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Posted by jemimy on 5/17/2008, 10:39 pm, in reply to "subjectivity-- the only game in town"
12.208.120.X
--Previous Message--
:
: Tears poured down my face
: as I read your note, I wept.
: My wife said �Oh. Jem?�
:
:
: Which seems to indicate that you Jem, enjoy
: subjectivity.
:
: And as I indicated, I think subjectivity is
: the only game in town. That is my
: subjective opinion.
:
: My other subjective opinion is that most
: people psychologically/emotionally need to
: be deceived into thinking that they can
: objectively characterize certain phenomena.
:
: Most of us seem to need fundamental beliefs.
: We need to think "something is for
: sure." This is called "ding"
: (certainty) in classical daoism. The
: classical daoist position is wu yi ding,
: "not positing certainty."
:
: love (subjectively),
: rat
:
Enjoy subjectivity? You make me smile, rat.
My attempt at haiku was a response to this, from you: “In my opinion, however, there is no warrant for claiming that any objective external evidence exists for producing an accurate characterization of any phenomenon, other than an experiencer reporting to itself that it is aware of an experience.” My tears were “objective external evidence” of my sadness for the state of (some) discourse here.
Rat, Michael LaFargue, in a book edited by him and Livia Kohn titled “Lao-Tzu and the Tao-te-ching” (SUNY Press 1998, ISBN 0-7914-3600-4), in the chapter titled “Recovering the Tao-te-ching’s Original Meaning: Some Remarks on Historical Hermeneutics,” wrote:
“It is helpful to begin on the most basic level of written text or spoken sounds. Meaning is never something completely objective, completely there in the text or sounds independent of any subjective involvement of a reader or listener. Strictly speaking, what is objectively there is simply a series of marks on a paper, or sounds made by vocal chords. These marks or sounds would be meaningless if there were no human beings with subjective associations, associating these marks or sounds with words and meaning. The important thing to note, however, is that “subjective” here does not imply that the associations are arbitrary or indeterminate, or that they vary unpredictably from subject to subject. [emphasis mine] Speech can only communicate meanings in a community of people all of whom associate a given set of ink marks or sounds with the same words having roughly the same meaning. These shared associations are part of what the linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky calls “competence” (Culler 1975, 9). Shared competence is the necessary mental, subjective component of meaning, necessary in order that the external component--sounds or ink marks--actually convey some definite meaning to some particular community of people.”
LaFargue is speaking specifically about interpreting ancient text but also illustrates the point that I, and apparently Lian Dao, have been trying to make. A highly personal lexicon of spiritual experiences with no commonality is not particularly helpful when describing aspects of Tao.
That’s all I’m sayin‘…
j
| 95 |
"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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