I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how conceptual abstraction relates to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience. I was thrilled recently to speak with a hero of mine, Brook Ziporyn, who is Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago. In this podcast we cover Ziporyn’s intellectual history, from his grandfather’s Spinozism to the ontological ambiguities of Tiantai Buddhism. We spoke about how values undermine themselves when made explicit, how grammar shapes metaphysics, and what happens when one follows anti-realism all the way through to its surprisingly positive consequences. Professor Ziporyn traced a philosophical thread that runs from the Daodejing’s second chapter—”when all in the world recognizes the good as good, there is the bad”—through Buddhist emptiness to Spinoza’s critique of teleology. This “value paradox” suggests that explicit embrace of values contains an immanent reversal, a self-undermining which challenges the Western philosophical tradition’s foundation in purpose, natural kinds, and the Good. We look at related insights across traditions, for example: Chinese Buddhism’s claim that samsara is nirvana, in Schopenhauer’s blind will that has no internal divisions nor any ultimate goal, in Nietzsche’s affirmation of life including its suffering, and in the Daoist sage who acts through wu-wei (spontaneous action or non-action) rather than purposeful striving. A central exploration concerns how language inclines thought, though it doesn’t limit it. Classical Chinese lacks tense, gender, singular/plural distinctions, definite articles, and even clear differentiation between parts of speech—the same word can be beauty, beautiful, or to beautify depending on context. This grammatical openness means that certain metaphysical questions of “Being” simply do not naturally arise. Other philosophical questions, whose appeal is difficult to render into English, do, of course, arise in Chinese — like the paradox “a white horse is not a horse”. By contrast, Indo-European languages with their subject-predicate structure seem to demand an agent behind every action (Nietzsche’s example: “it rains”—what is the “it” that does the raining?). The law of excluded middle, natural kinds, and teleological thinking may be, as Ziporyn puts it, “downhill” moves in Western languages—statistically more likely to develop because they’re grammatically easier to express. But they are “uphill” for Chinese, meaning that they can be expressed with difficulty. Likewise, Chinese insights into “non-purposive action” can be expressed easily in Classical Chinese, but only with difficulty in Western languages, like Spinoza’s Latin or Schopenhauer’s German. Ziporyn has written on “ontological ambiguity” in Tiantai Buddhism. Rather than ambiguity being merely epistemological (we don’t know what something is), Tiantai suggests ambiguity is inherent to existence and distinctions. To be determinate requires relations to what something is not—and those relations make any finite thing necessarily ambiguous, appearing differently in different contexts without changing. This leads to the Buddhist notion of the “emptiness of emptiness.” Rather than a straight line to pure experience beyond concepts, Chinese Buddhist readings suggest the negation of negation brings us back to provisional reality—but transformed. As Ziporyn notes, once you say everything including nirvana is an illusion, the contrast between illusion and reality disappears. “Illusion” no longer functions as a put-down but [...] