To "deconstruct" philosophy [...] would be to think - in the most faithful, interior way - the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine - from a certain exterior [...] - what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid [...] By means of this simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between the inside and the outside of philosophy [...a] putting into question the meaning of Being as presence.
"In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence--as not-bound to life", meaning the value of the Other's recognition of me depends on the value of my recognition of the Other In this sense to the extent that the Other apprehends me as bound to a body and immersed in life, I am myself only an Other as Ego.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (with explanation, which is even sadder, also from Wikipedia)
A student asked Master Yun-Men (949 C.E.) "Not even a thought has arisen; is there still a sin or not?" Master replied, "Mount Sumeru!"
A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, "What is Buddha?" Dongshan said, "Three pounds of flax".
- Two Zen Koans. You have three guesses as to where I got it.
It is perhaps with extreme risk of ridicule for committing the same sins in my "My System" posts that I criticize what seems to be a staple of philosophical thought, especially starting with Existentialism and much of Eastern thought (i.e. Zen and Taoism - Confucianism I condemn as harmful and short-sighted, but it is at least comprehensible and makes some good points). This staple is what appears to be the deliberate use of confusing language in philosophy. This is not good philosophy! If a philosophy is so tangled and confused as to be completely incomprehensible, this means (a) nobody can check the underlying logic, so it probably has logical holes you could drive an aircraft carrier through, and (b) it actually probably is too vague and the terms it uses too ill-defined to be logical anyway, which is a much worse form of (a), since the good use of logic usually straightens out a system by default. And this makes the philosophy (a) probably wrong, as in its assertions are flat-out not true, or (b) almost definitely useless, as a car with unusable controls or a map with no relation to the territory is useless - any attempt to use it will either lead to a horrible accident (car analogy) or to getting completely lost (map analogy). That is all I have to say for Derrida and Sartre - I feel that is already enough to dismiss them as lost causes.
For Zen, I have an even bigger problem. They use not confusing language - indeed that koan was absolutely crystal clear in the sense of the literal meaning of the words. But they deliberately cloud the ideas they attempt to transmit, as if trying to let only a select few in on the Big Secret. However, their Enlightenment simply doesn't hold up to even the most feeble analysis. For example, suppose you replaced the Student in the koan with a dreamy show-off eager to ask the Big Important Questions and the master with an eight-year-old with ADD that has just been given a big bowl of candy and shiny objects. Would the koan really run that much differently? The student asks a typical show-off question whose meaning is not easily understood - and being not easily understood is (I cannot stress this enough) NOT GOOD - and the master, being completely distracted, answers with a total non-sequitur. A good check of whether the philosophy can be said to make sense is whether the switching the answers to the questions would radically alter the result. For the two koans I present, the answer is a clear NO. The questions are immensely different, but the answers are both non-sequiturs. This attitude leads monks on 30-year quests for truth when any reasonable truth that this bullshit is hiding could be transmitted in around 3 seconds of plain, logical language.
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