Losing your self to find your Self

Losing your self to find your Self

I am intrigued by the following questions: (1) “Is apophatic theology simply an apologia in which one does not make affirmative or positive statements?” (2) “Does apophatic refer to the ineffable in the sense of simply being beyond words or indescribable?” Or, (3) “Is apophasis a much more radical concept, or exercise, in which we viscerally experience the ineffable by pushing ourselves to our cognitive limits, exhausting our abilities to comprehend and being reduced to stunned silence – the unsayable?”

Question (1) suggests a simple rhetorical style. Question (2) suggests that apophatic could be little more than intellectual assent. I don't have access to Franke's book at this time. However, Armstrong's description of Denys' exercise and the Brahmodya competition suggests that when apophasis is experienced at its most challenging and experienced at its most rewarding that it is akin to what is described in question (3). Question (3) points to something that rings true and that could be personally transformative.

Armstrong finds commonalities with Catholic apophatic theology in diverse religious and spiritual traditions – pagan, Taoist, Brahmanical, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Judaic. It strikes me that apophasis is applicable also in a non-theological context to exploring the aporias of philosophical enquiry and discourse more generally; that apophasis could be a powerful tool in the context of immanent critique.

My exposure to via negativa is in the context of Buddhism. In Buddhist phenomenology a person comprises five skandhas (literally heaps or aggregates): form (the material body and sense organs), sensation (feeling; positive, negative or neutral), perception, mental formations (mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, prejudices, compulsions) and consciousness. That is a person is a composite of various physical and psychological elements. This Buddhist perspective challenged the prevailing Brahmanical view of an enduring, substantive Self (atman).

In analytic (in contrast to contemplative) meditation one “searches” for the Self among the skandhas and comes up empty-handed. From this enquiry, Buddhists draw the ontological conclusion that the Self is empty (shunyata). The conclusion that the Self is empty is often stated enigmatically by contemporary Buddhist (these statements seem to be ubiquitous and are made by representatives of all contemporary Buddhist schools: Zen, Tibetan, Thai Forest etc) as “egolessness”, “no-self”, or that the “self does not exist”. My transition in the previous sentence from upper case “Self” to lower case “self” is intentional, and is meant to emphasize the conflation by contemporary Buddhist of the Brahmanical concept of Self (atman) with the western philosophical and psychological notion of self, ego and individuation.

In the Madhyamika Buddhist literature the concept of shunyata [emptiness, void, not-Self (anatman)] is expressed by stating that self is “dependently-originated”, or arises from multiple “causes and conditions”. This is not to deny the psychological or phenomenological experience of a self, or to claim that a self does not exist. Rather it is a statement that the self is impermanent and does not exist as a singular, fixed, stable, independent entity. Or in contemporary language, “not-self” or “emptiness

of self” means that the self is contingent. In the Mahayana tradition, the argument that the self is empty is generalized from the individual to all phenomena: all things are said to be empty of inherent existence. One of the most concise Mahayana statements of the concept of the emptiness of all phenomena is summarized in The Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge http://nalandatranslation.org/media/Heart-Sutra.pdf For a brief summary of key terms in the Heart Sutra which may help to open up what at first sight appears to many as an obscure text, see http://nalandatranslation.org/media/Notes-to-Sutra-of-the-Heart-of-Transcendent- Knowledge.pdf A familiarity with the Buddhist concepts and teachings referred to in the Heart Sutra reveals that the Heart Sutra is a breath taking statement of “knowing and not knowing”.

The Buddhist notion of the emptiness of self and more generally of all phenomena is strikingly similar to Hume's bundle theory of self and objects; namely that the self is a bundle of perceptions that are in perpetual flux and that objects cannot be distinguished from their properties.

The routine misperception of fleeting, contingent phenomena as a permanent, enduring self leads to our dualistic perspective in which things appear to us as either objective (external, empirically accessible), or subjective (internal, accessible to consciousness). That is we relate to the world by constructing a self as a permanent, stable and unchanging locus of experience from which we navigate the complexities of our world. And many indeed, find the notion of the emptiness of self every bit as challenging and undermining as Hume was for Kant.