Metaphysical Certainty

If we try to establish metaphysical certainty and “faith” based on phenomenal knowledge (how things seem to be), we are prone to come up with some metaphors that make a lot of sense to us and even show some half-truths about us, but then they are the very springboard from which we fall astray, because we can’t form a metaphysical truth based on human phenomenal observation, even if we think what we say is not anthropocentric.  I bring three examples below.  Pay attention and see where they go wrong, based on this premise: 

We can’t draw metaphysical conclusions from our phenomenal observations, because we are not equipped with enough tools to grasp the whole of reality—including the unknown and the unseen or unperceived—comprehensively.  As Chomsky puts it, “[f]ar from bewailing the existence of mysteries-for-humans, we should be extremely grateful for it. With no limits to growth and development, our cognitive capacities would also have no scope. Similarly, if the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth and development of an organism it could become only a shapeless amoeboid creature, reflecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment, each quite unlike the next. Classical aesthetic theory recognized the same relation between scope and limits. Without rules, there can be no genuinely creative activity, even when creative work challenges and revises prevailing rules.”  (Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding) https://chomsky.info/201401__/

Bin Song

1)     In a well-written piece, A Catechism of Ruism (Confucianism): A Ruist View of Death, Bin Song wrote:

Ruism is frequently introduced as a tradition which is too this-worldly to care much about what happens after death. To a certain degree, this is true. Ruism teaches that there is no afterlife, no final judgement, no Paradise or Hell, and no reincarnation. When people are born, this is only a contractive form of the movement of the cosmic matter-energy called Qi (氣); when people die, this energy dissipates, and accordingly people’s lives lose their agency. Accordingly, life and death is just one embodiment of the constantly contracting (yang) and dissipating (yin) natural processes of cosmic change. As a consequence, nothing is supernatural, nothing is uncanny.”

“According to Ruism, the truth of the Dao of Heaven (天道) is that the entire universe is a constantly creative process called ‘Tian’ (天, Heaven). Tian creates a process of dynamic harmony, endowing energy and creativity to all creatures within Tian, in all places and at all times, by means of a method called ‘wu-wei‘ (無為, effortless action). In this view, the movement of cosmic matter-energy is the manifestation of Tian’s creativity. However, Tian’s creation is neither anthropomorphic nor anthropocentric. For, natural disasters on this little blue planet can be considered ‘disasters’ only from a human perspective. From the perspective of Tian, a flood, as one of millions of processes within Tian, has its own beauty, a beauty which is not inferior to that of, for example, the human houses being destroyed. In the same way, from Tian’s point of view, the HIV virus has a value which is not less lovable than that of the human bodies which have been infected by the virus.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bin-song/a-catechism-of-ruism-conf_1_b_9519626.html)

Where does this interpretation of the nature of cosmos, life, and death go wrong?  It goes wrong when it takes some common-sense evidence and metaphors, some phenomenal evidence as the foundation of a metaphysical knowledge.  In this case, Bin Song establishes absolute certainty about the nature of Heaven (Tien) and that “there is no afterlife, no final judgement, no Paradise or Hell, and no reincarnation”, by using some metaphors taken from some phenomenal (“this-worldly") observations: “When people are born, this is only a contractive form of the movement of the cosmic matter-energy called Qi (氣); when people die, this energy dissipates, and accordingly people’s lives lose their agency. Accordingly, life and death is just one embodiment of the constantly contracting (yang) and dissipating (yin) natural processes of cosmic change.”

It makes a lot of sense because it is based on our phenomenological observation of birth and decay of living beings and even objects, and the phenomena of “contracting and dissipating natural processes of cosmic change”.  So, he is so sure about how the universe works based on an anthropocentric phenomenology.  The idea of a chaotic purposeless naturalistic universe is itself a product of anthropocentric perception of the world.  The problem is that following modern astronomy, Bin Song, draws wild metaphysical conclusions about the nature of “heaven”.  He states: “What Confucians worship about “Heaven” is a benevolent but wild cosmic creative power, without any anthropomorphic sort of purpose, will or plan. Correspondingly, the Confucian humanism is a non-theistic humanism, and in this strictly defined sense, it is a religious humanism.”  One may wonder whether “benevolence” is not itself an anthropocentric description of the chaotic events in the universe.

