[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Dan Lusthaus]

Hi Erik,

I assume you just want to be playful, since those pseudo-refutations hardly 
rise to the level of an argument. I have a few moments, so let's play.

> First of all I did not say what my own view was on the matter (I wrote a
> book on Nāgārjuna who is not an idealist) and there are more theories on
> truth than just materialism and idealism.

The position that *one cannot know what, if anything, is going on outside of 
one's mind* is idealism, regardless of how many books about other subjects 
anyone has written. It is the basic stance of epistemological idealism (and 
possibly other types as well; note that epistemological idealists do not 
thereby commit themselves to any particular ontological stance, other than 
the flat out rejection of naive realism).

>More important is that you
> don't understand the whole problem. The truck and your teaching methods
> don't prove anything.

That's because you are only thinking about them after reducing them to ideas 
rather than considering them as actual experiments. Unfortunately for the 
poor unfortunate who takes the position you espouse (whether it is yours or 
not) and actually stands in front of the speeding truck, by the time s/he 
realizes the fallacy in the assumptions, there will be little time left on 
planet earth to enjoy that new-found wisdom. And die hard idealists of this 
type who watched that person perish (or heard about it second hand) can try 
to tell themselves that what they saw (or heard about) is only in their 
heads. If they truly believe that, they can leap in front of the next truck. 
Pretty soon there will be no one left holding that position. A brutal way to 
win an argument.

Hence the more compelling -- and less lethal -- refutation of that position 
is the slap method I suggested. Like most good arguments, it consists not 
just of a punch line (pun intended), but of a series of arguments. How many 
slaps and reiterations of the question will it take until the person 
concedes the point? Each fresh slap presses the point further. If one 
prefers, a wrestling hold that inflicts increasing pain can be used in lieu 
of slaps. Amounts to the same end. Either they are torturing themselves (if 
it is all in their mind), or something other than them is causing the pain. 
As the pain increases and its cessation grows increasingly unlikely, the 
attractiveness of the latter option also increases. Actual (rather than 
virtual or mentally abstracted) pain makes for a compelling argument. If you 
don't think so, ask a friend to administer it to you (even if the friend is 
just in your head).

>If everything is ideas me getting killed and
> getting hit by your pedagogical treatment and all the consequences will
> also be ideas.

That's exactly what the slap argument disabuses one of. The *idea* of pain 
is not the same as actual pain -- or as Dignaga, et al. pointed out long 
ago, there is a difference between sensation (pratyaksa, which serves up 
reality) and conceptualization about reality (anumana, etc.). You are 
mistaken to insist -- for Buddhists or for Husserl, et al. -- that 
everything is reducible to the latter.

>There is no experiment that can show any difference
> between materialism and idealism.

No one mentioned materialism until just now. Since both are theories, it is 
quite easy to point out all the differences between them. That has nothing 
to do with what I wrote.

> You disappoint me because you have read some Husserl, but appearantly
> did not understand much, let alone Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and
> contempary phenomenologists. There you will find a more interesting and
> intelligent approach than this old and oldfashioned idealism-debate.

That sort of ad hominem is not worthy of you. In fact, as you know, I have 
read quite a bit of Husserl and am constantly amused when people who clearly 
know much less about Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc.  than I nonetheless try to 
accuse me of not understanding them (that accusation is invariably 
accompanied by the utter absence of any shred of husserlian or 
merleau-pontian thought substantiating the charge). Husserl and 
Merleau-Ponty were both fascinated by an answer to the famous claim 
stretching back to Nagarjuna and beyond, namely that the eye can't see 
itself (and the knife can't cut itself). Yes, they say, but one finger/hand 
can touch the other. The touching finger is not the touchee and vice versa 
at the same moment, though they can reverse roles. That was the foundation 
on which Merleau-Ponty fashioned his notion of the chiasm (using the 
chiasmic crossovers the optic nerves make when traveling from the eye to the 
brain). In short, neither would contemplate standing in front of a moving 
truck or being silly enough to advance an argument for that.

> Well you even see a progression that leads to Yogacāra, Since when did
> Kant influence Indian Buddhist writers? I must re-educate myself on
> historical dates.

Since it is unlikely that you suddenly became stupid and lost the ability to 
recogize the difference between a parallel and a chronological progression, 
this too is beneath you. So let me make the parallel more explicit.

Correspondence to representationalism to constructivism is the western trend 
from the 16th c to the present. Indian schools were also basically 
variations of correspondence theory (Buddhists, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Mimamsa, 
etc.). Nagarjuna challenged the idea that language and its intrinsic 
conceptualizations accurately and coherently mirrored reality, and, in fact, 
he exposed language's own pretense to coherency as insupportable. That 
dismissed the correspondence theory qua theory, but proposed no 
epistemological tools in its place. Yogacara pressed the point that 
cognition (unless one is fully enlightened) is representational, and 
karmically constructivist. For that, the correspondence theorists, trying to 
cling as much as possible to their realism, accused Yogacaras of being 
unrealistic idealists. Even for the Yogacaras, ultimately tathata as 
cognized by a Buddha comes down to a higher form of correspondence.

> I beats me how you can say that theft is not a social construction when
> it is defined in law books.

I explained the difference between theft and legal systems.

>Theft is when someone takes something in his
> possession against the rules and we are not born with rules.

No. Theft is taking something possessed by another and making it one's own 
without the consent of the original possessor. One can formulate all sorts 
of rules and legal codes to define varieties of such transactions in more 
detail, esp. in terms of refining notions of ownership and adequate 
compensations and remedies, but theft itself has nothing to do with rules. 
Take a one-year old's toy away -- ANY one year old, regardless of whatever 
ethics or legal code s/he may or may not have been introduced to -- and you 
will be accused by that child of theft, not by filing a complaint with the 
police but by screaming and crying. That child understands -- much better 
than you do -- that theft is not a social construction. Social attitudes and 
remedies for theft are social constructions, and the child will be hoping 
some adult in the vicinity will administer swift justice and restore the toy 
to him, but first comes the shock and pain of being the victim of a theft.

Dan