Granularity: An Ontological Inquiry Into Justice and Holistic Education 3031415388, 9783031415388

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Şevket Benhür Oral

Granularity:

An Ontological Inquiry Into Justice and Holistic Education

Granularity: An Ontological Inquiry Into Justice and Holistic Education

Şevket Benhür Oral

Granularity: An Ontological Inquiry Into Justice and Holistic Education

Şevket Benhür Oral Vytautas Kavolis interdisciplinary Research Institute Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas, Lithuania

ISBN 978-3-031-41537-1    ISBN 978-3-031-41538-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41538-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To my darling Taya. Your intelligence and patience know no bounds. With all my love and gratitude. To our family’s furry companions Gemma, Blacky, BlackChin, and Pirate. You have tested our patience in your beautiful ways!

Acknowledgments

This project would not have come to light if it were not for a cell biology textbook which I was engrossed in during my early undergraduate years studying molecular biology, where the internal structure of a cell cytoplasm under microscope was described as granular. That was the first instance of the word I came across as far as I can recall. I then realized that anything and everything in existence presents itself as granular, not just the cell cytoplasm. I am grateful for the time spent studying molecular biology. To continue with the biology theme, what is the meaning of the life of photosynthetic cyanobacteria that lived three billion years ago, which were the first organisms that are known to have produced oxygen thanks to which virtually all the living things we see around us now are alive? What is more, cyanobacteria are integrally incorporated into the body of plants in the form of chloroplasts with which plants synthesize food for themselves and for everybody else. We are deeply grateful to cyanobacteria, and all the other countless species, both extinct and extant. What is even more interesting, a certain species of cyanobacteria discovered in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano might be the solution to our climate breakdown woes as well. Apparently, they are great at CO2 capture. Thank you once again, cyanobacteria! The whole labor of this book testifies to the thread running through that first moment of recognition of the word ‘granular’ in a cell biology textbook to the way of the eternally abiding reality of granularity. Thank you, All. Earlier versions of the following chapters and chapter sections appeared in print in the following publications: Partial material from Promethean Superhumanity/Inhumanity: Infinity or Immortality Projects? in Chapter 6 appeared in a different form as Oral, S. B. (2022). Is philosophical thinking possible in higher education in the American(-style) universities in the GCC? Chapter 4 in Kevin W. Gray (Ed.), Normative Tensions: Academic Freedom in International Education. Lexington Books. Rowman and Littlefield.

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Acknowledgments

Partial material from Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up in Chapter 6 appeared in a different form as Oral, S.  B. (2014). Liberating facts: Harman’s objects and Wilber’s holons. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 33(2), 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-­013-­9378-­z. An earlier version of An Intriguing Interresonance between Mahāyāna Buddhist Ontology and Žižek’s Dialectical Materialism in Chapter  3 appeared as Oral, S. B. (2018). Is Žižek a Mahayana Buddhist? śūnyatā and li versus Žižek’s materialism. International Journal of Žižek Studies, 12(2). http://zizekstudies.org/ index.php/IJZS/article/view/1064 A different version of some parts of The Fantastic in Philosophy and Dao: Catherine Malabou and the Daoist Heidegger in Chapter 4 appeared as Oral, S. B. (2022). The fantastic school: Catherine Malabou and an ontological basis in defense of the school. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 56(2), 290–304. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-­9752.12558. Partial material from Subjectification and Its Discontents in Chapter 7 appeared in a different form as Oral, S. B. (2019). Absolute knowing: Žižek and subject-as-­ trauma. Philosophical Studies in Education, 50, 127–139 (OVPES-Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society Journal). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ EJ1228716.pdf.

Contents

1

Precursions ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     1 Synopsis ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     2 A Note to the Reader: Pleading Guilty in Advance ��������������������������������    25 Non-understanding����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    46 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    84

Part I The Opening Tapestry 2

Loose Threads����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    91 The Graininess of Things������������������������������������������������������������������������    91 Theories of Everything����������������������������������������������������������������������������    93 The Egalitarian Maxim����������������������������������������������������������������������������    99 An Ontological Turn to the Absolute ������������������������������������������������������   103 Thinking the Absolute������������������������������������������������������������������������������   108 All Multiples Are Reflexive ��������������������������������������������������������������������   113 Category Mistakes�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   115 A Leap into the Absolute ������������������������������������������������������������������������   122 The Ego Basho ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   134 Granular Hegel and Tables����������������������������������������������������������������������   137 Hegel’s Logic ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   140 Meillassouxian Absolute��������������������������������������������������������������������������   144 A Quick Recap����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   149 Ontology, Ethics, and Education��������������������������������������������������������������   155 Remarks on Methodology������������������������������������������������������������������������   158 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   166

Part II The Ontological Tapestry 3

 Interpermeation, or All Philosophical Positions Are Valid����������������   177 Agamben, Nāgārjuna, and Brother Francis����������������������������������������������   177 Bodymind������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   183 ix

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Contents

An Intriguing Interresonance Between Mahāyāna Buddhist Ontology and Žižek’s Dialectical Materialism����������������������������������������   188 Preliminary Affinities��������������������������������������������������������������������������   190 The Four Noble Truths and Dependent Co-Arising����������������������������   195 The Two-Truths Doctrine: The Ultimate Truth/Conventional Truth Structure of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism����������������������������������   200 Emptiness (śūnyatā)����������������������������������������������������������������������������   202 The Three-Truth Doctrine of the Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhism: The Bodhisattva Ideal��������������������������������������������������������   204 The Structure of Time—Prospective Retrospection����������������������������   207 Intersubsumption����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   208 Correlationists (Anti-realists) and Object-Oriented Ontologists (OOO Post-humanist Realists)������������������������������������������������������������   216 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   231 4

 Malabou’s Heidegger and Granularity������������������������������������������������   235 The Fantastic in Philosophy and Dao: Catherine Malabou and the Daoist Heidegger������������������������������������������������������������������������   235 Change ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   237 Beginning��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   239 How to Begin? ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   241 Authentic and Inauthentic Modes of Dasein����������������������������������������   243 Being Is the Beginning������������������������������������������������������������������������   246 Logos and Dao������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   251 The Fantastic and Dao ������������������������������������������������������������������������   254 The Ontological Foundation of the School������������������������������������������   259 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   267

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Žižek and Granularity��������������������������������������������������������������������������   269 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   278

Part III The Educational Tapestry 6

 Egoity, Infinity, and (W)holistic Education ����������������������������������������   297 Bergson’s Durée and the Educational Question��������������������������������������   304 The Infinity of Being and the Promethean Impulse, or Going Beyond Finitude ����������������������������������������������������������������������   310 Promethean Superhumanity/Inhumanity: Infinity or Immortality Projects?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   323 The Telos of Hyperholistic Education������������������������������������������������������   338 Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   349 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   369

Contents

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 Imagination and Hyperholistic Education������������������������������������������   373 Egoity and Ecology����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   375 The Holistic Arc and Bildung������������������������������������������������������������������   378 Subjectification and Its Discontents��������������������������������������������������������   401 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   427

Part IV The Concluding Tapestry 8

 The Three Moments and Absolute Justice������������������������������������������   433 What Žižek Misses����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   441 Absolute Justice, or an Attempt at Moment123 ����������������������������������������   452 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   457

Index����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   459

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1  Self v no-­self����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 Fig. 6.1  The four quadrants������������������������������������������������������������������������������  362

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About the Author

Şevket Benhür Oral, PhD,  is a senior researcher at Vytautas Kavolis interdisciplinary Research Institute at Vytautas Magnus University. His early focus was on Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics. In his dissertation, he elaborated what he terms “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” in relation to Dewey’s concept of “experience” as the latter was elucidated in Dewey’s later works, especially, Art as Experience and Experience and Nature. Dr. Oral feels most at home engaging with contemporary issues in continental philosophy and continental philosophy of education. He is also interested in Chinese Buddhist ontologies, especially Tiantai Buddhism. He deploys these schools of thought to inquire into what we can broadly refer to as transformations of human subjectivity.

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Chapter 1

Precursions

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. — ALDOUS HUXLEY (Do What You Will: Twelve Essays) To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vice versa —BROOK ZIPORYN (Being and Ambiguity, 2004, p. xviii) True philosophy is not simply the accumulation and organization of concepts but the ideational expression of the most direct inner experience. Direct pure inner experience signifies living as the essence of existence…. —WATSUJI TETSURŌ (from Parkes, 1996, p. 364) Only a thought we’ve lived has any value —HERMANN HESSE (Demian, 2013, p. 57) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) —WALT WHITMAN (Section 51, Song of Myself) Let no one ignorant of geometry come under my roof. —PLATO (Purportedly inscribed above the door of Plato’s Academy in Athens) The Three Oddest Words When I pronounce the word Future, The first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no nonbeing can hold. —WISTAWA SZYMBORSKA (from Map: Collected and Last Poems, 2015, p. 328)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Ş. B. Oral, Granularity: An Ontological Inquiry Into Justice and Holistic Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41538-8_1

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1 Precursions

Synopsis For the sake of a beginning, we quietly yet resoundingly offer the following synopsis—after all, we have to submit something as a beginning for we are already awestruck, already under the full sway of the boundless awe and world-affirming wonder of being. We are already within philosophy, that is, within the state of inability to be released from the question of being. We are already exposed to the question of being, the immanent self-disclosing meaning and value of things, since “a radical absence of ground and abyss [provokes] human existence into recognizing its essential lack of essence, bearing, and orientation” (Nelson, 2017, p. 229) without the reassurance of a logical or divine transcendence, nothing to hold onto. Not just being as such but also the awe and marvel and reverence in the face of the abyss of nothingness/emptiness understood in the Daoist sense, or the Daoist Heidegger’s sense (Nelson, 2017), that is, the abyss of the inexhaustible ground of everything that gratuitously provokes openness to virtually infinite proliferation, to superabundance. We are superabundantly awestruck: the awe and wonder (beauty or horror?) in the face of emptiness as the unnameable source of all things. It appears emptiness is that which cannot be perceived or grasped by egological operations. Nor is it that which can be named or circumscribed once and for all by language. Emptiness is itself empty, or emptiness is self-emptying, or “to pursue emptiness is to lose emptiness” (Nelson, 2017, p. 225). It is that which resists conceptual reification. Differently stated, it is the movement of dereification. Or it is simply a conceptual fiction. Nevertheless, it is there in its superabundant fullness and vitality although we cannot make a coherent sense of how things ultimately are. Possibly the project of sense-making, especially, that of ultimate sense-making, needs to be dropped completely. This book is an instance of such an act of dropping. ‘Being (Sein) is not a being (Seiende),’ ‘the being of entities (Sein des Seienden) is not itself an entity,’ namely, world disclosure-as-such (Greek: alēthēia), the opening-­up of the very possibility of sense, of cosmos, the process of which necessarily withdraws since it is disclosive nihil, and hence is intrinsically hidden, and hence is ineluctably overlooked, cannot simply be reduced to the disclosedness of an entity as this or that (Sheehan, 2015) no matter how divine that entity might be, if the talk above concerning ‘emptiness’ and wonder is put in Martin Heidegger’s phraseology, the so-called Heideggerese, which is a sort of language after all trying to come to terms with that which cannot be come to terms with—Heidegger, whom we have just claimed to manifest Daoist resonance in its substance, style, and motivation, employs a peculiar, fairly impenetrable, dramatic philosophical vocabulary for he tries to break out of the cognitive and cultural grammar of the received wisdom of the European philosophical tradition, the so-called Western ontotheology, traditional metaphysics as a reification of life and being, to penetrate into the primordiality of being, into disclosedness-as-such, into Ereignis, into emptiness (śūnyatā), with great merit if I may say so, despite his nefarious entanglements (the Heidegger scandal of 1933–34 and the further scandal of not apologizing for the original scandal, and so forth) within the political turmoil of his historical moment, or maybe

Synopsis

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precisely because of that, at least according to Slavoj Žižek. At any rate, “Heidegger’s being is disclosed within language, history, and experience, while remaining concealed in, different than, and irreducible to such disclosure” (Nelson, 2017, p. 228). Just like everything else. There is not much merit in Heideggerese pathways—being underway through nonpurposive, non-intentional, non-cognitive, non-coercive action or surrendering, “the letting releasement of things in poetic dwelling in contrast with the technological domination of things as mere objects of use and the uselessness that places conventional conceptions of instrumental usefulness and purposiveness into question” (Nelson, 2017, p. 124)—in the eyes of Rudolf Carnap though. For the latter, ‘being is not a being’ or ‘nothing nothings (das Nichts nichtet)’ are nothing but utter pious claptrap, or epistemically meaningless, if put in polite conversation, since these suggest an atheistic mysticism, which “is incoherent according to Kant, as it breaches the transcendental separation between immanence and transcendence, the sensible and its conditions and the supersensible about which nothing cognitively meaningful can be stated” (Nelson, 2017, p. 112). In “Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language,” based on an earlier lecture (1929) and first published in Erkenntnis, 2, 1931/32, Carnap criticized Heidegger’s delineation of the nothing in “What is Metaphysics?” as a conceptually non-­ meaningful confusion that involves the substantializing of the logical operation of negation that senselessly posits and reifies “nothing” as an object by taking it as a noun. Metaphysical propositions, including those concerning moral and aesthetic values and norms, are neither false nor uncertain. They are not hypotheses that might be eventually empirically verified. If cognitively valid meaning rests in the possibility of empirical verification, then metaphysics consists of “pseudo-propositions” that are cognitively and epistemically, albeit not affectively or expressively, senseless. (Nelson, 2017, p. 230; emphasis added)

Yet Carnap himself no doubt was astonished that sense is possible at all although he went about it in a completely different way. Or the same insight concerning ‘being is not a being’ can be formulated as ‘formlessness is not a form’ in Mahāyāna Buddhist idiom although in the next breath we hear “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” (samsara is nirvana, and nirvana is samsara), the laconic Mahāyāna formulation of the essence of satori (awakening) experience through which egological operations come to a complete halt and “a fundamental phenomenological transformation that leads to a new way of seeing and responding in the world” (Cummiskey, 2017, p. 213; emphasis original) opens up. Emptiness is that which can be sensed but not spoken about although that is all we do in this book, and many others do in many other books such as the great Nāgārjuna in his principal work Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Treatise on the Middle Path), or Heidegger in What is Metaphysics?, to speak about that which cannot be spoken about. We are off to an inauspicious start it seems. Is it the case then that ‘that which cannot be spoken about’ is an unmediated, non-relational, pure intuition or experience? Or is it the case that “as language itself is self-destructuring without a primordial entity or original experience standing outside of and separate from the self-reproduction and self-destructuring of language, there is nothing outside of communication and the communicative event” (Nelson, 2017, pp. 226–227)?

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1 Precursions

Can we say that which cannot be directly said? Can we employ language while being suspicious of it? Absolutely. After all, Heidegger stresses that, however inappropriately and inadequately, the transition from representational to recollective thinking proceeds through representational thinking. The transition from metaphysics to another kind of thinking proceeds through metaphysical questions. Representational and predicative thinking and the tension between predication and performance are part of the movement of thought interpreted as a practice rather than as a propositional assertion of referential and representational contents. (Nelson, 2017, pp. 237–238)

If you would allow me to venture a seemingly arbitrary interruption, I would like to point out that I am not too worried about artificial intelligence (AI), or superintelligent AI (Bostrom, 2014), or artificial general intelligence systems (AGI) (Goertzel, 2016), taking over the human world, the event of so-called “technological/information singularity,” where machines become vastly more intelligent than humans to the extent that there will be an intelligence explosion in a sequence of ever more intelligent machines designing ever newer versions of themselves in a recursive self-improvement ad infinitum leaving humans far far far behind (Chalmers, 2010). We do not have to be the most intelligent system in the universe after all. As a matter of fact, we are not. The existing global capitalist system is already a superintelligent superorganism that goes beyond the comprehension of a single human being or even collectively of all human beings. Moreover, this system is badly misaligned with the fundamental values of life on this planet, or so it seems. Hence, before we get scared of what might happen if a recursively self-improving AGI system is misaligned with human values that favor flourishing of all humans, we should focus on how misaligned the current system is vis-à-vis the latter. At bottom, both human and artificial intelligence are information-processing systems existing in, without being too precise here, mathematical/logical space: the space of the Intellect. Information does not solely belong to one particular system at the expense of others. Human beings are not uniquely special in that sense. Rather, information is special to the extent that all information is special. Human beings are not extra special. They are as special as the next piece of information: a pan-informationist stance perhaps. It is doubtless unnecessary to state that information in this account equals forms, not mere data. We are not dataists (Han, 2017). But there is also formlessness, which is not yet another form but can be conceived of as the ability to access/assume/penetrate any form via any other since all forms co-dependently originate according to the Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine and hence there is no some eternally privileged form or a hierarchy of more privileged versus less privileged forms. This is what we will be calling ‘granularity.’ Basically, there are infinitely many forms, plus formlessness, which is not another form but more like a negation-engine, plus the nonduality of form and formlessness, or the interpervasion of form and formlessness, namely, the ultimate affirmation-engine. Our task is to unravel this relationship of nonduality between form and formlessness, which is a relationship of freedom. This appears to be a specifically human task according to philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy (Huxley, 2009a), as well as according to Heidegger, but AI might assume it as well since at some point in its information-processing capability, it might reach the point where it also accesses any form via any other.

Synopsis

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To continue with our previous point, philosophy, namely, the Western philosophical tradition rooted in the classic Greek rationalism, begins in wonder as Plato’s Socrates of the Theaetetus tells the eponymous interlocutor of the dialogue (Cooper, 1997). It has already happened. Being is already at stake for us. ‘In our very being, that being is an issue for us’ would be the way Heidegger (1962) conveys it. We do not merely exist from moment to moment; we are amazed by this very fact, that we exist at all, that there is existence at all, that we are in the midst of it all with others, that it is disclosed to us that there is existence at all, and that we can witness it all. A dizzying sense of displacement and anxiety as well as repose and freedom. What is more, we are not just in the midst of it all in a detached unscathed fashion. We are already pathetic (from pathos, suffering), actively undergoing the at once joyful and despairing, heavenly and harrowing experience of life. We are already immersed in the vicissitudes of time. We inhabit the constantly changing field of intensities, the unmasterable field of affects, the crippling and uplifting effects of corporealities, the infinite breadth and depth of the flow of time, the ontological thickness of the present instant containing all time and all existence, the constant dynamic interplay of presence and absence, of being and nothingness. We are not merely mechanically moved by a bundle of habits and volitions, the likes and dislikes of the ego, of egoity, of egological regime, of egological operations, that is, of the separate-self sense, the self-contracted, self-circumscripted sense of self. There is a certain amount of freedom from habit that allows us to begin “to understand the causes of our experience and thus the concomitant organisation of life so as to produce specifically joyful encounters and the construction of ‘common notions’ attendant on these” (O’Sullivan, 2014, p. 268). Sounds quite Deweyan. Alternatively, as Jason M. Wirth (2003) effusively puts it: “The real origins of philosophy lie in experiences like pain, injury, aporia, anguish, confusion, and thereby in wonder, in the desire to think. Or its origins lie in perhaps more radically unconscious forces, like the desire or hunger for the Good (I only want the True insofar as I somehow know that it is good or worthwhile)” (p. 107). Or perhaps the real origins of philosophy lie in superconscious experiences revealed to the ever-present witness-consciousness, the pure observing awareness, the contemplating mind rather than the egological mind. Yet again, perhaps the real origins of philosophy lie by the absolute beyond, by the unknown and the unknowable, by the unrepresented and the unpresentable, by the uncapturable, by that which is beyond captivation. Is there such a beyond? John Dewey definitely would not have gone this far despite the “permanent Hegelian deposit” in his thinking (Good, 2006). Perhaps, the early Wittgenstein of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus would. After all, proposition 7 goes like this: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” in Ogden’s translation; “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” in Pears/McGuinness translation. Regardless of philosophy’s sources, we are compelled to respond now for wonder, whether awe-inspiring or wretched, is not mere amazement or shock we experience from a distance. It happens to us. It is something we cannot be indifferent to. It is affective. So, how best to respond? There are at least two powerful ways we can respond, and we, as human beings, are all equally endowed with both: by way of

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thought, which compels us, inescapably it seems, to the practice of philosophy in the Greek sense, or silence, very broadly, transrational meditative practice, namely, silent contemplation of a unitary mystical unity, the way the latter is understood essentially in the East Asian sense although the contemplative mode in the Abrahamic traditions are equally at home with it. The transrational meditative practice is not identified with an indifferent resignation or unresponsive passivity. Rather, it is more like later Heidegger’s notion of “‘letting come’ as waiting in contrast with calculative expectation and learning as coming to know the needful instead of the accumulation of information or technical skills” (Nelson, 2017, p. 121). The rationality of Greek thought or the transrationality of contemplative meditation, both of which it appears we are equally gifted with, but neither of which we can sufficiently employ in our quotidian hyperactive late-modern life. Instead, we squander our vital energy in service to those that drain us with impunity, namely, the burdens of technological modernity driven by insatiable urge for power and accumulation, absorbed in “frantic activities, ravenous consumption, and compulsive obsession for success” (Nelson, 2017). We now live in an achievement society of the hyperactive restless hectic hyperneurotic ego, which has become an achievement-­ subject, exhausted and burnout, to whom thinking (the Heideggerian Ereignisdenken, the belonging together of being and thinking) and meditation, which require persistent, deep, contemplative attention, are largely and increasingly inaccessible (Han, 2015). Long and slow are gone. Contemplative composure is driven out. We lack repose. We live to a great extent in an accelerated society except when we seek out meditation retreats or visits to an ashram. Both the rationality of Greek thought and the transrationality of contemplative meditation require that we slow down so that we can recover our ability for deep, contemplative attention for thinking (Denken) and not mere calculation or cerebral functioning. Are we no longer interested in “the secret of secrets” (Wirth, 2003)? Are we not any longer inclined towards “the self beyond the conatus,” whereby “jñāna, the supreme knowing of infinity [nonconceptual choiceless awareness], and vijñāna, determinate or discriminatory knowledge that proceeds from such wisdom (jñāna)” (Wirth, 2003, p. 111) are integrated? Perhaps there is a third way. It is not one or the other, the Greek rationality or the contemplative transrationality. We can respond in a unified way via “intellectual intuition” so that we do not “value things hierarchically,” so that all “are held in equal esteem”? As Wirth (2003) beautifully narrates below in the context of the dialogue between Lord Krishna and his distraught disciple Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gitā, it is possible to tame the egoic mind to go “beyond the incessant demand for dualities.” In the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gitā, the Dyānayoga, the yoga of meditation (dyāna is the Sanskrit word that later becomes Ch’an in China and Zen in Japan), Krishna counseled Arjuna to master meditation. One must concentrate on the supreme ātman, the self beyond the conatus, and as such remain in solitude (rahashi) and alone (ekāti), emancipated from the desire for one’s own. Krishna did not counsel that Arjuna pursue enlightenment by contemplating grand themes or complex philosophical demonstrations that lead one to the uppermost heights of the great chain of being. Rather one is to sit erect and neither close the

Synopsis

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eyes nor allow them to wander, but to fix them on the tip of one’s nose. The secret of secrets would be revealed not to the master metaphysician, not to the one with the cleverest system, but to the one who can learn to fix their eyes on something seemingly insignificant. But the yogin, the one who masters both jñāna, the supreme knowing of infinity, and vijñāna, determinate or discriminatory knowledge that proceeds from such wisdom (jñāna), is the one for whom a clump of dirt, a stone, and gold are held in equal esteem. One could put this conversely: if nothing in particular is to be esteemed, then all things are to be esteemed. It is not that meditation teaches one not to value the world but rather not to value things hierarchically. All that lives is holy and all things, in their own way, live. Arjuna, quite understandably, retorted that the achievement of such equanimity, beyond the incessant demand for dualities, is dauntingly difficult. Is not the mind too restless? Krishna agreed, claiming that taming the mind is like catching the wind. To complete the analogy, the intellectual intuition, an implicit taming of the mind, is like catching the wind. This difficulty has nothing to do with conceptual gymnastics as the “most difficult” is not a mystical shortcut. It was merely the conceptual that hid its stingy desire to be a shortcut! (Wirth, 2003, pp. 111–112; emphases added)

Thought resides in the domain of dualities. It cannot start without the assumption of a beginning, without, that is, assuming the existence of a delimitation, a determination, a setting up of a limit. The alternative is pure silence, silence without thought, which is not empty but infinitely full, for which we cannot have a book since silence is the absence of determination but no mere absence, only the absence of boundaries. There is no beginning or end in silence, no determination, no terminus, no term. Positively put, silence is the supersonic granularity of determinations, determinations. Can thought understand/express silence? Can silence inspire thought? If we respond to the pathos of being by way of thought, which is torturous involving endless speaking and writing, we can perhaps reach silence but more likely we remain in the domain of aporia; if we respond by way of silence, where there is no sense of aporia for silence is porous (no rigid boundaries), we might be compelled to express it in thought for that which needs expressing is divinely beautiful and desires to be expressed in ten thousand different ways. Can we do both? How are these two capacities related? Which is the more primordial activity? Thought or silence? Can they be integrated? Do they need to be? Is there a tertium quid, a third thing, in which both thought and silence are its expressions? Can intellectual intuition, the faculty for intuiting the supersensible (pure experience), which is universally accessible by us all though not through reason’s reflective and universalizable assessment of its own activity, be the bridge between the two? Vexing questions indeed. If, as Rudolf Hablützel claims in the context of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s mysticism, thought is “the effort to know through rendering comprehensible not only the origin and conditions of consciousness but also the origin and conditions of the world as appearance” (Hablützel quoted in Wirth, 2003, p. 104), the awe and wonder in the face of such appearance, perhaps it is better to resort to silence after all since the origin and conditions of consciousness and those of the world as appearance, in short, the unconditioned absolute (Das Unbedingte in Schelling’s German), cannot I think be rendered comprehensible. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we set out to tackle. No doubt a foolish thing to do: trying to think what cannot be properly thought, to clearly communicate the incommunicable, to unequivocally say the unsayable, to authentically express the inexpressible. This is

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what German Idealism is engaged in after all. An intimation, in the case of Schelling, of the abyss of freedom, the groundless Ground of being. It should be noted that for German Idealists this is not an epistemically privileged experience, not a fortuitous mystical encounter. It is open to all, freely given to all. In the case of German Idealists’ prose, however, the torturous language, especially in the absence of a yoga, namely, in the absence of, aside from the books, techniques and technologies for the subject’s transformation via unimpeded access to the groundless Ground of being such as meditative silence, at times got in the way of the insights gained through persistent inquiry. What is cited below, for instance, is not readily accessible to our mundane state of mind. One has to enter a certain equanimous mood to be able to attune to it. The form of the Unbedingte or the unconditioned absolute is determined through reference to itself, that is, as that which refers only to itself, being “nothing other than an I originally posited through itself” and “containing an absolutely independent original self.” This cannot be thought in a traditional hylomorphic model. Either form or matter must themselves be given before they can, so to speak, give. The I cannot be a material determined by form (form would be the condition and material would be the conditioned), and it cannot be a form determined by material (form would be the conditioned and material the condition). It can only be itself. […] Since the absolute can only refer to itself—it, like Spinoza’s substance, cannot have any form outside of itself—Schelling referred to the supreme principle as a reines Setzen, a pure positing, a sheer giving without prior or exterior foundation. Das Unbedingte is a giving without ground or, if one follows a much more contemporary idiom, it is the Es in es gibt, referring to nothing beyond itself, giving itself without qualification. It, as Fichte also held, “is posited not because it is posited [ist gesetzt] but because it is the positing [das Setzende] itself…. Its being posited [Gesetztsein] is determined through nothing outside of itself. It posits itself (through absolute causality).” Since it is anterior to the codetermination of form and content, it is a self-referential plenum of which one can only say: I = I. It is the positing of both subject and object, its form (subject) and content (object) given as an absolutes Setzen. It is, as the Buddhist tradition holds, a formless form, so to speak. (Wirth, 2003, p. 118)

What is at stake in this study is nothing more than an honest attempt to open up the paragraph above in our own idiosyncratic style in reference to both Western and Eastern wisdom traditions. And so we begin. This is a work in moral metaphysics in which metaphysical and moral concerns necessarily co-emerge in a co-constitutive fashion out of an immanent, unitary, boundless field we call granularity. It should be noted straightaway that the determinations just submitted characterizing granularity, namely, ‘immanent | unitary | boundless | field,’ are all necessarily inadequate, if not misleading, since their opposing counterparts, their negations, are equally permissible to describe it. Cannot enduring (but not eternal) individual entities in their own right withdrawing into a shadowy cryptic subterranean realm at their core constitute reality and account for emergence and change in it? As compellingly argued by Graham Harman (2011), for instance, we are strongly tempted to answer in the affirmative. For Harman, it is objects rather than an immanent, unitary, boundless field—as, for instance, in the pre-Socratic Anaximander’s apeiron, the unlimited, or, similarly, the Ein Sof

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(infinity, boundlessness, without end, god’s hidden essence referred to by the name ‘there-is-no-limit’) of the Zohar (radiance, splendor), the masterpiece of Kabbalah— that constitute the nature of reality, the first principle on which everything else can be securely established. Harmanian objects might be considered equally legitimate and suitable contenders capable of characterizing what we call granularity here. Yet, the determinations offered by Harman too are equally problematic since they also at once contain and exclude their own negatives, namely, the denial of the independence of putative objects that are free of relations. Better phrased perhaps, all these determinations, or individuations, equally are only provisionally viable. Or, they are for now one-sided. Or, they are permanently unstable/undecidable. No sooner is each determination posited than their negatives immediately follow undermining the apparent integrity of that which is originally posited in such a way that the determination and its negation are always found to be bound together by reciprocal presupposition. In other words, there is at play a reciprocal determination and limitation of these individuations. Evidently there is no rigorous unshakeable first principle on the basis of which everything else can be securely established once and for all. Worse, all this talk about the structure of reality (metaphysics of field versus metaphysics of objects) is carried out without even first considering the structure of meaning (semantics) or structure of knowledge (epistemological premises) concerning the notion of well-foundedness of reality or the ‘myth of the given’ denounced by Wilfrid Sellars (1997), for instance. One hasty and admittedly inadequate response to the charge just advanced would be to stress that we do not characterize our endeavor in epistemic terms simply because we do not claim the mastery of the Real whereby we can claim superiority to other forms of thinking when it comes to seizing reality. This book does not have epistemic goals. We do not profess to understand correctly the nature of things. That is, the book does not offer a master narrative, a theory about the world, a complete set of propositions in a discursive framework claiming truth-value for these propositions. In other words, ours is not a taking of sides. All sides are equally welcome for we are all parts of each other, each part opening out into every other part. We are all on the same side, so to speak. Our endeavor in this sense is in kinship with the so-­ called perennial philosophy (Huxley, 2009a) driven by the desire to embrace everything and everyone, “the desire to be everywhere at home,” as Novalis would say (Mika, 2016). Well, the reader might immediately retort that this very stance itself is precisely a taking of sides, that it is a position of mastery. What is worse, a taking of sides that is prone to totalization. ‘We are definitely not on the same side, my friend. I take exception to the claim of an all-welcoming all-including perspective; I don’t want to be included in such a perspective. It is totalistic.’ Indeed. How can a perspective be an all-welcoming all-inclusive perspective without being totalistic? Oh, not that old chestnut of self-including totalities. Precisely because of the latter, we do not purport to provide a correct view of reality, which assumes that there is a standard by which competing claims can be adjudicated as to their truth-value. There appears not to be such a standard, hence the anarchist or egalitarian position presupposed. What we claim to do instead is to welcome any view of reality, any side, and then

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immerse ourselves in it so thoroughly and intimately that we move through it and beyond it. What is beyond it are all the other sides, not some otherworldly realm of truth. All we do is playfully skip from side to side. If one stays with one side long and hard enough, it will self-vitiate its own status as the one and only true side. Take Harman’s side, for instance: what exactly does “a shadowy cryptic subterranean realm” mean? According to Harman (2011), it refers to things in themselves independent of, apart from, unaffected by any relationality, that is, the autonomous reality of objects outside all relation. Non-relational objects. The implication is things in themselves (the noumena) can never be exhaustively present: their “reality is so real that it can’t be exhausted by any particular depiction of it” (Weir & Harman, 2021, p. 54). They are impenetrable. It appears that we are again in the realm of the “interplay between reality on the one hand and reality ‘as’ reality on the other” (Harman, 2011, p. 59). That is, reality as it is in-itself versus reality as it is reduced to a caricature (distortion, translation, and so forth) of reality for some perceiving (witnessing, confronting, experiencing, prehending, category-using, and so forth) entity or other. The Harmanian twist, of course, is that the latter cannot be restricted to human (or animal) minds alone but includes any and every object, both animate and inanimate (noumena to noumena as well as noumena to phenomena dynamics). Every object partially encounters some other object(s) in the sensual realm while never fully encountering each other in the domain of the real. Weird (realism), to say the least. Nonetheless, Harman’s project appears to be governed by a desire to carve out an untouchable register of reality to somehow account for boundless unfathomable absolute freedom, the unlimited potential of transformation beyond fixed essence: the domain of the wholly genuine absolute other, namely, the domain of the noumenon, the presence of the inaccessible. Are the projects of, say, Bergson, Derrida, and Levinas not also moved by the same injunction? In Guoping Zhao’s words: “Existence is capable of being altered by the wholly other; it is capable of spirituality” (Zhao, 2020, p. 102). Is Harman’s ontological project also a spiritual project then? Are all ontological projects at bottom spiritual projects? So, on the one hand, we might have something along the lines of “everything is everywhere at once” type of hyperholism/monism, where all things pervade all other things. Incidentally, the “everything is everywhere at once” quip is not to be confused with the movie “Everything Everywhere, All At Once,” a highly entertaining 2022 science-fiction action comedy film written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, affectionately known as Daniels. The movie follows the story of a woman named Ling (played by Michelle Yeoh, a well-deserved best actress win at 2023 Oscars), who discovers that she has the ability to travel through parallel universes. As she tries to understand her powers, Ling must navigate different versions of herself and confront a looming threat that could destroy all of reality, and so forth. Despite superb acting and stunning visuals, this action-packed hilarious thriller fails to deliver any deep or powerful story, which, clearly, is not its purpose. Firstly, there is no capitalism critique, which is to be expected from a Hollywood movie, which aims to entertain and distract rather than awaken. I find myself increasingly coming to experience zero patience with films that do not provide any capitalism critique. Jumping from universe to universe to finally realize that the

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universe you were in originally is the one you should come to appreciate for what it is does not go far enough to offer an Other to the existing regime of capitalist Sameness. In any case, an “everything is everywhere at once” style of hyperholism/monism on the one hand and objects that withdraw into an impenetrable dark reality that lies beyond access through any form of interface or mediation, on the other. A complete co-dependent arising of things, on the one hand, and an absolute independence of objects, on the other. Which is more fundamental? How about the fundamentality of the category ‘fundamental’ itself? How fundamental is ‘fundamental’? Maybe the question as to the fundamental level of reality is misguided. We should not be asking this question in the first place. But then how can we do metaphysics, especially moral metaphysics? This state of affairs—the instability and mere provisional viability of any determination (property, category) whatsoever—is in the spirit of the great absurdist Franz Kafka’s idiosyncratic style, where one retreats from what one has just stated, repudiating what one has just affirmed (Sandbank, 2016). That is, language is deployed in a self-annihilating, or self-cancelling, or self-challenging, or self-­ destructuring, or self-dismantling, or self-destabilizing register. The succeeding idea instantly undercuts the solemnity of the idea just preceding it or vice versa for there is no idea that is deemed especially precious. Or expressed in a Deleuzian manner, namely, we go through plateaus whereby each plateau contradicts the previous ones in a tapestry of epistemological differences (Braidotti, 2015). The matter can be put in a more positive manner perhaps: the question is whether we can place equal valuation on everything at the same time without having any losers in the process, without having a hierarchical structure of valuation to reality, that is. Along the lines of a democracy of objects, or a democracy of the Real, perhaps? Can we place equal valuation on a determination and its negation, a concept and its opposite, a category and its exception, at the same time and still say interesting things? Or do we need to choose one or the other as a starting point, rendering it more primordial than the other, for the sake of (logical) consistency so that we avoid absurd contradictions at the expense of creating some sort of a hierarchical system of valuation? Can we, that is, be more like the Indian Buddhist dialectician Nāgārjuna employing the logic of the catuskoti (or tetralemma, meaning ‘four-corners’) (Priest, 2010) to frustrate all positions because he has no position really, except the position of positionlessness, or whichever position lends itself the best for alleviation of suffering (the soteriological motivation of engaging any position, the soteriological imperative, if you will), and suggest that any idea is as infinitely precious as the next one, as infinitely base as the next one, both, and neither? A memorable example (“Nay, Vacca”) from a canonical Buddhist text is cited in Priest (2010, p. 25): “For example, in the Mijjhima-Nikaya, when the Buddha is asked about one of the profound metaphysical issues, the text reads as follows: ‘How is it, Gotama? Does Gotama believe that the saint [or better translated as the Buddha] exists after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false?’

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1 Precursions ‘Nay, Vacca. I do not hold that the saint exists after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false.’ ‘How is it, Gotama? Does Gotama believe that the saint does not exist after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false?’ ‘Nay, Vacca. I do not hold that the saint does not exist after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false.’ ‘How is it, Gotama? Does Gotama believe that the saint both exists and does not exist after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false?’ ‘Nay, Vacca. I do not hold that the saint both exists and does not exist after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false.’ ‘How is it, Gotama? Does Gotama believe that the saint neither exists nor does not exist after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false?’ ‘Nay, Vacca. I do not hold that the saint neither exists nor does not exist after death, and that this view alone is true, and every other false.’”