In our Facebook exchange, Bin Song explicated his position:

We can only categorize Tian as lovable, pro-human, friendly in the vaguest sense. In the sense that Tian is ultimate resource for all forms of life, it is lovable; it is even love itself. However, Tian loves human beings equally as it loves the virus of HIV. Its love is so all-encompassing and egalitarian that we can't ascribe any personal characters to it. In this sense, we can worship Tian, but it is hardly to say we rely upon Tian to execute the Ruist program of moral self-cultivation.” And “Tian is humane in the sense that it creates all forms of life. Tian lets all forms of life be and become together in the most all-encompassing cosmic scale of eternity.

Bin Song obviously struggles to reconcile the modern naturalistic perception of the universe as a chaotic force of becoming with Confucian conception of benevolence and love.  However, he levels off all living beings, HIV virus and human beings, in the method of scientific reductionism, as “all-encompassing and egalitarian” love of Tien.  So the divine human nature whose author is Tien is the same as the nature of viruses or dead particles.  This is called pure immanentism, identifying the natural universe and God, but it is not even immanentism, because it doesn’t hold that the universe is alive.  It is pure naturalism.  This is a nihilistic reductionism in which life indeed is a subclass of dead. Tien is indifferent to us, barely alive, unconscious, and chaotic.  There is no point or purpose in Tien, as it begs the question that the meaning and purpose of creation is creation itself:

Tian's creation is not of purpose in the sense a purpose is understood as a 'telos' which can only be fulfilled in a long span of time so that all cosmic events are interpreted as the 'means' or 'stages' towards this purpose. No, in this sense of 'telos', there is no purpose of Tian's creation. But Tian's creation can only be described as of purpose in the sense that it has no purpose other than 'creation' itself. So every moment, Tian's creation is continuous, and all creatures in the cosmic scale of eternity were, are, and will be and become together. If we understand this most generic features of Tian's creation as of purpose, this purpose is instant and momentary, existing solely for the sake of itself. Anyway, Tian's creation is definitely meaningful. Its meaning is still creation itself. For human beings, this is particularly important because the meaning of human life consists in how we live out our life in relation to this cosmic creation of Tian. For Ruism, this 'living out' process of the innately good human nature is called the virtue of 'humaneness', and whether to live out it or not is the meaning of human life, which embeds itself in the meaningfulness of the entire cosmic process of Tian's creation.

One might ask why should this Sisyphean creation for the sake of creation carry the mark of “benevolence” or “innately good human nature”?  Nietzsche held the same metaphysical belief about the universe, as a pure force of becoming without any telos.  One might ask, why should the inner impulse of the chaotic force of Tien, in which the perpetrator and the prey are the same, not be “will-to-power” rather than “human heartedness” or “dynamic harmony”?  Bin Song’s response is vague: it is a kind of survival of our species in a hostile universe, in which dynamic harmony has to be attained based on what he calls 'anthropo-cosmism' or 'perspectival anthropocentrism in a cosmic scale'.   What does this mean?   I agree that depicting Tien in this way is anthropocentric, because it is grounded in human phenomenology.  But we can't take a humanistic code from a Tien, for which the beings who try to attain ren, equanimity, and love are the same as beings which have no sense of any of these (viruses).  Similar to Nietzsche, one might ask, why not our anthropo-cosmism should follow will-to-power instead of “dynamic harmony”.  After all, Tien is not aware and doesn’t experience love, or to make it as “impersonal” as possible, it "loves" everything equally, which doesn't even make sense to use the emotional-spiritual exuberance of love for a lifeless Tien.  Because Tien creates just for the sake of creation and is indeed indifferent to everything equally.  This is a concealed nihilism, I am afraid, under the name of “religious naturalism”. 

Bin Song finishes his comments with these words: “We evaluate from the perspective of human beings, but the values are also intrinsic to cosmic beings.”  I read it that in this cosmos everything has equal intrinsic value, as well as human beings.  But if Tien is not alive and aware, then this intrinsic value has the same intonation as a materialistic and physicalist scientific discourse which says everything is made of atoms or dead particles; on the surface it looks egalitarian but indeed it is nihilism.  Our human soul is the same as dead particles or at best viruses.

Thich Nhat Hanh

      2) In the second part, let's see how drawing metaphysical accounts from phenomenological considerations is fallacious by reading parts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful discussion of The Fullness of Emptiness:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. We can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also, so we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary.

According to Avalokiteshvara, this sheet of paper is empty; but according to our analysis, it is full of everything. There seems to be a contradiction between our observation and his. Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something. The five skandhas, which may be translated into English as five heaps, or five aggregates, are the five elements that comprise a human being. These five elements flow like a river in every one of us. In fact, these are really five rivers flowing together in us: the river of form, which means our bodies; the river of feelings; the river of perceptions; the river of mental formations; and the river of consciousness. They are always flowing in us. So according to Avalokita, when he looked deeply into the nature of these five rivers, he suddenly saw that all five are empty. If we ask, “Empty of what?” he has to answer. And this is what he said: “They are empty of a separate self.” That means none of these five rivers can exist by itself alone. Each of the five rivers has to be made by the other four. It has to coexist; it has to inter-be with all the others. When Avalokita says that our sheet of paper is empty, he means it is empty of a separate, independent existence. It cannot just be by itself. It has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud, the forest, the logger, the mind, and everything else. It is empty of a separate self. But, empty of a separate self means full of everything.

Now, again what is wrong with this description?  Nothing, it is a wonderful phenomenal description of the interrelation of all beings—Inter-being.  It makes a lot of sense, but we can’t establish a metaphysical truth about the nature of cosmos and life and death based on merely a phenomenal knowledge or description.  This description tells us some truth about our dependent origination but does NOT establish that our five skandhas are “empty”.  So, based on some interesting observations and nice metaphors, he comes to this metaphysical certainty: “In fact, these are really five rivers flowing together in us: the river of form, which means our bodies; the river of feelings; the river of perceptions; the river of mental formations; and the river of consciousness. They are always flowing in us. So according to Avalokita, when he looked deeply into the nature of these five rivers, he suddenly saw that all five are empty. If we ask, ‘Empty of what?’ he has to answer. And this is what he said: ‘They are empty of a separate self.’"

The problem with this way of interpreting the cosmos or Tien or God or Nirvana is that everything, including our own self, is merged together and is empty of a self, because phenomenally we can see and experience dependent origination of everything.  In another word, if we could put the obvious interdependent skandhas together, still we couldn't say the sum is nothing but addition of parts, i.e., it is empty of self.  The other problem with this deduction is that it doesn’t and can't bring things that we don’t know, the unseen, the mysterious, the ineffable into account.  It is like a blind bat saying the nature of all cosmos is similar to its sonar perception of location of objects.  Both Bin Song and Thich Nhat Hanh say interesting and stimulating half-truths and rush to arrive at a strange metaphysical perception of the universe or Heaven, which is empty of God, [and indeed love], and perception, like an indifferent vast ocean that brings everything to life and destroys everything in a sheer impulse of creation for the sake of creation.

Myself

      3)  In the third part, let's look at my own mistake.  Out of a methodological mistake, I mixed half-truths with some observations and wrote the following a while ago:

Let's have a thought experiment, imagine we are really becoming dust if we are lucky enough to burn blue in a life. Imagine the body doesn't remain, nor does the spirit. Spirit merges with spirit and loses memory of a self and disappears. Imagine we live just this one life, and there is no eternity for us in anything: in fame, honor, wealth, in hell and heaven, except in our birth, and body-soul effects, the whole aura of actions and effects we leave on the world, including our children, the way we raised them, the mistakes we made, all that some call "legacy".

In this thought experiment even "legacy" [say “cultural immortality”] is gone.

A sheer world of becoming. Would you not still agree that the ethical has intrinsic and karmic value, i.e., we just don’t want it for its result? That this one life is meaningful, exactly rejecting modern nihilism and subjectivism? That the God of Love exists? And that we should love our integrated self in the universe and in God regardless of whether we are immortal or not? In this thought experiment, a natural death is the proper end of an integrated life.

