Being and Ambiguity Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism

by Ziporyn, Brook

• ISBN13: 9780812695427
• ISBN10: 0812695429
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780812699272
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-25
• Publisher: Open Court
• More Book Details
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Summary

Being and Ambiguity is a brilliant work of philosophy, filled with insights, jokes, and topical examples. Professor Ziporyn draws on the works of such Western thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Hegel, but develops his main argument from Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. This important work introduces Tiantai Buddhism to the reader and demonstrates its relevance to profound philosophical issues.

Ziporyn argues that we can make both of the claims below simultaneously:
This book is about everything. It contains the answers to all philosophical problems which ever shall exist. This book is all claptrap. It is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind.

These claims are not contradictory. Rather, they state the same thing in two different ways. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vise versa. All interchanges of any kind - conversations, daydreams, sensations - are not only about something but also about everything.

Thus, this book concerns itself with no less than the nature of what is and what it means for something to be what it is. It provides a new approach to the basic Western philosophical and psychological issues of identity, determinacy, being, desire, boredom, addiction, love and truth.

Author Biography

Brook Ziporyn is Associate Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Religion at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Preface	xiii
Introduction: What Is Tiantai?	1	(34)
PART ONE Neo-Tiantai Basics: Enframement, Coherence, and Agency---The Thusness and Otherwiseness of All Coherences	35	(120)
What Else Is There?	35	(2)
Meaning a la Mode	37	(3)
More to Come	40	(1)
Quiddity Qua Quaddity: Oneness, Coherence and Agency	41	(4)
Perception, Conceptualization, Imagination	45	(4)
Properties Are Theft	49	(6)
Centrality: Local Coherence as Global Incoherence (Intersubsumption)	55	(7)
Four Ways of Being Thus and Otherwise: Impermanence, Illusion, Tertium Quid, Asness	62	(11)
Transpositions of the Four Ways	73	(9)
Omnicentrism	82	(9)
The Process of Transformative Recontextualization: Setup and Punch Line as the Basic Categories of All Possible Experience	91	(9)
Enchantment, Disenchantment, Reenchantment	100	(1)
Asness as All-pervasion	101	(2)
The Transcendental Unity of Apperception and the Principle of Charity	103	(6)
Content and Category in Kant and Tiantai: A Priori Categories and Inherent Entailment	109	(15)
``Natural Law'' as Global Incoherence	124	(6)
Sense, Reference, and Private Language	130	(9)
Composition, Temporal Succession, and Contrast	139	(7)
On the Fire Not Burning Itself	146	(3)
The External World(s)	149	(2)
Categories of Asness and Their Attributes: Summary of Part One	151	(4)
PART TWO Desire and the Self: Toward an Ethics and Psychology of Constitutive Impossibility	155	(158)
Presence as Hyper-absence; Absence as Hyper-presence	155	(8)
Correspondence and Coherence: Epistemological Implications	163	(1)
Control and Its Lack: Practical Implications	164	(2)
Unavoidable, Unobtainable	166	(1)
The Cunning of Cunning	167	(1)
What It Is Like: Being as Cunning, Cunning as Metaphoricity	168	(8)
Non-X Is Just Like X, Only More So	176	(3)
Can't Get No-Satisfaction	179	(2)
Rival Centers and Reversibility: Desire and Aversion	181	(6)
Desire to Be	187	(1)
Aversion	188	(3)
A Note on Crawling through the Desert	191	(2)
The Self: Subject and Object, Punch Line and Setup	193	(9)
Identity as Constitutive Impossibility (as All-pervasion)	202	(13)
The Good as the Intersection of Two Impossibilities	215	(5)
Krug's Pen Revisited	220	(2)
Pleasure and the Self	222	(12)
Freedom	234	(17)
More about the Will	251	(2)
Full Exertion: Repetition, Intensification, Meaninglessness, All-pervasion	253	(3)
Language, Mindfulness, and the Obvious	256	(4)
Adequation, Openness, ``Moretoitivity,'' Energy	260	(11)
The Desire of Desire: The Intersubsumption of Self, Affect, and Object	271	(7)
Bad Faith versus the Innocence of Becoming: The Moral Benefits of Inherent Evil	278	(8)
Ethical ``Layering''	286	(2)
Personality as Symptom and as Pregnancy	288	(1)
Buddha Sive Time Sive the Inscrutability of the Other. . . Or: The Samadhi of Not Knowing What You're Doing	289	(11)
Sive ...	300	(2)
Boredom, Anxiety, Narrative, Addiction, and Love: Human Time	302	(6)
Death and Embarrassment	308	(5)
PART THREE Hermeneutics and Autoerotics: Truths and Other Hidden Parts, and How They Welcome Their Demise	313	(128)
Why There's Anything: Habituation and Solidarity, with Some Reckless Reasoning about Entropy and the End of the Universe	313	(9)
Atomicity, Otherness, and Violence (Co-starring Whitehead, Levinas, and God)	322	(28)
Eroticism and Continuity, with Bataille	350	(10)
The Rival and the Double: Oneself as One's Own Indigestible Kernel	360	(9)
Beauty, Harmony, and the Mystical	369	(12)
Humor	381	(12)
Sex and Drugs	393	(5)
Catharsis and/or Addiction: Asness, Art, and the ``Repression Hypothesis''	398	(7)
The Limits of Sublimation	405	(1)
Hegel and/or Zen	405	(5)
The Revolutionary Impulse and Revolutionary Charisma, with Gotama, Jesus, Nichiren, Lennon, Dylan, et al.	410	(7)
Boredom or Truth: A ``Critique'' of Critique	417	(3)
Onany, Interpretation, and Love: Truth and the Libidinal Community	420	(8)
Proof that All Previous Errors Have Spoken This Truth, and Vice Versa; Or: How to Believe Everything You Read	428	(11)
Invitation to a Recantation	439	(2)
Index	441