Associated Musings: Though Daoism is something in it's own right, it does seem to have some considerable influence on some schools of Buddhism. I keep seeing reference to Chan Buddhism, which is seen as the result of a mixture of
Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. And I've recently seen some interesting points that for my brief exposure to points about what people think Daoism to entail that it seems to try and transfer Daoist thought within Buddhism.
And as already stated, it does seem to emphasize reality as separate from language but perhaps in a way that
can't be understood through language but must be experienced for itself. That it goes
beyond acknowledging that a word isn't the very thing that it refers to. But that perception itself is restricted by language, our way of thinking is constituted by language. It seems like it somehow moves beyond perception to a kind of immediacy where one is no longer individuated (sense of self/ego) from reality. Although I don't know well enough if it's correct to transcribe to such a context, seen it once described as experiencing Kant's noumenon (thing-in-itself).
This might be illuminating in depicting the Chan Buddhist view where it's not emptying one's mind, but breaking the boundary between the world and self in a way that by removing something one isn't exactly emptied but neither are they full. But I presume part of the process of reality where things simply in a state of
constant change.
“Look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light.” — Zhuangzi
This is confusing for me because I don't know enough to really try to delinate how much is in line with Taoism.
Stumbled upon all this when not understanding stuff about Freud and Lacan, which I still don't understand.
Where someone constrated Lacan's methods of teaching to that of Chan Buddhism, where words can't explain things, so they're presented in ways to disrupt and show the error of language or something like that.
Chan Buddhism and Lacan on the Role of the TeacherLearning as Breaking from the Illusion of the Errant Discourse
For Lacan, reality is structured by language, not as natural language, but as discourse – language that has been given a meaning and a value by the speaking subject. The basis is a particular aspect of Saussure's theory of language, the view of the arbitrariness of the connection between the signifier and the signified along with its tremendous implications for the relation between language and reality:
"The characteristic role of language vis-à-vis thought is not to create a phonic means to express ideas, but to serve as an intermediary between thought and sound under such conditions that their union necessarily leads to reciprocal delimitations of unities. Thought, chaotic by nature, is forced to become precise in being decomposed."[10]
To my mind, this theory only has its fullest force when the arbitrariness is located, as Saussure has it, between the signifier and the signified, and not, as Émile Benveniste would prefer in a point of criticism of Saussure, between the sign and reality.[11] Language, coming between the sphere of meaning (signified) and the sphere of sound (signifier), can thus give rise to a contingent world, a world that – as Lacan extends the theory – is errantly taken as reality itself.
It is important, however, to distinguish a linguistic model of language, which Saussure still essentially uses, that is, one in which linguistic units (words, phonemes, morphemes, and so forth) have meaning due to their relation to other units in a system, from the concept of discourse that Lacan introduces – according to which the whole system of words first gains its meaning in virtue of an act of speech (la parole) by a subject. (Lacan's use of la parole is very different from Saussure's.) The mere fact of speaking a language by no means determines what world will exist for the speaking subject – she can take on the subject position that sustains the errant discourse and remain in ignorance, or she can express her own voice, her own speech, and come to see that discourse as error. In this way, for the enlightened, it is not language itself, and least of all the conventional meaning of words, that determines what reality is.
...
Given that the illusion of reality is constituted by discourse and that this depends on the act of speech (la parole), enlightenment would consist in perceiving this error, in making another act that corrects the errant discourse, an act that makes discourse not something taken over from outside, but something of one's own creation. This reality may stay the same, but our attitude towards it, as its creators, has now changed. True teaching, then, is not the transmission of water from one bucket to the other, or of tidbits of information from one human flash disc to another, but a disruption of discours resulting in a new awareness of reality, of being, and the creation of a new discourse and hence a new world. But where is the teacher in all of this?
...
The Chan Buddhist Master as Teacher
Zen verbalism parallels the analyst's role in transference as a sort of subjective intervention into the student's errant discourse enabling the student to see it as illusion. Bear in mind, it is not essential that the teacher's intervention with la parole be literally spoken words, since la parole is extra-linguistic. Speech as symbolic act essentially has no meaning in terms of the system of language, as was seen with the phenomenon of the holophrase. So the Zen master's kick, a blow with his staff, a twist of the nose, or any other gesture, even silence, can constitute a symbolic intervention of the master as "speaking" subject into the student's discourse. And, of course, the famous koan and numerous other Zen tropes suit this role well, precisely due to the fact that, while they employ the words of the standard discourse, they do so in ways that violate usual linguistic meaning. In many cases, the master's intersubjective intervention into the student's discourse directly illustrates the holophrastic nature of Zen verbalisms, since the point is to get the disciple to liberate himself from the conceptual linguistic meaning of the terms.[19] This usage of words, as Daisetz Suzuki tells us, cannot be analyzed by any of the standard models employed in the philosophy of language – it "violate[s] all the rules of the science of linguistics."[20] The verbalism of Zen is, like the tao of Laotze and Chuangtze, from which it is derived, ungraspable and unnamable. (As is la parole for Lacan, with its connection to unconscious repressed truth: "There are essential relations that no discourse can sufficiently express except in what I just called between the lines."[21]) The point is not to grasp the meaning of words in the system of language to which they belong as linguistic entities, but rather, quite to the contrary, the language usage of the Zen master, like the intervention of the analyst, serves to change the student's mental state in reference to the reality constituted by that normal discourse.
The underlined is interesting I think because it points out how it's not about the gap between sign and reality but the arbitrariness between the sign and signifier.
This sentiment of disrupting one's 'discourse' seems quite interesting to thoughts about ideology (in a very broad sense) in that it seems you're inherently trapped within it, so it's difficult to better see it because there's no contrasts/distinction. Can't see it until you're beyond it in some way as we're stuck like the
fish that doesn't know it's in water.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics