Vagueness

“Cloud, banks of clouds hide something: but what?”

Hubert Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/ 

“Let go of ‘I am’

Let go of ‘I am not’”

Nagarjuna, Verses from the Center, as translated by Stephen Batchelor

I’m interested in vagueness. In art - in a painting, say. By ‘vagueness’ I mean the undifferentiated, shapeless, blurred, and things without clear boundaries.  We sense we are in the presence of something obscure; a twilight atmosphere, a dim, vague, impalpable ambience that occludes our view, both perceptual and cognitive. Something suggestive and mysterious. Such vagueness implies an undecidability that effects and also infects what we see and think, forcing us to recognize the limits of our knowledge and to explore what we don’t know – and perhaps what we are afraid of. For vagueness undermines  our quest for mastery, testing but not entirely negating the familia, and often provokes  confusion and perturbation. as a result, it can be construed as an affliction, a blindness, a source of meaninglessness.  Within the evanescence of the vague, things cease to signify monolithically, and we encounter an openness of gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, where there are lapses and perturbations of meaning, but also a realm of possibility. The vague reminds us that we are constantly being confronted by new experiences that are too vertiginously complex for us to ever fully encompass them in our mind: they overwhelm us.  

We cope with this uncertainty by  retreating into a space of reflection in which we can have some kind of control, where we can understand what it  is we experience and so make distinctions and decisions. We are very good at identifying our consciousness with such mastery, and structures and boundaries  are the foundations of the ‘ego’. We reduce all that our mind contains -  memories and perceptions - to the psychologically shaped space of a particular subjectivity: the self-mastering ‘I’. We control experience through a process of demarcation, fixation, organization, delineation, separation, formation, definition and rationalization. By establishing clear boundaries, we come to believe that the distinct nature of identities is the precondition for true knowledge. 

This how the former Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor (Tibetan and Seon, or thev Korean  from of Chan or Zen)  puts it in the introduction to his translation of the the teachings of the second century Indian Buddhist monk Nagarjuna,  Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime :

 All that is certain in this world is that at some unspecified time one will die. As a means of coping with the anxiety generated by awareness of this fate, human beings elaborate a picture of life in which the self appears to be intrinsically separate from the multitude of other people and things that surround, attract and threaten it. In assuming a safe distance between “me” and “you”, and between “me” and “mine”, one feels able to manage whatever is boring, desirable or terrifying situations face one.

 But one way of characterising the last two centuries of Western thought is to see it as being engaged in the slow but sure erosion of the confidence once built on a  fixed, bounded and boundaried  ‘I’.  When we read modern philosophy, poetry and novels, or look at the visual arts and listen to music,  we often sense that we are being shown that  the ways we seek to represent the world through symbols and signs, and through languages, are miserably inadequate tools for framing our experience.  We are remined of the failure to make sense,  of indeterminacies of meaning,  and  fluid, boundary-free experiences of fusion and loss of istable dentity.  

The  concept of sublime, for example, which  became an important aspect of thinking about the arts in the eighteenth century, explored the limits of  consciousness  in situations in which the experience of reality is registered as excessive and overwhelming.  But awe and wonder can quickly blur into terror, giving rise to a darker aspect of the sublime experience that has always been part of its allure, where the exhilarating feeling of delight metamorphoses into a flirtation with dissolution, the ‘daemonic’ and death.Initially, the sublime was associated with aspects of nature that instill awe and wonder, such as mountains, avalanches, waterfalls, mists and fogs, stormy seas, or the infinite vault of the starry sky. Today,    rather than nature it is likely to be the incredible power of technology that   supplies the raw material for a characteristically contemporary sublime.  

It is no coincidence that the concept of the sublime, and the willingness of Western thinkers and artists to explore what lies on the other side of the borderline dividing reflective consciousness from ecstatic experience coincided with the period during which Eastern ideas began to become better known in the West and influenced its thinking. But the manner in which East and West understand the fundamentally indescribable totality of reality, and the wayward and uncontrollable emotions that are entailed, diverge fundamentally. This difference lies in what  is judged to be the ultimate value and meaning of the realization that we are not separate, bounded identities. In Eastern thought there developed quite early on the idea that truth is not a matter of empirical observation. Much was made of the need to abandon belief in language’s ability to reveal anything approaching the ‘real’. Oriental thinking steadfastly focused awareness on ontological lack or deficiency – on how we will inevitably fail to comprehend reality through thinking. 

In the Buddhist concept of non-duality it is argued that only silence is an adequate response to  ultimate reality.  Chan Buddhism, which drew heavily on Chinese Taoist ideas, teaches that understanding is wordless and can be transmitted only from mind to mind.  The experience of reality is therefore understood to be something that cannot be caught within the nets of the sign-systems or  languages deployed by human minds. Instead, we are invited to open ourselves up to a sense of absolute  contingency, unpredictability, impermanence, emptiness and otherness.  As a result, the fundamental insight of Oriental thought is that the human subject – the ‘I’ - is neither limited nor distinguished by an inviolable and bounded individuality. Here is the  thirteenth century Japanese  Zen (Chan) Buddhist monk Dogen:

To study the Way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be awakened by all things. To be awakened by all things is to let body and mind of self and others fall away. Even the traces of awakening come to an end, and this traceless awakening is continued endlessly.

Sigmund Freud called the desire to  abandon the illusion of the identity-based  ego n favour of immersion in the non-self  the ‘Nirvana’ complex, and saw it as concealing an unhealthy yearning for the oblivion of death. From the point of view of Western ego-focused thinking and its psychology,  Freud  is  correct. But he misunderstood the fundamental insight of Oriental thinking, which is that the self exists in a state of becoming that knits together both the experience of the bounded and the unbounded. The self unfolds in  a relational state whose identity is connective, contingent, dependent, and in process.   In this way, Eastern thought outlines a theory of consciousness that proposes a middle way between difference and fusion, between bounded, separate individuality, on one hand, and the boundary-less non-self  immersed in the void, on the other. 

As  Nagarjuna put it, we are torn between two impulses: “I am me, I will never not be” –/ The longing for eternity,” on the one hand, and,   “I used to be, I am not any more” –/ The cut of annihilation.” But as he goes on: “The sage avoids being and nothingness”, because reality unfolds as the dynamic interplay between these two impulses, and the goal of life is to site one’s consciousness on the threshold between being and nothingness, rather than to embrace either one at the expense of the other. The Taoist concept of ying and yang – the intertwining of opposites that constitutes the tao –  exemplifies this, and was absorbed into Chinese Buddhism in Chan teachings, and then into Korean Seon and Japanese Zen.