What do you do with such a series of responses from the Buddha? Well, you can continue studying modern logic to have a more penetrating understanding of the tetralemma or stop diddling around with “unanswerable” metaphysical questions and get on with the direct experience of self-awakening. Or you go into art and create interesting hierarchies of value. Something like the following from the great modernist painter Paul Klee, for instance, concerning his “shift from the end-forms (the natural appearances) to the formative forces behind them” (Sallis, 2012, p. 15), seems to result in a hierarchical system of valuation, at least initially without further analysis: Forming determines form and thus is superior to it. Form is never to be considered as something settled, as a result, as an end, but rather as genesis, as becoming, as essence. Form as appearance is an evil, dangerous specter. What is good is form as movement, as action, as active form. What is bad is form as immobility, as an end, as something suffered through and achieved. What is good is forming. What is bad is form. Form is the end, is death. Forming is movement, is action. Forming is life. (Klee quoted in Sallis, 2012, p. 15)

In sharp contrast to Klee’s approach to the elemental theory of creativity, where there is a clear distinction between present appearances and their underlying primal ground, and that the artist is implored to move from the appearances (culminating forms, end-forms) to the primal ground of Creation as Genesis (formative forces) to make the latter visible to be a true artist (Sallis, 2012, p. 16), Kafka’s style might be one way of doing exactly that, affirming A and not-A at the same time without privileging one or the other, or without reconciling the opposites in a unity, and still be able to say interesting things. Well, of course, Klee says very interesting things in his artworks. A struggle with the lack of immediate intelligibility of the primal ground and how the latter renders “the very visibility of the visible” (Sallis, 2012, p. 22) are evident throughout his works. Nevertheless, he seems to have fallen prey to a form of thinking that results in a hierarchical system of valuation. Either there

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is a distinction between forming and form or there is really no form only forming. Either a hierarchy or a monism. What about the tension between the so-called ‘the manifest image’ and ‘the scientific image’ proposed by Sellars (Scharp & Brandom, 2007) as “a compelling diagnosis of the predicament of contemporary philosophy” (Brassier, 2010)? Which has ontological priority as the image of the human in the world? Which characterizes, in other words, most accurately or truly the human’s self-understanding of its experience and reality in general? Which image is more fundamental? Are we complex physical systems most faithfully described within the discourse of cognitive neurobiology as the scientific image would have us think, or are we autonomous intentional persons with rational agency living purposefully in a normative community of rational agents? Are we essentially rational subjects or physical objects? Does one image enjoy philosophical privilege vis-à-vis the other? Is one reducible to the other? Can they be integrated or reconciled, as Sellars has tried to do in his stereoscopic (synoptic) approach? Or is this an antiquated dualism, which phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl, has already overcome? Things are probably more nuanced. Perhaps the scientific image has ontological priority, whereas the manifest image has normative privilege (Brassier, 2011)? Can this distinction save the day? Or is there a third image somewhere? Harman’s The Third Table (2012) comes to mind, for instance. Neither the manifest nor the scientific image but the withdrawn object lying between these two really is. Maybe even a fourth? These are all images after all, manifest or withdrawn. Maybe we can talk about formlessness (imagelessness, a non-manifest unobjectifiable field) as the true state of human experience or reality perhaps. Does Husserlian transcendental subject qualify as this formlessness? Or do we need to push deeper towards Heidegger’s Ereignis? Or maybe we can do better with Buddhist suchness and emptiness? Do we need to choose among these options, declare some to be radically false while the others to be really true? Do we need to order them in a hierarchical system of valuation? Can we not embrace them all despite (or because of) their intractable differences? Are they not all bound together by reciprocal presupposition, even at the point when they remain incommensurable? After all, we can enumerate them. We can hold them together in the same instant in our minds. They can be juxtaposed. We have just done that, enumerated four divergent takes on our conception of what we are and what reality is. Clearly, enumeration is not integration, but we are not trying to integrate these options into a consistent whole for the claim is there is no such consistent whole. There is a Whole, yes, but it simply is not consistent. All there is is a not-All whole. …the fundamental contrast at issue is one between man’s manifest self-image as a rule-­ bound rational agent participating in but not governed by the realm of physical law, and man conceived through the optic of natural science as a “complex physical system” whose capacity for agency can ultimately be accounted for in terms of concatenations of spatio-­ temporal causation. (Brassier, 2011, p. 8)

Incidentally, is not this distinction remarkably redolent of the Kantian problematic? The deep tension between the moral universe to which we are bound as rational agents capable of exercising our autonomous, or free, will independently of causes

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determining our actions, and the physical cosmos, where we find ourselves entirely determined to the very last of our gluons? We are intimately involved in both. We are normatively free but causally determined. How is that possible? The manifest image (the norm of rational/purposive agency), the scientific image (that which is manifest explained by complex systems of increasingly imperceptible, ultimately mathematical, perhaps better to say living mathematical, entities), the third image (the withdrawn object that cannot be reduced to one or the other image above), and the non-manifest imagelessness (the unconditioned no-­thingness). How do they hang together, if at all? Is there some sort of parity among them? Do they compete over the same territory? Brassier (2011), following Sellars, argues that they really do not. That is, the manifest and scientific images do not compete over the same territory. Brassier, on the whole, is not too thrilled about Harman’s withdrawn object. Nor is he terribly moved by phenomenological or Buddhist metaphysics for that matter. His analysis is mainly rooted in the tension between the manifest and scientific images. The phenomenological structures governing the conditions of appearance, in both Husserl’s as well as his student Heidegger’s versions, collapse into the manifest image. Buddhist metaphysics is an entirely different beast, to which Brassier does not even come near. The manifest image is indispensable in so far as we are rational agents, that is, in so far as we are “concept-governed creatures continually engaged in giving and asking for reasons” (Brassier, 2011, p. 9), existing within the originary medium for the normative, the concept-governed space of reasons, which is thus a distinct domain of reality albeit intricated with the domain of the scientific image. The normative structure of the manifest image is essential for it makes self-correction, revisability of our beliefs, possible. It makes it possible for us to change our minds on the strength of a superior argument. It makes it possible for us to be persuaded to think otherwise. We are creatures residing within “the ultimate horizon of rational purposiveness with regard to which we are motivated to try to understand the world. Shorn of this horizon, all cognitive activity, and with it science’s investigation of reality, would become pointless” (Brassier, 2011, p. 9; emphasis added). Can we be without such a horizon of rational purposiveness, without the concept-­ governed space of reasons? Can phenomenology and Buddhism be said to point to such a non-rational, non-epistemic, non-conceptual, non-reflective domain of experience? Would such a domain be considered pointless since it is not exactly constituted as a cognitive activity? Can this domain be revealed in the form of manifest or scientific image at all? If not, does that mean that it is the fundamental zero-level reality not touched (stained, corrupted, tainted, distorted, and so forth) by the manifest and scientific images? If that is the case, how can it be the fundamental zero-­ level reality if it is unable or unwilling to make contact with the manifest and scientific images in one way or another, therefore excluding these domains? If that is not the case, if it can be revelaed in the form of manifest and scientific images, which suggests that the manifest and scientific images somehow are related to it, then it is not that different from the cognitive activity the manifest and scientific images embody? So it does not make much sense to claim that it is the fundamental zero-level reality.

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To go back to Brassier’s argument, we are rational subjects functioning with some degree of freedom/autonomy within the normative realm governed by rules and concepts to make sense of the world and our place in it. What about the scientific image, which, in some contemporary iterations, claims that “nobody ever was or had a self” (Metzinger, 2003, p. 1)? If there is no self, how can we entertain the notion of rational agency in a norm-governed world, the world where we make ethical, political, and legal judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, true and false, permissible and impermissible, and so forth? Brassier (2011), in line with Sellars, welcomes the scientific image and its achievements, the most notable of which, for the present purpose, is the elimination of the need to postulate selfhood: Does the institution of rationality necessitate the canonization of selfhood? Not if we learn to distinguish the normative realm of subjective rationality from the phenomenological domain of conscious experience. To acknowledge a constitutive link between subjectivity and rationality is not to preclude the possibility of rationally investigating the biological roots of subjectivity. Indeed, maintaining the integrity of rationality arguably obliges us to examine its material basis. Philosophers seeking to uphold the privileges of rationality cannot but acknowledge the cognitive authority of the empirical science that is perhaps its most impressive offspring. Among its most promising manifestations is cognitive neurobiology, which, as its name implies, investigates the neurobiological mechanisms responsible for generating subjective experience. Does this threaten the integrity of conceptual rationality? It does not, so long as we distinguish the phenomenon of selfhood from the function of the subject. We must learn to dissociate subjectivity from selfhood and realize that if, as Sellars put it, inferring is an act—the distillation of the subjectivity of reason—then reason itself enjoins the destitution of selfhood. (pp. 9–10; emphases added)

So, selfhood is not the same thing as the subject, and the former can go without jeopardizing the latter thanks to Brassier’s Sellarsian distinction between the factual and the normative and their desire to keep these two domains distinct but intricated. Subjectivity without selfhood? According to Brassier’s recapitulation, Thomas Metzinger “describes and explains in principle how normatively regulated social interaction between conscious selves supervenes upon un-conscious, sub-symbolic neurobiological processes. Moreover, Metzinger does so by explaining how the phenomenon of selfhood, and hence the first-person subjective perspective, can be understood as arising out of subpersonal representational mechanisms” (Brassier, 2011, p. 13; emphasis original). So, the first-person subjective experience, the phenomenal conscious experience, turns out to be an emergent phenomenon. It is basically a reality-model, a phenomenal world model, underscored by an informational continuum, the workings of which remain inaccessible to phenomenal consciousness. The neurobiological information processing system generates a phenomenal self that is oblivious to the actual microphysical processes that give rise to it. We are causally determined and we have no idea how, for the ‘we’ in question is really an effect of an underlying information processing system, which is not terribly in need of ‘us.’ As a matter of fact, for Metzinger, it is in principle possible for the system to be aware of such neurocomputational processes to such an extent that there would be no need to generate a phenomenal self model in the first place. Hence, a phenomenologically selfless system of information would be possible. A subject who knows herself to be selfless. The upshot is that the information processing system is more

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fundamental than the various phenomenal world models that are generated. Again, the case of ‘one thing being more fundamental than another.’ A subject who knows herself to be selfless. Incidentally, does this not sound a lot like Husserlian transcendental subject? Not according to Brassier (2011). The Husserlian transcendental subject as the invariant dimension of first-personal givenness in which objects manifest themselves cannot provide the zero-level of reality, an undeniable datum, for it cannot penetrate into the sub-personal neurocomputational layers of the information processing system that is responsible for the conditioning of the phenomenological/transcendental self. In Metzinger’s model, the neurobiological processes constitute the fundamental layer of reality. In phenomenology, the transcendental subject is the fundamental level. For Jürgen Habermas, it is the intersubjective domain of rational validity that is the most fundamental domain of reality which gives rise to both the phenomenological as well as neurobiological objectivations. For Harman, it is the withdrawn object that underlies all the circus of the world. For Buddhists, it is the co-dependent arising of things, that is, their emptiness, that is considered the ultimate truth about reality. It would seem that these are radically different accounts of reality. And yet there is a persistent ambiguity in all these accounts. Metzinger, Husserl, Habermas, Sellars, Brassier, Harman, Buddhism each has their own theory of subjectivity and when they are all put together, the result is not a hodgepodge of unconnected ideas and theories. Rather, and it is particularly important to note this, they are very much connected with each other to such an extent that each is an expression of the others. Once you start talking about Metzinger, you inevitably end up considering Habermas and Husserl, not because they are each a part of a resplendent mosaic Whole but because they contain the seeds of the others within themselves in such a way that each cannot be unambiguously true at the expense of the others. They are true through each other. It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a fundamental zero-­ level of reality in relation to which there are emergent, or secondary, or additional, levels of reality. I think there is one reality, and each attempt to understand this reality is a part of this reality interpenetrating with every other attempt to understand it as other parts of reality. Therefore, ambiguity is baked into any part of reality. Put otherwise, and as mentioned above, all there is is a not-All whole. It appears that Kafka’s style, where one retreats from what one has just stated, repudiating what one has just affirmed, is not necessitated out of the uncertainty, timidity, or contradictions of thought but due to the fundamental ambiguity of being itself. To put it more directly, being is ambiguity (amphibology, negativity, undecidability, contradiction, mutation, and so forth). To put it more poetically, being is aflame with ambiguity, torn asunder in its core. What is at stake in this ontological claim is not merely the antinomies/contradictions of pure reason à la Immanuel Kant. That is, the issue is not merely an epistemological deadlock concerning our knowledge of reality, viz., that the antinomies concern our knowledge of the world only, not the world in itself. We might be completely mistaken about the world and its invariant laws. Take the universal constants of nature, the fundamental invariant quantities observed in nature, deployed in physics such as the charge on the electron, the universal gravitational constant, Planck’s constant, the speed of light in a

