Heidegger’s Misreception of Buddhist Philosophy
Heidegger’s Misperception of Buddhist Philosophy
University of The Andes (Mérida, Venezuela)
elicap@cantv.net
Abstract:
Heidegger attempted a “hermeneutics of human experience” that, by switching from the ontic to the ontological dimension, yet maintaining a phenomenological εποχή would bring to light the true meaning of being and, by the same stroke, ascertain the structures of being in human experience. It is now well known that Heidegger drew from Buddhism. However, in human experience being and its structures appear to be ultimately true, and since Heidegger at no point went beyond saṃsāra, he failed to realize the phenomenon of being to be one of the two essential aspects of the most basic of delusive phenomena, which is the threefold
apparitional structure produced by the threefold thought structure (Skt. trimaṇḍala; Tib. ’khor-gsum), and therefore, instead of achieving a genuinely ontological understanding of being and its structures, he came to the wrong view of identifying being (the understanding of which was a priori in a somehow non-Kantian sense that will not be discussed here) with truth and taking the ontological structures of saṃsāra to be somehow given. The problem is that he used
the term Being (das Sein) roughly as a synonym of Buddha-nature, Tao and so on: whereas the latter is unthinkable and inexpressible, for Heidegger the word “being” is not an empty word, for it has its “appellative force.” In fact, for him it is not a mere sound or written sign that brings nothing to our mind; on the contrary, it causes us to immediately conceive something, and what we thus conceive manifests in our experience as a (non-Kantian) phenomenon.
Although philosophers in both East and West have discussed the concept of being, with very few exceptions (among whom Pyrrho and Nietzsche are to be mentioned) Western philosophers associated being with truth. In the twentieth century Heidegger took a leap forward by carrying the discussion of being into the field of phenomenology, yet this leap was sterile insofar as—despite his study of Taoism and Buddhism (in particular Zen)—he persisted in the error of identifying being
with truth. In fact, though he was right in denying that (as the aforementioned philosophers seemed to believe) being was an empty word, and asserting it to have an “appellative force” (Heidegger, 1987)—i.e., not to be a mere sound or written sign that brings nothing to our mind, but, on the contrary, something that elicits a conception manifesting in our experience as a phenomenon—he failed to realize the phenomenon of being to be the most essential delusive appearance of saṃsāra.
Though the concept of “being” has been said to lack a genus proximum, it has its differentia specifica in that of “nonbeing,” and hence it cannot correspond to the single, true condition of everything and everyone, which does not exclude anything, and which, since it has neither genus proximum nor differentia specifica, Ashvagosha called it “the Unthinkable.” In the Madhyamakavritti Nagarjuna stated:
A position (paksha) implies a counterposition (pratipaksha), and neither of both is true.
This is why—seemingly like Pyrrho (McEviley, 1982; Carré 1999; Capriles, 1994, 1999)—Nagarjuna insisted that neither the whole nor any of its parts may fit any of the four extreme concepts consisting in (1) nonbeing, (2) not-nonbeing, (3) being-and-nonbeing, and (4) neither-being-nor-nonbeing.
The above remains within the ambit of logic, falling short of phenomenological ontology. However, delusive samsaric experience results from perceiving and experiencing the given in terms of concepts that are taken to be absolutely true or false with regard to that to which they are applied. This results from charging thoughts with the illusion of truth(/falsity), importance(/unimportance) and absoluteness. According to rdzogs-chen, there are three types of
thoughts: (a) “coarse,” (b) “subtle,” and (c) “super-subtle.” (a) “Coarse thoughts” are the objects of the manovijñana: the mental images Dharmakirti called samanyalakshana (Tib. spyi-mtshan) or general collections of characteristics, which are intangible, dim mental phenomena similar to Hume’s ideas (which in his view reproduced the impressions of particular phenomena manifesting through the senses); these include the thoughts used in discursive thinking (Gr. διάνοια), which are copies of impressions of hearing which, insofar as they are “pronounced” in our minds, are temporal, and the copies of impressions received through sight (in combination with other senses), which are spatial. (b) “Subtle thoughts” are data of the klishtamanovijñana: those involved in the intelligible intuition Greeks called νοεῖν, which Descartes called “intuitive concepts” (but which, rather than being a source of indubitable truth, if taken to be true or false give rise to delusion) and which are instantaneous, mute comprehensions of essence that, in the recognition of sensory collections of characteristics
(Skt. lakshana; Tib. mtshan-dpe) and, again and again in discursive thinking, interpret data in terms of universals (universals being sources of delusion). (c) The paradigmatic “super-subtle” thought is the threefold directional thought structure (Tib. ’khor-gsum), involving the concept of being and the notion of an experience/action, something experienced/done and an experiencer/doer. When we charge “discursive thoughts”—which as we have seen are a type of (a) coarse thoughts—and the subtle thoughts that occur again and again in reasoning, with the illusion of truth(/falsity), importance(/unimportance) and absoluteness, we take them to be either the absolute truth, or something absolutely false, with regard to that which the thoughts interpret. When we so charge (b) the subtle / intuitive thoughts coming into play in sensory perception, we confuse these thoughts with the territory they interpret and take them to be entities-in-
themselves. When we so charge (c) the threefold thought-structure, the result is the phenomenon of being and the threefold directional apparitional structure, and therefore the illusion of a mental-subject-that-is (the noetic pole of experience/action) and an object-that-is (the noematic pole), and of ourselves as mental subjects or souls at a distance from an objectively existent “physical universe” (it was this that led Descartes to take the mental subject for a given, objective, self-existent cogito).
