And the next moment, and so on down the line.)
This is, in effect, the third option, which defines truth relationally and creatively, according to what we do with the affordances of this moment and how it allows us to live with others. Without each other (and therefore without the third), neither of the first two truths holds up well on its own. Our life is given meaning not just by the narrative we tell ourselves about it; it requires the universe of relations as a background against which that narrative can bear any weight, any narrative significance, at all.
The first two options, then, are versions of Nagarjuna’s “Two Truths”: conventional truth, which takes what I perceive of my life, and of things in general, to be real (though its reality is miniscule and fleeting); and ultimate truth, which understands that nothing is anything in separation from all the things that have made it (that is, from everything). The first truth takes on a more dignified appearance in western humanistic doctrines about the sanctity of the self; this is the truth harbored both within Augustinian Christianity and in the humanism that followed and, in many ways, supplanted it. The second truth comes to us in mystical experiences. We could think of these two as the “truth-of-the-self” and the “truth-of-the-all.”
The third truth (Zhiyi’s) sees the first two as being mutually intersubsumptive: they imply each other and require each other. This third truth can be called the “truth-of-the-between.” It keeps the first two in tension and relation with each other. When its particular relations are given attention, it makes them both viable. This trio resonates well with Peirce’s, and with Gurdjieff’s, triads: the firstness of the thing in itself, the secondness of relation (and negation), and the thirdness of meaning that emerges from that relation, reconciled. In this sense, the “selfhood” of anything is its firstness, where the It of (its) reality is felt; “the all” of everything is (ultimate) thirdness; and the “between” is secondness — it is where all things happen. It is the place of events.
But even these three truths are not quite enough. A fourth truth is found by implication in Buddhist concepts of liberation or nirvana, but is more directly expressed in the apophatic (negatively expressed) traditions of Christianity and other theistic philosophies. It is the “truth-of-the-beyond”: that which we do not know and cannot know, at least not through the kind of knowing that is known to us.
Whether we came from “someplace else,” as some transcendentalist and gnostic versions of this fourth truth might claim, is not really the issue here. But the idea that there is or may be a beyond — something that perpetually withdraws (like Graham Harman’s withdrawing objects) — and even the perspective that we are “in the world, but not necessarily of it,” because we are somehow of a similar substance as that withdrawn essence — suggests a kind of speculative openness that keeps things from getting closed in on themselves. This is the zeroness underpinning triadism; it is the withdrawal, the mystery, the nature that loves to hide. It is the place of the Event.
These are the four aces that mark each suit of our deck: the suits of Self, of All, of the Between, and of the Beyond. (Or of Things, of Everything, of Relations, and of Withdrawal. Task for a rainy sabbatical: design deck of ten plus four court cards each, and 22 trumps to connect them.)
Heidegger somewhat picturesquely called them “earth, sky, gods, and mortals,” but this is an odd coupling — really two dyads in relationship with each other (which makes for a complex triad) — and none of his terms quite gets at the between. It is a quadrivium, which is what four aces implies. But I intend the four to be not a quadrivium, with four aces marking the four corners of a square, but a quadrinity, in specific relationships with each other: 0-1-2-3, where 0 is off the map, the always Withdrawing; 1 is prime, the Alpha; 2 is the end point, the Omega; and 3 opens up to the endless creativity of mediation; but that’s Peirce for you).
As for what do we do with these aces, we do what we do with everything. They are, after all, in everything.
Inter-esting!
I would question the claim that ‘we are of the same substance as all things.’
One could claim that ‘nature’ is ontologically one (the same substance) – but each psyche is ontologically unique or ‘cadacualitic’, each-oneness, to use a spanish neologism.
A bit like Heidegger’s ‘jemeinigkgeit’ (my own-ownness) but objective rather than subjective.
‘The German technical term Jemeinigkeit in no way translates cadacualtez. “My-own-owness” has been successlessly essayed to translate this German concept of Jemeinigkeit, specially by Indian researchers writing in English as J. L. Mehta.
But Jemeinigkeit presupposes an untenable subjectivist description, which pretends to reduce all allusion, by its being such, to a reference to contents of experience and avows that contents of experience do not need extramentality for any reasonable purpose.
So it fully obliterates all possibility to describe any multiplicity of non-systematic individuations, as was the case of Martin Heidegger’s “Jemeinigkeit.” It was unfortunately so, despite his recognition that, more originary than the person, is the finitude of her being determined.
Thus Heidegger understood Jemeinigkeit not as cadacualtez but as mere situatedness. Finitudes are previous to their Daseinen because eclosions are situational and the ontic constitution of this thin transformable actuality not.