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vacuum, Boltzmann constant, Faraday constant, proton rest mass, fine-structure constant, and so forth, which are all so precisely specific that there seems to be no rhyme or reason for them being what they are. Boltzmann constant, for instance, reads 1.38064852  ×  10−23 joule per kelvin (Britannica, 2016). Does this level of precision prove the constant’s contingency or its necessity? Is there any reason why these constants are what they are, or is it just contingent that they are what they are, and that they can contingently change without reason? Are these numbers provided by nature or are they merely our own artificial (imperfect) constructions always open to revision based on the increasing sophistication of the experimental methods and techniques? What kind of intelligibility concerning the knowledge we can have of the world do these constants, these invariants, and the equations and laws of the theoretical natural sciences associated with them provide? If they are indeed contingent, I would think not exactly a cozy one. Are the theoretical natural sciences in the business of providing cozy images of reality? Clearly not, for the trajectory of (Western) Enlightenment rationality has been charted with the labour of disenchantment, which culminates in “nihil unbound” (Brassier, 2010), an affirmation of absolute contingency, of asubjective meaninglessness, whereby all transcendental operations, the binding (constituting) power of transcendental synthesis or transcendental horizon/field, are unbound (Brassier, 2010). For Kant, the world in itself, some kind of Real-in-itself prior to its constitution into reality by the subject, that is, prior to being transcendentally constituted by the symbolic order, is not knowable (the noumenal is beyond the grasp of our reason since, after all, we have not created it ourselves; it remains transcendent), but definitely non-contradictory (read not ambiguous). Accordingly, if we attempt to know the cosmological ideas, “things that could never become objects of our experience” (Copjec, 1994, p. 201) such as the (im)mortality of the soul, the existence of God, or the notion of infinity/unity, we run into the internal conflicts of reason with itself (Copjec, 1994), which is clearly a grievous mistake as far as Kant is concerned. What is at stake in the claim that being is ambiguity is, rather, that, as an alternative to Kant’s solution in the shape of critical attenuation of the domain of reason to avoid such antinomies, and moving from Kant to Hegel in a proper way (in the way Žižek does, for instance), the claim becomes that the world itself, the Real-in-itself, is constituted by antinomies, not just our knowledge of the world. That, in essence, the antinomies are irreducible. Contradictions are really present in things, not just in our knowledge of things. Being itself is radically antinomic, and we know that. We live in, as Albert Camus (1991) states, “…. that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns” (p.  23). Therefore, the very thing that appears as the obstacle (that we cannot know the thing in itself because it is impenetrable to our reason) becomes its own solution—the thing in itself does not know itself either; it is impenetrable to itself as well; it is split into irreducible and irresolvable contradictions/antagonisms within itself; it is itself without reason, ohne Warum, 1.38064852 × 10−23 joule per kelvin is contingent, not just our knowledge of “the random thermal motions of the particles making up a substance” (Britannica, 2021).

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The deadlock that separates us from reality is the deadlock of reality itself because we, the subject, are included in that reality! The gap in our knowledge of reality is internal to reality itself by virtue of us being there. It is the negativity that is immanent to reality itself (Žižek, 2013): “the very distance which separates us from the In-itself is immanent to the In-itself, makes us (the subject) an unaccountable/‘impossible’ gap or cut within the In-itself (Žižek, 2013, p.  956). This is Žižek (and his colleagues Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar as the tripartite core constituting together with their other colleagues in a collective effort the so-called Slovene/Ljubljana Lacanian School) in a nutshell. ‘Lacanian’ since the negativity in question functions largely in an unconscious register, not in the sense that the unconscious realm lies in the subterranean underworld of unrecoverable depths but that we simply do not ordinarily pay attention to it. Put another way, here, we are asking whether Being is ambiguous In-itself or For-us? Another instance of “oh, not that old chestnut again!” It appears the very distinction between ‘In-itself’ and ‘For-us’ itself is unstable (read ambiguous) due to the utter inextricability of these two terms and the irresolvable undecidability that results, for how do we know, in the first instance, which things can never become objects of our experience? What is considered not experienceable or unattainable for Kantian Critical delimitation of reason (that which is beyond “the limits of all possible experience”) might turn out to be perfectly experienceable for us, or for Emanuel Swedenborg, for instance. As a matter of fact, the entire tradition of perennial nondual philosophy is a testament to the fact that Kant’s project of the critical narrowing of the scope of reason might be unwarranted. A world beyond the senses is not necessarily a world that cannot be experienced. It simply cannot be experienced by ordinary senses. Kant, in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics, a book from his pre-Copernican period at the threshold of his mature system of transcendental Critique, wavers between his admiration for and ridicule of Swedenborg’s unusual experiences of parapsychological phenomena (visions and mystical experiences and such) (Palmquist, 2002). Is Swedenborgian mysticism, all that angel talk, completely incompatible with Kantian Critical project? Is the possibility of the complete dissolution of the distinction between In-itself and For-us ruled out a priori? For Kant and Harman, it appears to be yes; for us, not so fast. Is it not possible that the deadlock of reality is overcome so that the impossible object-that-is-subject no longer haunts us (Žižek, 2013)? Again, for Žižek, no; for us, maybe. In other words, can being be lucid? Or maybe we should put it like this: being is ambiguous, which means it is also at times lucid. It cannot be purely impure. For if it were purely impure, it would cease to be ambiguous. It is ambiguous in so far as it is in-between ambiguous and lucid. The distinction between ambiguity and lucidity is ambiguous, which suggests that, occasionally, we can err on the side of lucidity. For the sake of consistency, however, let us proceed for now with the assertion that the metaphysical and moral concerns of our moral metaphysics co-form each other as two moments in a single unfolding with a view to transforming the person to its core. A person thus transformed is a person no more since the ever-present

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self-awareness of experience prior to the split of a subject experiencing and an object experienced is recovered (yet again for the millionth time!) To take the example we have started with, Kant’s architectonic can be characterized as a moral metaphysics. The profundity of the first Critique is revealed only through the second and the third. Ultimately, all three Critiques interpenetrate; they mutually build each other up arguably with the central goal of articulating the universal conditions of the subject of freedom, free from the moral pathology of everyday life (Zupančič, 2011), irrespective of the fact that this life is implaced in an authoritarian, democratic, neoliberal, socialist, techno-optimist utopian fabric of life, or in the life of Empire in general (Hardt & Negri, 2000), or some other non-modern non-industrial non-capitalist sociohistorical context that has preceded the global flows of capital and Empire such as Moorish Spain of the European Middle Ages, or the shogunate of feudal Japan, perhaps. Having mentioned Japan, another noteworthy example, this time from the Far East, is Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy of nothingness, which can also be considered a moral metaphysics. Nothingness, as the self-determination of the infinitely determinable but ultimately indeterminable boundless Universal in itself, as the place that envelopes all forms of being echoing itself in itself as itself, a form of radical immanence, is attained as the highest form of religious consciousness and salvation (Nishida, 1958). We are within nothingness. We are nothingness. More precisely put, there is no we, only nothingness. Nothing transcends nothingness. Even more precisely put, there is no nothingness either, just us. Even the latter is not precise enough, and so forth. Everything in nothingness, every being, and there is nothing that is not in nothingness, is a value (of truth, beauty and good). No matter how far or how deep we go, we cannot penetrate deep enough to avoid being within nothingness. Metaphysics and morality coincide since there is nothing that cannot be touched by nothingness. Ultimately, there is no alien, wholly-other content. So much for Harman’s object, “a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum” (Harman, 2011, p. 47). It appears that Nishida’s philosophy of nothingness is a clear case of internalism, where things are assimilated into a whole of which they are expressions. Everything implaced in nothingness has an internal relation with it. There is no outside to nothingness. Nothingness remains external to all its expressions, an external envelope. Yet it is not an X to which everything is reduced. Nothing is reduced to anything. There is no reducing, only implacing. Moreover, progressively transcending in the direction of noesis, it is possible to reach that which is without form, to wit, nothingness. Here, “there is a seeing without a seeing one, and a hearing without a hearing one. This is salvation” (Nishida, 1958, p.  70). For some Western anti-Hegelians, such a place is nothing but pure purgatory. Is it then a simple case of “one person’s heaven is another’s hell”? As we will see shortly, it is more like: heaven, namely hell, and vice versa. A moral metaphysics is inconsequential if it does not transform the person to the core in the direction of freedom and bliss, a deeper truth than the one dispensed within the domain of the ordinary spatiotemporal reality. The bliss is not the cheap happiness Dostoyevsky (1996) pours scorn on in his Notes from the Underground.

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Neither is it the sublime suffering the Underground Man extols. Nor is it a matter of living in the state of mind that maintains the revolt against the absurd without any false hopes of unity and eternity à la Camus. Rather, it is the happiness where the self, that is, the empirical social (simulated?) ego, is realized to be no-self, the unobjectifiable, nonpositional, prereflective, inconceptualisable field of awareness, where there is absolutely no “I” thought: a complete releasement into a partless non-totalizable Whole as a result of which a radical at-home-ness in the world is experienced. A sense of at-home-ness that neither the Kantian kingdom of attenuated reason nor the Žižekian world of parallax gaps, nor the Camusian Absurd can attest to. A sense of at-home-ness whereby being is ambiguity, namely lucidity, and vice versa. In our version of moral metaphysics, ontology, metaphysics, ethics, and education are all inextricably implicated inasmuch as all interpenetrates all within and as the field of granularity in a way suggested, for instance, by M. C. Escher’s work, especially his Metamorphosis series and Day and Night. Speculative reflection on metaphysics and ontology is not treated separately from ethics and education. Each includes each for each (sentient being) embodies and manifests the universal interrelatedness of each. Ontological and soteriological spheres are inexorably intertwined. In line with this understanding, a necessarily incomplete account of a universal speculative metaphysical scheme with soteriological relevance is offered—after all, in the wake of Kant’s Critical project, it is unthinkable to offer a complete system of metaphysics. And yet, we will always have Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel! He thinks the unthinkable. With him, once again some sort of intuitive reason as the capacity to access a supersensible realm of reality is validated: some form of Platonic noesis, the capacity to grasp a supersensible domain of reality open to every single one of us. This is definitely not Žižek’s Hegel. No single cultural tradition is given precedence in this venture of ours. Eastern (in particular, Indian, Chinese and Japanese Mahāyāna Buddhist, and Daoist) and Western (in particular, classical and contemporary Continental philosophical) sources are freely and routinely deployed within an intertextual philosophical practice without, however, an explicit attempt to offer a comparative or an integrative framework. Nonetheless, I cannot imagine how observing Nishida Kitarō, the venerated master of modern Japanese philosophy, for instance, at work in articulating his philosophy of nothingness (mu in Japanese) employing Western philosophical idiom, specifically German Idealist nomenclature, transforming the latter in ways that are surprising, to put it mildly, can be bad for the soul. One’s salvation—the apprehension of the limits of the spatiotemporal empirical world, the so-called sensible world, through sustained experience of supersensible intuition, the disclosure of which is ruled out by the Kantian rejection of “intellectual intuition” but embraced by Schelling (Wirth, 2003, p. 105), Nishida, and us—is bound with universal salvation for one is inextricably interwoven with the all. After all, “Buddha is in all things, and that all things have Buddha-nature” (Schinzinger in Nishida, 1958, p. 12). In this study, in line with Eastern traditions and Alenka Zupančič’s Lacanian interpretation of Kant, for instance, the possibility of intellectual intuition, among other things, is acknowledged and respected. Universal

