ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Buddhism and Kant

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Buddhism and Kant

Someone wrote me insisting that what some translate as "transcendental" was precisely Kantian.

Well maybe for Schopenhauer, in his darkly inverted way--we can't get our paws on the will that structures the world.

But "transcendent" is a translation of paramita. Paramita means "reaching the other shore," the other shore being enlightenment. You can reach it. It's not transcendental. It has empirical, even physical qualities.

Paramita means beyond ego, but not beyond altogether.

1 comment:

Petrus said...: Bravo. That's more than enough work for one day! Now hows about… if we can only ditch that old persistent nugget "supernatural" once and for all… what could they have possibly been thinking with that one? And: could it survive any contextual translation (hope not)…

Consider the "super": If everything has its own nature -- and especially regardless of whether that would even show up on our radar -- then what can possibly transcend nature, or suchness… and would that be taking it with itself or beyond itself?

At this point, enter enlightening superhero TATHAGATA -- who proclaims: "Suchness only" (which, admittedly, he does perhaps to qualify Dogen's two cents, "Arising only"… (Now, enough from me.); February 7, 2012 at 2:37 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Buddhism and Kant

1 comment:

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