Calculative thinking computes… it races from one prospect to the next. It never stops, never collects itself. It is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning that reigns in everything there is… Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what, at first sight, does not go together.
— Martin Heidegger, Memorial Address
found in "The Death of Environmentalism"
Calculative thinking is equivalent to vijñana in Buddhism - the mind which flutters on the surface of reality ("races from one prospect to the next"). It is juxtaposed to prajña, which sinks into the calming depths of reality ("reigns in everything there is"). On the surface we cannot see beyond the next wave, especially when life is 'choppy.' In fact, the calculative mind can quickly get caught up in discerning 'this wave' from that one, dividing reality into chunks (nationalities, races, etc). But when one goes deeper one sees that the surface is all of one whole, one grasps the togetherness of all which was once thought disparate.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Buddhism: A Heideggerian Parallel
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12 comments:
ahh the 'monkey mind'....well familiar with such!
Calculative Mind! I thought that was the goal of the Accounting degree (bean counting)!
Hia Taza, yup - good 'ol monkey mind, or as a zen monk recently in Missoula described it (more appropriately for our environment) "squirrel mind" --
Hia Nacho too! I just got out of an environmental restoration lecture where the speaker, Andrew Light, basically said "we don't like 'em, but the Accountants (economists) rule the world!" But he painted a wonderful image of an alternative, Aristotelian, vision of value and ecology, which is I suppose how to draw people beyond (away from) the economists.
Calculative Mind. Sound more like someone who disbelieves in spirit: A physicalist atheist, to me.
This is, perhaps, highly tangential and rube. [Me? Rude?] But that article/essay/thing you snagged the Heidegger quote out of is one terrific a/e/t about Global Warming! I am dazzled. There are great ideas there.
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Good old Martin... Thanks for the quote - do you have a reference to it in Heidegger as I'd like to track it down?
I'm not entirely sure about the metaphors of surface and depth here. In his essay on the End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, MH quotes Goethe, "Look for nothing behind phenomena: they themselves are what is to be learned."
Thanks for the excellent blog! All the best,
Will
Hia Will - great thoughts... Heidegger's Memorial Address is in Discourse on Thinking. Translated by J.M. Anderson and E.H. Freund. New York: Harper &
Row, 1966
In discussing phenomena, "getting to the thing in itself" as Husserl put it or "seeing things as they truly are" as in early Buddhist thought, we are dealing differently than with the opperation of the mind, and thus the depth/surface metaphors would there indeed be tenuous.
There are two ways, it seems, that one can be attentive to phenomena - the first, as Heidegger describes it and as I think of as monkey or squirrel mind; and the second attention to phenomena which is grounded in a stable picture of the whole (Being?)... But it is an issue certainly deserving more thought.
Another good quote from the essay I thought I'd toss in is:
To be empty of a fixed identity allows one to enter fully into the shifting, poignant, beautiful and tragic contingencies of the world.
— Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center
I am still off on a tangent to your post ...
But YES, I picked up on the Batchelor quote, too, when I was reading "The Death of Environmentalism" paper.
My context of interest is with regard to the idea of what constitutes 2nd Tier thinking -- which for me begins with the idea of not being attached to set opinions. So the problem here is stopping too much, thinking you have a bead on the pattern of what is good and that you can know it with a glance.
But I would not go so far, so deep, as to believe there is a complete meld of togetherness. There are differences that demand to be seen as disparateness.
Reality really is chunky. AND it's smooth.
Thanks for the reference. I'll look it up.
You've opened up an interesting question about seeing phenomena and seeing phenomena as grounded in a stable picture of the whole. I'm not sure what the second would be, nor why it would be better than the first - unless the stability was a knowledge of the continual instability of things.
That's a great quote from Stephen Batchelor,
Best wishes,
Will
alan watts warned about the bureaucrats and thier lackeys, the accountants. alan said that as we pull the entirety into more and more bits and made rules about these increasingly smaller bits we will forget how the bits went together in the first place. this will be choas. it is now insurmountably to build hospitals or provide housing or deliver councelling into the community without the miles and miles of red tape that these people have demanded.
the experts are now using this bureaucracy to further thier own specific interests. i got into a discussion with a phd psychologist that, straight-facedly, told me that he was chairman of a committee to lobby the government to designate the psychologists as the only people to be able to deliver councelling into the community. this excludes ministers, msws, teachers, behavioural practitioners such as myself, etc.
chaos.
the human result of fragmented thinking.
In String Theory, the world of the very small is seen as churning, bubbling, chaotic -- whereas on a planetary scale, things seem smooth and predictable, guided by constants.
Would we say that 'things as they truly are' is seen on one scale moreso than another? Large-scale events are more familiar to us: an apple falls and hits us on the head. But small scale events and the physics associated with all of that is surely no less real. [Not that we have as good a grasp of what's going on in The Land of the Very Small -- but whatever is going on is surely just as real.
So, if there are two ways of looking at things, often aren't these two views such that they inform each other, giving us a parallax advantage?
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