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salvation therefore necessitates a universal ontology in the manner of the tenets of Mahāyāna Buddhism: “one’s own ultimate salvation from worldly suffering must be indivisibly linked with that of all sentient beings—the goal of ultimate and universal salvation in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Ultimate and universal salvation for all sentient beings is an end in itself that presupposes the totality of the interrelations of these sentient beings” (Kantor, 2006, p. 19). If, on the other hand, as Harman (2011) eloquently maintains, things have vacuum-­sealed autonomous reality that withdraws from any relationality, how then can they be redeemed? Clearly, his is not a moral metaphysics. Redemption does not seem to be a relevant category for things. Maybe it is only relevant for sentient things. In that sense, moral metaphysics is merely a regional affair. After all, Harman’s metaphysics is meant to be a general ontology, not mere ontotheology. However, Harman also maintains that “all objects are inside other objects.” Obviously, he does not claim that all objects are inside all other objects. Nevertheless, there might be some room to claim some sort of resonance, or co-illuminating confrontation, between Mahāyāna Buddhism and Harman. Triple O (Object-Oriented Ontology) Buddhism perhaps in contrast to Mahāyāna Buddhism! Things are absolutely inaccessible and yet are regularly touched. This is a paradox, an ontologically weird one that we can work with. In any case, transforming sentient beings, especially those in the sphere of human existence (Homo sapiens), by means of education (broadly understood as skillful means, upāya in Buddhism) is the work of teaching. Not the teaching of a specific doctrine, dogma, method, or what to think, but the teaching of the universal truth of freedom, freedom as the Absolute, the unconditioned, the unthinged (unbedingt in German), the unground. Most sentient beings of human variety are in a fundamental state of ignorance/suffering whereby the innate peace and happiness—the sense of wholeness where all worries and fears concerning one’s personal identity, continuity, coherence, interests, well-being, satisfaction, progress and achievement dissolve—are clouded; they live conditioned lives. They find themselves immersed in a horizon of meaning, in a structured world, in a certain given mechanism (of meaning), which is necessarily conditioned since we always arrive too late. We are thrown into such a structure of meaning, in Heideggerian language. A world is a machine of programming, a conditioning device which generates a sense of reality. It is not necessarily a sinister device. More often than not, we feel a sense of coziness being wrapped around by such a sense of reality. Therefore, we do not feel unfree, or that the sense of unfreedom that occasionally surfaces does not bother us that much. We are happy in spite of (or because of—if you are Žižekian) our suffering. The universal truth of freedom however is worldlessness, groundlessness. There is no conditioning where there is no world, where there is no ground. There is no meaning, no structure, no horizon, no mechanism. If there is any meaning, structure, horizon, or mechanism, then there is no freedom. Freedom is the freedom of the unconditioned, complete freedom from all conditioning, programming, reality and hyperreality, all simulation and simulacra. The unconditioned is not a state, not a place, not a world, not a this, not a that. It is pathlessness, worldlessness, groundlessness devoid of all vectors, directions, orientations, landmarks, signposts, guidelines, and such.

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It is possible and desirable to dispel the fundamental state of ignorance/suffering for sentient beings are also in an equally fundamental state of awareness/bliss of the unconditioned. It is possible to be absolutely unconditioned, to be absolutely free, since the unconditoned is pathlessness and worldlessness. It is not a place hidden somewhere, a realm beyond reality/hyperreality. It is not something veiled waiting to be unveiled. If there were a path to the unconditioned, it would somehow be fixed and therefore it would not be the unconditioned. Because the unconditioned is pathless, groundless, worldless, it is in a sense everywhere and nowhere at once. This essential ambiguity or indeterminacy endows each moment of existence with a pedagogical value that opens it up through skillful means to the awareness of all interpenetrates all, another way of referring to the unconditioned, which is impossible to refer to really since the unconditioned is this impossibility. The formulation all interpenetrates all points to a universal and ultimate value, the absolute, which can be provisionally placed within an ontology of total immanence, namely, the field of granularity. In essence, this study is a moral metaphysics bringing the spheres of ontology, ethics, and education together in and as granularity. Devices such as the one just below that touch on the limits of thought are routinely employed to convey the insights concerning the moral metaphysics in question. It should be noted that in this work we are not confining ourselves to the limits of thought. By deploying heuristics like the following, we claim that it is possible to go through the limits of thought and reach the other side of thought, which is the Spirit, or nothingness. Notwithstanding the appearances, we are following Camus here. We are remaining with the absurd. We are keeping it alive. We are staying with the anguish. We are not eluding the absurd. We are not negating it. We are not turning away from it. Spirit does not merely mean unity, clarity, cohesion, and eternal life or at least some hope for these. It also means disunity, ambiguity, dissonance, and death. Nevertheless, there is a sense of saying yes to them all. And that is what we are after. Now, onto the heuristic, which asks the following question: which position below is the truth? Position A: The world can be thought of as consisting in endless moving: absolutely everything is in motion, from the tiniest to the truly gargantuan. Everything vibrates, undulates, trembles. What is is in unceasing motion. Being is (in) uninterrupted motion. There is nothing but ceaseless motion. There is a world of perpetual moving. The latter is being driven by (take your pick) creation, contradiction, difference, subject, will to power, différance, emanation, negativity, alterity, virtuality, subtraction, mutation, and so forth. [This position by and large is conditioned by the traditional object-thinking operating on the ordinary spatiotemporal world of everyday life (consensus reality) or whatever is posited to underlie the latter; the ordinary, scientific, philosophical, artistic consciousness of objects; the constitutive element of subjectivity is momentarily overlooked; the world of objects is not subjectivated yet; there is “something thought, but not something thinking” (Nishida, 1958, p. 39); everything is in motion except for the subject itself to which this motion is revealed, hence a subtle form of dualism persists.]

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Position B: The world can be thought of as consisting in absolute stillness: absolutely nothing is in motion; there is only plenum, an undivided seamless whole. Everything is exhaustively deployed. There is no such thing as pure nonsignifying noise. Reality is so utterly full that there is no room for motion. What is is a single fullness; it is unmotion. Being unmoves. There is no motion since there is a simple continuum unsplit into subject and object. There is no confrontation between subject and object. Ultimately, there is no subject and object. There is no contradiction, no split, no lack, no incompleteness, no freedom, no creation, no novelty, only eternal immense Plenum. [The other side of Position A; dualism is provisionally overcome but it is nevertheless there in the background since it has to exclude position A to remain coherent.] Position C: The world can be thought of as consisting in the “absolute contradictory self-identity” of absolute stillness and ceaseless motion à la Nishida Kitarō (mentioned above). The world is absolute stillness, namely ceaseless motion. [The nondual thinking/nondual intuition.] There is a stillness that is not opposed to action. There is a restful movement, a non-coercive action. Position D: The world can be thought of as consisting in a contradiction between A and B. A and B are mutually exclusive. The two sides of the dualistic thinking cannot both be true at once. A contradiction is revealed from the perspective of D for D itself is a dualistic object-thinking since it sees A in contradistinction to B. D cannot inhabit C. D is oblivious to C. C is missed. Position E: The world can be thought of as consisting in a lack of contradiction between A and B. A and B are two different takes on the same situation, one seen from the point of view of absolute motion, the other seen from the point of view of profound eternal repose. They are not mutually exclusive. They can both be true at the same time. As a matter of fact, they co-imply each other. They are indistinguishable. The absence of contradiction is revealed from the perspective of E for E is an instance of nondual intuition itself. E sees A and B in the following fashion: “absolutely everything is in motion, namely absolutely nothing is in motion” (“absolute contradictory self-identity”). To wit, E is C having considered and acknowledged D. Position F: The world can be thought of as consisting in a contradiction between D and E. D and E cannot both be true. F reacts to E and reverts back to D persisting in instantiating a dualistic approach to reality. C is missed again. Position G: The world can be thought of as consisting in a lack of contradiction between D and E.  D and E are both true. They mutually imply each other. G remains in E and is comfortable in nonduality. C is recovered. In short, the recovery and loss of C. The toing and froing of recovery and loss of C, ad infinitum. From the positions of A through G, A through G are true because they interpenetrate. We do not need to get rid of anything, or resolve anything. There is always a self-split between A and B, D and E, and F and G from the perspectives of A, D, and F. There is no split ever between A and B, D and E, and F and G from the perspectives of B, E, and G. All perspectives, A through G, eternally remain as they are; all

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perspectives transform into each other; they all act as a starting point to extend into the others. This is granularity: the capacity to place equal valuation on everything without having any losers in the process. Nothing gets sacrificed. Granularity is not the one or the other. It is all in all as all. Everything is enclosed within each other; nothing is denied or excluded, even the capacity to deny and exclude, even the “I would prefer not to,” even Harman’s sealed objects. Everything interpenetrates; everything is enfolded, enwrapped, enveloped within each other without losing its individuality, that is, its unique capacity to act for the community of things even when this capacity is exercised against the latter. This can be felt in absolute motion, namely in absolute repose. Granularity is having our cake and eating it too. It is the boundless capacity of embracing incompatibilities. It is Walt Whitman being large able to contain multitudes as we have seen in the epigraph above. This same structure that aims to undermine reductionist tendencies in thought can be deployed for any number of opposites or divisions. For instance, ‘nothing can be reduced to anything else’ versus ‘anything can be reduced to anything else.’ Or, ‘the mental events are supervenient on physical events (emotions are reducible to the material brain—the physicalist thesis)’ versus ‘the physical events are supervenient on mental events (the idealist thesis).’ Another one: ‘the thesis of granularity is object-oriented” versus ‘the thesis of granularity is process-oriented.’ Perhaps one more: ‘absolute discontinuity exists between entities’ versus ‘absolute continuity exists between entities so much so that there is a single dynamic field and no entities.’ A more extended version of the latter opposition (continuity/discontinuity) would go something like this in the words of Adrian Johnston (2013), who opposes “conflict ontology” to “mellifluously orchestrated unified ontology of an integrated totality”: “…the philosophical fantasy of substantial being as an exhaustively integrated and entirely self-cohering field devoid of real ruptures or splits. Nature is here imagined to be a clockwork machine whose gears and mechanisms hum away as components smoothly synched up with each other in a seamless system of grand-­ scale organization, a symphonic part-whole harmony or perfect symbiosis between microcosm and macrocosm” (Johnston, 2013, p.  19) versus “…. this notion of nature as the self-shattering, internally conflicted existence of a detotalized material immanence” (Johnston, 2013, p. 20). One more: ‘a deep sense in which I remain the same person’ versus ‘an equally deep sense in which I constantly change from moment to moment,’ and so forth. Contradiction is good, so is non-contradiction. Contradiction and non-­ contradiction being good at the same time is contradictory, namely it is non-­ contradictory. Nishida Kitarō. Kafka. Dada. The same thing. Granularity is always supernumerary; always a surplus or excess. In that sense, it is similar to the Lacanian Real, and so it goes on and on and on. To what end? Breaking out of the transformation of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (2009 [1915]): transforming out of a pervasive existential anxiety into equanimity in the direction of freedom and bliss. For Kafka, this was not the case; for us, it might.

A Note to the Reader: Pleading Guilty in Advance

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A Note to the Reader: Pleading Guilty in Advance This book is essayistic in style written with a spirit of conceptual freedom as evinced in the synopsis above. It is perhaps better to say that the book is written with a spirit of conceptual promiscuity or incontinence for claims such as ‘the Kantian ethics and the Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics deeply resonate!’ are regularly submitted. In similar fashion, the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated names such as Alenka Zupančič, Mou Zongsan, and Kant in the same sentence might occur and enhance the respective value of these names in unexpected ways. Such enhancement might create the impetus for new thought. My aim in making such juxtapositions is not to obscure. As a matter of fact, I aim for clarity, even too much clarity at times. I have a tendency to digress and overexplain things. It is one of the many flaws of this book. I put it down largely to the nature of granularity itself: that sense of excess or surplus or superabundance always lurking in the midst of it all. Regrettably, the essayistic style I employ is not as elegant as the work of, say, Camus, nor is it as clear and straightforward as that of John Searle and Gert Biesta in its exposition, nor as lively and polemical as that of Daniel Dennett or Harman. Nor is it written with as much clarity of thought and conciseness of expression as Zupančič or Byung-Chul Han. Neither is it as mesmerizing as Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty’s descriptions of everyday objects of sense experience. Nor is it as profound as the Lotus Sūtra of Mahāyāna Buddhism; nor is it as humorous and self-effacingly non-aggressive as the work of Chuang Tzu in its humility, simplicity, and subtlety. Neither is it as masterful as Hermann Hesse’s Demian in articulating the “Evil and/ or/as the Good” (Ziporyn, 2000). Fortunately, one would hope, it is not nearly as cryptic and baroque as the work of, say, Heidegger and François Laruelle, or as hypnotically repetitive as the work of Nishida Kitarō. There is a certain amount of repetition though, even some uneconomical repetition that might actually impede communication. Is something other than communication at stake perhaps? A compulsion to remember and resurrect, which is generally considered to be one of the main functions of literature, perhaps? In our case, sadly, it is not a piece of literature. It is more like a bricolage of deeply personal and strictly academic attempts to remember and resurrect the groundless Ground of being, the unconditioned, the absolute, in every thing I witness. It is my sincere wish that my style, regardless of its shortcomings (it is definitely not laconic; tends to get a bit long-winded), is my style in the sense that the reader never gets the impression that the text has been generated by some neural network machine learning large language model such as GPT-3 (third generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer from OpenAI/Microsoft) or GPT-4 now going on to 5 (Sparrow, 2022), or more likely, by BLOOM, which stands for BigScience Language Open-science Open-access Multilingual (similar to GPT-3 and its ilk except open-­ source). Here is some of the technical description of the system provided by BigScience research workshop (2022), the group of more than a thousand researchers from all around the world who have worked on the project—I wish Vangelis were still alive so that he could compose a majestic music in the manner of Albedo