But, absent the concepts of real – ontic – circumstantiation or of the plurality of Jemeinigkeiten in a plurality of psyches, the recognition of extramentality in Heidegger’s worldview must be instead sought in the Heideggerian notion of Earth as groundedness, which as such ought to be extraentitative (Heidegger well realized that one cannot add turtles, elephants and seas to account for why there is something rather than nothing, so the unoriginated portion of the reality cannot be an entity; cf. the chapter’s Conclusions.) Cadacualtez as a notion not admits the subjectivistic interpretations that, rather, imbue Jemeinigkeit.’ (Mario Crocco).
‘And in natural science the respect that is due to every finite mind is the value that the ultimate ground grants to people. The ground, or unoriginated portion of the reality, that causes reality to exist instead of not existing, and reality to be as it is, having the exact nature it has; that is to say the ground or portion of the reality which, in the causative level making reality real, cadacualtically circumstances each person to the body that, due to that circumstancing, becomes her or his “own” – a determination (called cadacualtez) that cannot be posited by the antecedents of such a body, nor of such an existentiality (all of which is also discussed in this chapter).’ Crocco.
Or we are in relations but we are not a relation.
Finite and non-fungible to use another term.
On all this Mario Crocco’s ‘Palindrome’ is inter-esting.
http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/a_palindrome.htm
For Spanish readers there are more essays on Academia.edu. A long version: ‘Un Palindrome’ and and an interesting study on the difference between Anglo-American and Iberian neuroscience.
Thanks for pointing to Crocco. I’d seen that chapter you cite (in the Wautischer edited ‘Ontology of Consciousness’ anthology), but avoided it because of its neologisms.
Perhaps I’ll take the first step into Crocco by meditating on a term I do think I understand, which I’ve never encountered anywhere else: “mind’s intrinsic unbarterability…”
Any chance this is a response to Harman’s call for someone to design a OOO card deck to represent the various elements and dynamics of that ontology?
Reading that book, I indeed took some notes for how that’d look. If you give each of these four aces a suit representing the six possible relations between each pair of these, with four added cards for each ace relating to itself, and then four more court cards to represent four ways that all four aces can relate as a whole (Harman proposes relations of “junction” and “disjunction” in his model, I’d add two cards for the notions of “relatedness” and “isolation” to make a nice fourfold that echoes the four aces themselves). Then you’re kind of already there as regards a normal deck of playing cards that would seem to express a comprehensive model of all manner of ontological models and processes.
I’m unfamiliar with the 22 tarot trumpcards you’d need to complete the occult spectacle. Maybe those could represent a Levi Bryant type onto-cartography? A list of archetypal things?I don’t know how to make that a logically comprehensive set, but I’m both a trained doodler, as well as a trained game studies and philosophy person, and should maybe make it an actual hobby project to realize this.
No, I wasn’t aware Harman had called for that. But his system certainly lends itself to the idea (as, I suspect, does Bryant’s). Since my own ‘system’ is intended to be psychologically/pragmatically useful (and not just objectively descriptive, as most speculative ontologies are), I should give that some more thought…
The 22, at least according to Tarot esotericists, come from the paths adjoining the ten Sephiroth on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life (and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is the same thing). Not sure if Harman’s ontology has any ten-point reference that way. The Peircian ‘triadism’ that I describe (e.g. in Shadowing the Anthropocene) does, e.g., with the four that I describe here (0, 1, 2, 3) correlating to the four levels of the Tree of Life (point, line, plane/triangle, solid, i.e. 1+2+3+4=10), but that’s complicated to get into… Lots of fun could be had. 🙂
I forgot to mention, but the card game thing is the main metaphor Harman explains his ontological model with in The Quadruple Object, and I think he references it in the OOO pelican book as well. There’s only the ten relations in that, between the four poles of any object, that one could use as the nodes on a Kaballah like map of life paths. That’s withdrawal, contraction, contiguity, emanation, confrontation, causation, conjunction, duplicity, allure, and theory. But going by my previous comment, I’d already use those in the basic card deck.
Bryant has his map of bright/obvious, dark/obscure, dim, rogue/unpredictable, consumptive black holes, and fantastical quasi-objects, with coordinates in space, time, sensation, and reality. So that’s ten nodes, with some mental gymnastics.
Seems Peirce’s ontology, if you unfold it like you describe, has a more bare spatial style to it that’s better suited to this image of taking an ontology and applying it to reading potential life paths. Puts the emphasis on the 22 paths rather than just the nodes.
I’ll get back to you if I find time to doodle out some basic playing cards. This is fun! It’s the first time I’ve been commenting on these dusty old philosophy blogs in my RSS feed : P
I did assist Mario a bit in trying to edit that essay for the anthology. I have now lost contact, in fact I’m not sure if he is still alive! He is v. elderly now was ill a few yrs ago.
He is/was a remarkable man. I you can read Spanish the material is valuable. I was going to translate some of it with him but the project never developed – partly cos he was unwell.