So, I really don’t desire to live forever. It doesn’t make sense to me. I see my frail constitution. I see my skin, flesh, hands, eyes, the malleability and fragility of my brain, so easily destructible and how they evolve in the course of my life due to their inherent openness that makes them prone to death. I am a growing phenomenon, whose growth is due to its vulnerability and sensitivity to life and the world, and its growth to death. I am not only in the world, I am integrated in the world. So I don’t know what “immortality” really means. Because every flower to me is universal and eternal in the mirror of ontogeny (development of individual organism) of flowers renewed in each season. Because I don’t want to be immortal in my fragile and exhausted constitution in my old age, nor in immaturity of my youth. I am happy with where I am and please with where I am going, if I am lucky to arrive at that stage.

We are scared of death and desire immortality all our life. The Greeks found immortality in immortal fame [call it “cultural immortality”] in public sphere. All religions have some notion of immortality afterlife even in Religious Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism. Life is mysterious and magical, so anything is possible, especially when one is religious like me. But life is essentially based on "dependent origination" and "integration in biosphere".

To be able to grow and to become, to find my way about on the earth, I need to be inherently an open system, who exists because of its already connection to biosphere and stardust of universe, in constant growth and decay/change to the point of death, like a flower, a tree, any animal, any seed, and any transformation of one's body. It is like a cell in our body asks why it comes into being, grows, and dies, it is as if a leaf or branch or tree complains about its transient existence, not knowing that it exists and perceives and connects to the world BECAUSE of this ephemeral and impermanent constitution [one reason only, don’t commit the fallacies of denying the antecedent and/or affirming the consequent (look at footnote 1)]. It reminds me of Kant's analogy of the false perception of a pigeon who thinks that if there were no pressure of the air, it could fly higher! Not knowing, it flies because of the air pressure.

What is the problem with this piece?  The same problem with the other two.  I am bewitched by phenomenological clarity.  What is more clear, as Thich Nhat Hanh and Bin Song hold, than the fact of “naturalism”.  Look how nature is and from our phenomenal perception of the world we can see that our very existence is ephemeral and impermanent like every flower and every living being.  This is the whole truth and nothing else.  Our integration in the universe, dependent origination, and being wired into biosphere is the whole of truth.  I fell astray to this seeming clarity.  I couldn’t see the limits of my knowledge and like a blind bat insist that my sonar perception of objects is the way the cosmos works.  However, I could see that the only way I could connect and have a perception of God or Tien or Nirvana is through my Ren or Human-heartedness, or ethical impulse, or human-divine nature, or Buddha nature, and I think this is also the major message of Confucius and Buddha, rather than a “naturalistic religion”:

In this thought experiment even "legacy" [say “cultural immortality”] is gone.

A sheer world of becoming. Would you not still agree that the ethical has intrinsic and karmic value, i.e., we just don’t want it for its result? That this one life is meaningful, exactly rejecting modern nihilism and subjectivism? That the God of Love exists? And that we should love our integrated self in the universe and in God regardless of whether we are immortal or not?

However, as I mentioned, I was blind to the fact that the divine human soul is ineffable and not reducible to phenomenal nature. 

Conclusion

I have been thinking about the pitfalls of thoughts and heart.
How easy and deceptive it is when we are set to take something as true.  Not only we are credulous beings, but also we are ready to take a descriptive observation as the universal ground of truth and bring faith in it.  Read any thinker, even very logical ones’ such as Russel and Quine or Chomsky, leave alone Nietzsche, Foucault, and postmodern thinkers.  Take metaphysical claims of some adherents of Buddhism and Confucianism about Nirvana or Heaven (Tien), too excited to come to a non-theistic or naturalistic perception of the universe.  Or consider the hasty attempt of those who try to prove the existence of God based on pure naturalistic or scientific evidence.  Think about the blind belief of the dominant feature of Western Enlightenment that human reason can principally grasp and understand everything in the universe based on reason and evidence alone. 

Chomsky, who actually calls himself a representative of 
Western Enlightenment, dispels the myth of Western Enlightenment that evidence and reason are enough to understand the texture of cosmos.  One may say the same argument may apply to some followers of Buddha and Confucius, who despite the will of Buddha and Confucius, try to come to a wild metaphysical account about the nature of cosmos and de-mystify it into a kind of naturalism.  About the fact that understanding the nature of cosmos is a mystery, that it is a truism that it is a mystery, that we can’t fathom it, Chomsky states:

Contemporary rejection of mysterianism – that is, truism – is quite widespread. One recent example that has received considerable attention is an interesting and informative book by physicist David Deutsch. He writes that potential progress is “unbounded” as a result of the achievements of the Enlightenment and early modern science, which directed science to the search for best explanations. As philosopher/physicist David Albert expounds his thesis, “with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically, infinite."