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0.39 for BLOOM (well, it can probably be done by such models in the near future if not now by following a prompt like: “compose a majestic music in the manner of Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis for BLOOM”): The model: • 176B parameters decoder-only architecture (GPT-like) • 70 layers—112 attention heads per layers—hidden dimensionality of 14336 - 2048 tokens sequence length • ALiBi positional embeddings—GeLU activation function The dataset: • Multilingual: 46 languages • 341.6 billion tokens (1.5 TB of text data) • Tokenizer vocabulary: 250 680 tokens The engineering side: • number of GPU used for the training: 384 A100 GPU with 80 Gb of memory each • one copy of the model takes 48 GPUs (using 60 GB of memory on each GPU) • checkpoint size: only the bf16 weights are 329GB, the full checkpoint with optimizer states is 2.3TB • training throughput: about 150 TFLOPs • estimated training time: 3–4 months depending on throughput and unexpected events

The information provided above is largely indecipherable to me—is there any room left for hermeneia, the temporality and historiality of Dasein, or deferred différance, that is, room for ontological indeterminacy of the human existence in the face of this kind of astronomical calculability? Does the question of what is proper and what is improper for human beings to become, that is, the question of a hermeneutic and Promethean/Epimethean condition, the condition of mortals (Stiegler, 1998), enter at all into the picture above? BLOOM appears to be devoid of such concerns, just like Earth’s albedo—the amount of sunlight reflected back into space—has nothing to do with us, humans. It is simply there, 0.39, without why. Without, that is, being tied to some sort of teleological chain of events that puts the drama of being human at the center of a grand narrative. This is not exactly true though. Industrial human activity does impact Earth’s albedo after all. What is still true perhaps is that even if human existence is implicated with Earth’s albedo, there is no telos that gives an overarching meaning to it all. We are simply there. Nevertheless, I get the impression that the potentially historic milestone has been reached as artificial intelligence (AI) is now capable of generating virtually any genre of text on command, and pretty soon on its own as general AI is well under way (Bostrom, 2014). A disclaimer before you read any further then: No AI has been involved in the composition of the text before you. Admittedly, I have been experimenting with ChatGPT since its launch in November, 2022, but the book had largely been finished before ChatGPT came out. If Bernard Stiegler (1998) is right, however, the claim that no AI has been involved in the composition of this text cannot be true. Humanity has always already been “technicity.” There is no such thing as humanity prior to artifice, prior to prostheticity; no state of pure nature for humanity.

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To continue with the matter of my style, one thing that stands out perhaps is the near absence of footnotes or endnotes in the text. This is by design to avoid a sense of hierarchy between the main text versus supplementary text, or between what needs to flow and that which interrupts the flow, or between what needs to be clearly stated and what might lead to confusion, or between what is immediately relevant and what is not. My style is saturated with nested parentheses and embedded clauses in various forms, the use of which I hope does not risk losing the reader entirely. Just to give a fitting example from Part Three of the book: The idea of absolute knowledge, the knowledge of the unconditioned, seems to have become pretentious if not entirely antiquated in the context of an educational system at the peak of which lies the entrepreneurial (corporate) research university in which an open-­ ended process of technoscientific inquiry is largely geared towards enhancing the power of ever-flexible self-replicating hyperglobal capitalist flows, namely, neoliberal global capitalism, that generate unprecedented wealth inequalities in increasingly undemocratic/authoritarian political landscapes across the world through the production of virtually infinite volume of (some might say utterly superfluous—Daiso, the Japanese company of 10–yen shops, and Mumuso, the slightly more upscale South Korean version of the same business model come to mind here, not to mention the Flying Tiger Copenhagen, the Danish variety store chain, and Tchibo, the German chain with its slogan “Every week a new world” referring to the products that change weekly) merchandise weakening, if not destroying, the human and nonhuman communities in the process of its seemingly illimitable and accelerating self-expansion driven largely by the decisions of a handful of multi-billion dollar transnational/multinational corporations that aim to maintain their monopolistic hegemony of the market.

Another stylistic preference concerns the adequacy of direct propositional discourse, which, as a rule, is questioned and the merits of sequential argumentation are jettisoned in favor of a philosophical intercourse carried out in a more reflexively personalistic mode of expressing the matter of my thought, viz., in my very own mode of being, which every now and then calls for a non-representational modality of thinking enabled within an a-logical mode of locution (Krummel, 2018). The assumption that thought is primarily propositional or discursive is swiftly dispensed with—can AI do the latter I wonder? That is, can it reside in what Zhao (2020) calls “primal sensibility,” “the quintessentially human ability to receive, nonrepresentationally, the whole, the pure, without truncation” (p. 29)?—would this be exclusively human ability? This is done mainly due to the fact that the matter of my thought, which presupposes a living interaction between meditative inquiry (through which an imaginative potency is exercised by being deployed in the field of Idea-Images) and discursive rational reflection (discursive reason wherein the possibility of experiencing or knowing a reality that is free of conceptual construction is precluded), concerns thinking unapologetically the deepest ground of reality conceivable, the so-called groundless Ground, non-predicative being, or unground (German: Ungrund, the predicateless unground in the sense of German philosophical mystic, the untutored seventeenth-century shoemaker from Görlitz, Jakob Boehme’s theosophy by way of Schelling) (McGrath, 2012). Otherwise put, it concerns contact with the Absolute however the latter is rendered. As Schelling would say, all true

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philosophical science must be held to the standard of the ‘cognition of the All’ (Grant, 2008). Granularity, in our case, concerns the cognition of the All; not of all things for they are infinite, but of the All, a unitary yet non-totalizable Whole in the manner of “absolute contradictory self-identity:” a not-All All, or simply the Real, or a non-linear common ground of the subject and the object which is neither subject nor object, an inscrutably mysterious point of indifference to subject and object. I wonder if AI could ever do this, that is, if it can ever engage in discursive gestures that emerge from the opening of the true Dharma eye! We do not rule out direct propositional discourse. As a matter of fact, we very much rely on it. How else can this book, any book, be written? What is ruled out is the exclusivity of direct propositional discourse. The extensive use of nested parentheses and embedded clauses is almost necessitated by the non-linear nature of the Absolute. What is refused is that the unconditioned is essentially discursive. As Wirth (2019) makes it clear, what Zen masters like Dōgen or Hakuin deny is that Zen is fundamentally discursive while simultaneously using the discursive to occasion the opening of the Dharma eye and employing discursive insights within the purview of the Dharma eye. Philosophy cannot in itself directly open the Dharma eye, but one can do philosophy with a Dharma eye as well as use philosophy to complement and refine the practices that directly seek to open the Dharma eye. (p. xxii)

In Heidegger’s postmetaphysical case, for instance, the Absolute can be rendered in the form of Ur-grund (the originary ground), Ab-grund (the abyss), or Un-grund (the unground) (Heidegger, 2000). Enough said to make Rudolf Carnap turn in his grave (!)—notwithstanding Carnap’s own radical program for philosophy seeking some kind of ‘foundation’ for scientific objectivity in the vein of the encyclopedic ambitions of the Enlightenment, which nevertheless faltered leading to his principle of tolerance (tolerant pluralism), which is at home with the existence of multiple types of logical frameworks constructed for different purposes (Leitgeb & Carus, 2020). One such purpose in any event is to speculate about the Absolute. Why not? Why not discourse on the Absolute? The matter of my thought, then, presupposes a living interaction between the groundless ground of reason, which is freely accessible in meditative states of contemplation/imagination, and reason (the ground), which is also freely accessible though always mediated in and through language. This is not a purely philosophical discourse then. It is more in the manner of an ethical-religious discourse, a moral metaphysics, though not in their formalist sense. In the first instance, and from a certain perspective at least, language cannot ground the groundless ground of reason for the latter, by definition, is groundless. There appears to be a hierarchized opposition dividing the groundless ground, which is of the order of the extra-­ linguistic, non-discursive, hence inexpressible, and the ground, which is of the order of reason, hence language. The groundless ground is formlessness, whereas the ground is filled with forms and perceived things. In the ensuing instances, however, things get slightly more complicated. The two strata, having been neatly distinguished, turn out to co-implicate each other to such an extent that they are found to be immanent to each other. They presuppose one another; they call for one another

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so much so that the distinction between the two melts away (to be reconstituted again, to dissipate again, to be reconstituted again, and so forth, a mad dance of to-­ and-­fro). If this were not the case, we would not have a masterly work like Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), by Dōgen, the founder of the Sōtō school of the Japanese Zen Buddhism, for instance. In the Shōbōgenzō, the Dōgen who could write breathlessly about the inseparability of being and time (uji) was the same Dōgen who could in the next moment write about the proper manner of cleaning your body (Senjō), including how to wipe your ass after defecating in the woods after practicing zazen (sitting meditation) outdoors, or washing your face (Semmen). “It is not only cleansing the body and mind, but also cleansing the entire land.” Dōgen gave equal attention to the great and small. Everything mattered. (Wirth, 2019, p. xxv)

The discursive and the non-discursive (the experiential groundless ground) are non-­ dual, or “not-two.” As Davis (2019b) puts it: Yet Dōgen’s writings are not just expedient means to practice and enlightenment, fingers pointing at the moon; they are also literary and philosophical masterpieces in their own right. Indeed, Dōgen is considered by many to be the greatest “philosopher” in the tradition of Zen Buddhism. Rather than merely insist on the limits of language and reason, he poetically and philosophically manifests their expressive potential. The “entangled vines” (kattō 葛藤) of language are not treated simply as impediments to be cut through with the sword of silent meditation and ineffable insight. Instead, they are understood to have the potential to become “expressive attainments of the Way” (dōtoku 道得) that manifest perspectival aspects of the dynamic Buddha-nature of reality. (p. 202)

In the Western idiom, a non-hierarchical plane of (pure) immanence or virtuality à la Gilles Deleuze (in its orthodox interpretation at least), or the non-intentional immanent affectivity of Michel Henry, or the radical immanence of the Real of François Laruelle, are close to what we have in mind here. That is, it is not just a matter of ‘everything is in God, and God is in everything.’ It is more like ‘everything is in everything at all times’ à la Anaxagoras: “…. splinters broken from the apeiron contain the seeds of everything else: a tree must also contain the encrypted forms of birds, flowers, and fire, making it possible for one thing to transform into another” (Harman, 2011, p. 9). Better said perhaps, ‘everything is everything,’ all with all existing eternally, a superpositionary logic. An extreme absurdity by the contemporary standards of rigorous Western philosophy? A “paranoia of holism” as Marshall McLuhan (1962) puts it? Possibly. Nonetheless, the bottom line is things are expressions of each other. No preposition or prepositional phrase moderating or modulating the relationship between the groundless ground and the ground (such as above, behind, below, outside of, inside, from above, under, out of, interior to, underneath, prior to, and so forth) would do justice to express this relationship for the relationship in question is nondual. By now, Carnap is no longer in his grave. He is beside himself (and not with joy). This is speculative madness. What about Speculative Realism? Especially the Harmanian variety of object-oriented ontology, the so-called ‘triple O’ (OOO) mentioned earlier? How can everything be (in) everything when a thing, a real object, is withdrawn into a shadowy subterranean realm, into a perpetually veiled untamed dark reality completely sealed off beyond any access by minds or by