Thus the logical dimension is not divorced from the phenomenological one: phenomena depend on, and are determined by, charging thoughts with the illusion of truth/falsity and absoluteness, and thoughts are ruled by logic. Here we are concerned with the phenomenon of being, which causes us to experience phenomena as being, as no longer being because they have been destroyed, as having never been, etc., and as such is the being of all phenomena. Since this phenomenon
results from charging with the illusion of truth(/falsity), importance(/unimportance) and absoluteness the concept of being implicit in the threefold thought structure (its correlate in discursive thinking being the word “being”), and this concept is subject to logic, the phenomenology of being cannot be separated from logic. However, the phenomenological is not the same as the logical, for whereas the logical is timeless and reversible, the phenomenological is
determined by time and as such is irreversible: if an abstract logical negation is negated, the result is the initial absence of negation; contrariwise, the result of the phenomenological negation of a phenomenological negation (as in Sartre’s bad faith) is twice as far from the initial absence of negation than the result of the first phenomenological negation (so that, concerning the logic that rules the phenomenological, we could speak of the “temporality of logic”). Heidegger’s avowed intent lay in ascertaining the meaning of being, which in his view had been concealed by ages of dealings with and thinking about reality in merely ontic terms (i.e. in terms of envisaging essents and their functionality rather than the being of essents). To this aim, he attempted what has been
called a “hermeneutics of human experience” that, by switching from the ontic to the ontological dimension, would bring to light the true meaning of being and ascertain the structures of being in human experience. However, in human experience being and its structures appear to be ultimately true, and since Heidegger at no point went beyond saṃsāra, he failed to realize the phenomenon of being to be an essential aspect of the most basic of delusive phenomena, which is the threefold apparitional structure, and therefore, instead of achieving a genuinely ontological understanding of being and its structures, he came to the utterly wrong view of identifying being (the understanding of which was a priori in a somehow non-Kantian sense that will not be discussed here) with truth and taking for granted the ontological structures of saṃsāra.
In Heidegger, phenomenology was supposed to be an experience-based ontology eschewing metaphysical fictions. In contrast, metaphenomenology is a metaontology that, on the basis of human experience and of the repeated dissolution in nirvana of this experience together with the delusive phenomenon of being inherent in it, discerns the true character of being: that of a delusive phenomenon manifesting only insofar as it appears, which in concomitancy with the subject-object duality founds all delusive phenomena of saṃsāra. This implies explaining how the concept of being is charged with illusory truth(/falsity) and absoluteness,
producing the delusive phenomenon of being; describing the delusive structure and function of being that is to be surpassed in nirvana, and contrasting the delusive, unhappy structure and function of saṃsāra with the undeluded structure and function of nirvana. Concerning the method of metaphenomenology, if we accepted Heidegger’s concept of a hermeneutics of human experience discerning the structures of being that manifest in this experience, then the metaphenomenological method would be a “metaontological hermeneutics of human experience” based on the dissolution of the phenomenon of being in nirvana and on discerning all that has been listed in this paragraph.
In my book Beyond Being, Beyond Mind, Beyond History, and in particular in vol. I, Beyond Being: A Metaphenomenological Elucidation of the Phenomenon of Being, the Being of the Subject and the Being of the Object (containing roughly 93,000 words), I produced a thorough metaphenomenology on the basis of the findings of the Dzogchen teachings and of Madhyamaka philosophy, together with the experience of my own rdzogs-chen practice. The purpose of the present paper is to invite the listener or reader to examine that book, which, until I complete the third volume of the series, will be provisionally posted at the URL http://www.webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/elicap/
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