The quest for better explanations may well indeed be infinite, but infinite is of course not the same as limitless. English is infinite, but doesn’t include Greek. The integers are an infinite set, but do not include the reals. I cannot discern any argument here that addresses the concerns and conclusions of the great mysterians of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

We are left with a serious and challenging scientific inquiry: to determine the innate components of our cognitive nature in language, perception, concept formation, reflection, inference, theory construction, artistic creation, and all other domains of life, including the most ordinary ones. By pursuing this task, we may hope to determine the scope and limits of human understanding, while recognizing that some differently structured intelligence might regard human mysteries as simple problems and wonder that we cannot find the answers, much as we can observe the inability of rats to run prime number mazes because of the very design of their cognitive nature.”  (Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding[2]) https://chomsky.info/201401__/

I read some different texts from philosophy to religion, from 

politics to cultural studies and scientific discourse.  What I see in some of these documents is a rash plunge into certainty based on certain limited evidence.  Yes, evidence.  We need evidence to form knowledge.  It is true, but I hold that no phenomenological evidence or description can give us enough evidence to talk about the essence of heaven or God.  We cannot address metaphysical questions by any set of evidence.  So it is strange to me when Darwin’s Origin of Species is taken as an evidence that God does not exist.  Or creationists try to bring phenomenal evidence that God exists.

For me there is enough “evidence” for the existence of God 
based on thousands years of scriptures and the elevation and revelation of love and the ethical command to break open from the prison of the self to YOU, to connect with you, and with every living being.  And then this strange and deep longing, strange longing in our heart for meaning and direction, for the heaven beyond and for the God close to our jugular vein, and a calling which is an “evidence” of God for me.  The calling is the “evidence”.  But how can I tell you about my calling?

Well, to conclude I repeat, my thesis is that 
phenomenological evidence of how things work and are in the phenomenal world cannot ground any metaphysical knowledge about God, Heaven, Tien, or Nirvana.  God comes to us in peculiar ways, through our very longing.  God comes to us through messengers and oracles.  Tien or heaven reveals itself to us through the light within, human-heartedness, shame, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right concentration, de, li, ren, and love.

I already mentioned the followings in another occasion and repeat it here. To me, the following is a way out of [self-]destruction of nihilism and opening up to God, Heaven (Tien, Nirvana):

Axial Age sages, Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s Mystics, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, and then Jesus, and Mohammad share a non-consequentialist message: they all hold that justice and morality are for harmony with God, Dao, or Heaven (T’ien) and are good for their own sake (have intrinsic value) and subsequently also have extrinsic value (good consequences). In Western Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant comes closest to this non-consequentialist approach. However, he along with other rationalists put all his faith in reason alone, which is the point of excess in our historical pendulum swing and detrimental to the divine balance of our soul.  The only way to perceive the meaning of our life and death, and have a sense of the nature of our existence and the universe, is through seeing the relation of our ethical impulses to the divine and through the revelations of God. 

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[1] 

The followings are two fallacies that one may commit in this argument.  

1) The fallacy of affirming the consequent:

(premise 1): If a living being perceives and connects to the world,  it is because of their ephemeral and impermanent constitution.

(premise 2): the constitution of all living beings is ephemeral and impermanent.

(conclusion): This is the only way a living being perceives and connects to the world. 

2) The fallacy of denying the antecedent:

(premise 1): If a living being perceives and connects to the world, it is because of its ephemeral and impermanent constitution.

(premise 2): A living being does not necessarily perceive and connect to the world.

(conclusion): So, the constitution of some living beings is not ephemeral and impermanent. 

[2] Also check these speeches: 

Mysterianism, Language, and Human Understanding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-E0IEyS4qw&list=PLHZGTTZG6HcLwJ6opUrf_VHBjSt2HgJBd&index=29

"The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0

Mysteries of Nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54tBI7Y4K7k&list=PLHZGTTZG6HcLwJ6opUrf_VHBjSt2HgJBd