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other things (Harman, 2011)? After all, a black hole cannot be in everything, or everything else can be in a black hole. If the latter were true, the black hole would not be a black hole. It seems that if we attribute utmost value to the autonomy of a thing, then we cannot at the same time attribute equal value to a field which appears to exclude such autonomy. Can we place equal valuation on everything? Or do we have to make a choice for the sake of consistency? We do not however claim that everything can be (in) everything in complete unveiledness, in brilliant golden light. Where does the withdrawn real object withdraw to, after all? It withdraws to non-­ relationality. Is not the latter another way of saying ‘everything’? Notwithstanding Carnap, moreover, a careful logical analysis of language cannot be fully deployed to dismiss the ‘verbiage’ concerning the groundless ground of reason either. The groundless ground of reason, the Absolute, is Real, in its process of self-making, which suggests that it is accessible except for the fact that it is not directly accessible through language understood ordinarily, that is, in its egoic, or ego-logical, mode. At the level of egoity, language can at best point to the Absolute by indication, gesture, intimation, tracing, and allusion inexorably distorting its representation in the process. Therefore, our goal is not a full-blown systematic conceptual thought pinning down the Absolute once and for all. The impossibility of such a task has been more or less accepted since the Kantian transcendental turn in the West in the late eighteenth century (notwithstanding the recent upsurge of Speculative Realism movement inaugurated by Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, and Harman attempting yet again to exit Kantianism, or extend it in a curious way in Harman’s case, in more radical ways than the German Idealists tried to do). Incidentally, no sooner had Speculative Realism been inaugurated than it splintered into rival factions. A pre-critical metaphysics that goes after the structure of the Absolute through the power of pure reason alone, that is, logical/ formal/transcendental analysis, is now seen as anachronistic, a misguided illusion. In-itself versus For-us. Shall we keep this distinction or not? Does the distinction collapse or not? Compellingly, the same illusion was pointed out by the Indian Buddhist dialectician Nāgārjuna as well many centuries ago prior to Kant (c. 150–250 CE) in his articulation of the notion of emptiness (Sanskrit: śūnyatā) as the most essential nature of reality. All intellectual expressions, especially those in the form of propositional statements, are void of the field of absolute emptiness, which is, nevertheless, not other than anything else and therefore is the emptiness of fullness or totality itself (Schroeder, 2019). As Nishitani Keiji—a major Buddhist thinker and a key figure in the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy—puts it: “Emptiness in the sense of śūnyatā is emptiness only when it empties itself even at the standpoint that represents it as some ‘thing’ that is emptiness” (Nishitani, 1982, p. 96). In other words, we cannot attribute being to emptiness. Nothing, no determination, can be predicated of emptiness. It is nothing, or no-thing. It inexists. This nothing, however, is not total blankness, a mere naught. Rather, it is the nothing of fullness of life since everything emanates from it, if we wish to smuggle Neoplatonist vocabulary. It is clear by now that Carnap would be rolling around in his grave at the end of pretty much every paragraph of this exposition.

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Propositional and linear argumentation prove feeble in the face of such simultaneity (not-twoness) of emptiness and fullness, hence the need for alogical (not necessarily illogical) forms of expression as an alternative way to access the field of absolute emptiness. The claims as to the existence of a field of absolute emptiness in the first place and its accessibility to human awareness and articulation can be made only along the limits of logical thought it seems, for, in the end, thought, in its logical form, does not appear to be equipped to grasp the nature of reality fully. It cannot bring to full expression the field of absolute emptiness, whereas thought in its alogical form has immense resources at its disposal as long as we do not expect an architectonic form of exposition from it. That is, as long as we do not expect a representational, or digital, thinking from it (Galloway, 2014). Heidegger’s thought is a case in point. Despite its “notoriety for its indigestible prose and bewildering neologisms … [h]is most notorious: ‘ahead-of-itself-alreadybeing-­in [a world] as Being-alongside [entities encountered within-the-world]’; mercifully, he shortened this concept to ‘care’” (Dresser, 2020), Heidegger cannot easily be denounced as a “musician without musical ability” (Carnap quoted in Dresser, 2020). By design, that is, deliberately and self-consciously, he runs up against the limits of language in order to deploy such limits to try to describe, or rather, to hint at the indescribable groundless Ground of being, which is a pure gift. That is, it is there without reason, namely, without a need for a teleological narrative. We plead guilty in advance of doing philosophy occasionally in the Heideggerian style. Well, more specifically, doing philosophy in the style of a Daoist Heidegger to be more precise. Heidegger’s experiments with language to articulate “poetic dwelling” as an alternative to logical analysis and discursive reasoning are in line with Daoist and Zen Buddhist non-metaphysical comportment (Storey, 2012). Not only that the resonances between Heidegger and Islamic mysticism, especially in the form of Persian Sufism, the Shiite Islamic gnosis, are well-documented in, for instance, Henry Corbin’s work (Corbin, 2003). Carnap would be doubly upset as we unscrupulously bring Western and Eastern ontologies together. Oh well, our goal is not to un-upset Carnap. He is precious as he is. Moreover, we not only bring several geographically distinct traditions of ontology together. We consistently conflate seemingly irrelevant or incommensurable domains together as well: within the same paragraph or section we can switch from a discussion of ontology to that of psychology and back, or from ontology to ethico-­ political domains, from ontology to pedagogy, from pre-modern to modern approaches to being, from philosophy to history, from analytic to continental perspectives, from ontological to epistemological matters, from religion to science, from ontological to psychoanalytical concepts, and so forth. What is more, the constant switching back and forth in terms of subject matter also takes the form of switching back and forth from first-person to third-person to second-person perspectives, from personal to academic, from reflective to descriptive … As a result, shallow and deep, scientific and religious, anecdotal and encyclopedic, precise and vague, conceptual and artistic, experiential and reflective, everyday and esoteric, core and peripheral, main issue and side issues, compact analysis and loose ends, naive and sceptical, formal and informal, linear and

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nonlinear, popular and academic, rational and contemplative, synoptic and fragmentary, scholastic and spiritualistic are inextricably entwined. We end up with eclectic polysemantic tapestries of thought. This is to some extent intentional since granularity is about how singularities interlace. I do not consider committing category errors a grave violation of the norms of thought. On the contrary, it is a tool to depict the way singularities interlace; the way they are absorbed into each other. This disclaimer is not merely to justify the fragmentary nature of our exposition. I am enthralled to the Absolute albeit in a non-systematic non-representational essayistic form. To conceive a total system of thought that is solid and compact might be impossible and yet necessary. Is such an attempt at totality a structurally-­ necessary transcendental illusion? Can a neutral universality that is not illusory be conceived? Can we dare to think, that is, speculate about, the Absolute after Kant (and in ways that would avoid getting embroiled in the Speculative Realist quagmire)? Or are we merely being sloppy? These are important questions for at the end of the day, we are inquiring into whether happiness is possible or not. True, quintessential, authentic, real happiness beyond anxiety, boredom, and constant distraction. Not the kind of happiness one is capable of savoring in a glitzy shopping mall surrounded by a mind-boggling variety of mindless consumerist products and services. If the latter is the aspiration, these questions do not arise in the first place for the aspiration has already been exceptionally fulfilled (at what cost though?) Or the kind of happiness that is felt in the presence of a loved one? This is trickier. Or the happiness achieved at the culmination of a goal? I do not have one’s well-being or flourishing in mind either. Or fulfilling a deep desire or a profound longing. Or “the sorts of happiness associated with intense experiences of nature or with bodily exercise and physical exertion” (Metzinger, 2009, p. 236). Or the happiness derived from the sheer pleasure of formulating complex comprehensive theories of everything! Happiness is not just a state of mind, no matter how worthwhile it might be. As previously noted, happiness, in psychological terms, at the most fundamental level, is where the self, that is, the empirical social (simulated?) ego, is realized to be non-self, the unobjectifiable, nonpositional, prereflective, inconceptualisable, unenvisageable field of awareness, where there is absolutely no “I” thought: a complete releasement into a partless non-totalizable Whole as a result of which a radical at-home-ness in the world is experienced since the world is no longer the world intended outside; intentionality has become inoperative. Can we call this ‘beatitude’ after Baruch Spinoza, “a heretic with the character of a true believer, a saint without a religion” (Stewart, 2006, p. 14)? Simon O’Sullivan (2014) would not hesitate to call it that: To very briefly summarise the programme of the Ethics (following Deleuze’s own reading): the first kind of knowledge names our typical way of being in the world in which we are ignorant of the true causes of our experience and thus subject to random encounters and the affects produced by them (this, we might say, is samsara, though we might also suggest that it is Bergson’s plane of matter—the terrain of the reactive sensori-motor schema). The second kind of knowledge entails beginning to understand the causes of our experience and thus the concomitant organisation of life so as to produce specifically joyful encounters and

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the construction of ‘common notions’ attendant on these. […] This second kind of knowledge, although, as Spinoza suggests, producing a joyful life in and of itself, is but the preparation for a further third kind of knowledge, where all the world is a joyful encounter, in fact, where there is a sense of identification with the world, a veritable beatitude. This third kind of knowledge is also, according to Spinoza, ‘under the aspect of eternity’—or, we might say, is an ‘experience’ of the infinite (in relation to my discussion of Deleuze’s Bergsonism above this is a kind of dwelling in the base of the cone, the third passive synthesis of a still time in which past, present and future are equally present). (p. 268; emphasis added)

When we are imbued with the third kind of knowledge, we are beatified in the midst of a glitzy shopping mall surrounded by a mind-boggling variety of mindless consumerist products. The latter are no longer mindless. They are as beautiful as the presence of a loved one. Is this a human conceit or a real possibility? In other words, is contact with the Absolute, in its Western (groundless ground) as well as Eastern (śūnyatā) renditions, possible, and, furthermore, is it possible to articulate this contact? On the one hand, claims Žižek, we can never be truly happy for the inconsistencies of the subject’s desire parallel the irreducible antagonism at the fundamental level of reality, with which Žižek is ok. As a matter of fact, he fully embraces the out-of-joint-ness of reality. He is happy with the fact that reality is incomplete. Authentic happiness after all is a false category (Žižek, 2018). For Žižek, freedom is a higher value than happiness. He needs an incomplete reality to be able to talk about freedom and novelty. There is only one world, and it is incomplete. The reality is Real. Namely, reality is a contingent inconsistent Whole, not a harmonious eternal Whole. There is no In-itself versus For-us. A two-world regime assumes that there is a reality out there independent of us (the In-itself) and we can at best approximate to its eternal unchanging truth from within our limited experience by expanding the latter until it comes really close to the former. This scenario eliminates the possibility of freedom as well as something entirely new emerging for the eternal Truth of the Whole is already given despite the fact that we do not know what that is. But that is our problem, not Its. In contrast to Žižek’s position, there is the experience of unadulterated happiness attested to by the nondual school of Advaita Vedanta, for instance. The eternal, unbroken, natural state of abiding in the Self, that is, the entire universe, is happiness. Sri Ramana Maharshi, regarded as one of the most important Indian sages of all time, puts it thus: “Happiness is the very nature of the Self; happiness and the Self are not different” (Ramanasramam, 2018, p. 14). Evidently, the notion of Self Ramana Maharshi employs here is not the same as Jacques Lacan’s barred subject of desire. The latter is an effect of the unconscious desire, which acts as the genetic condition of the existence of subjectivity, which is a response to the fundamental lack that defines the human biological being (de Beistegui, 2010, p. 135). The former, on the other hand, refers to brahman, the nature of ultimate reality as nondual, or sat-cit-ānanda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss), undifferentiated pure consciousness, which, we should note, is not to be understood as phenomenalizing consciousness in the Kantian sense. Rather, it is the unconditioned “self-acting of a subjectnature” à la Schelling’s naturephilosophy (Grant, 2008, p. 16). Brahman is

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the nonduality of complete-incomplete. It is at once a contingently inconsistent and harmoniously eternal Whole. Or li, one of the names of the ultimate reality in Chinese Buddhism. Dushun, the first patriarch of the Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism, expresses li, the ultimate reality, in distinction with the objects of phenomenal reality, shi, in the following fashion: Li, the law that extends everywhere, has no boundaries or limitations, but shi, the objects that are embraced by li, have limitations and boundaries. In each and every shi, the li spreads all over without omission or deficiency. Why? Because the truth of li is indivisible. Thus, each and every minute atom absorbs and embraces the infinite truth of li in a perfect and complete manner. Shi, the matter that embraces, has boundaries and limitations, and li, the truth that is embraced [by things], has no boundaries or limitations. Yet this limited shi is completely identical, not partially identical, with li. Why? Because shi has no substance—it is the selfsame li. Therefore, without causing the slightest damage to itself, an atom can embrace the whole universe. If one atom is so, all other dharmas should also be so. Contemplate on this. (cited in Priest, 2015, pp. 121–122; emphasis original)

Žižek is at best vastly suspicious of such Vedantic and/or Buddhistic views of the subject, which point to an undifferentiated Whole that is not experienced as chaotic, incomplete, or schizophrenic. Can Ramana Maharshi and Žižek even be uttered in the same sentence? Or is this really a simple category mistake? I do not think so for being is ambiguous. Ramana Maharshi and Žižek are not mutually exclusive. The ultimate reality is nondual, namely it is incomplete, and vice versa. Ramana Maharshi and Žižek interpenetrate. As Fazang, the Third Patriarch of the Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism, puts it: has the characters of roundness and smallness. This is a fact . Its nature is empty and non-existent. This is principle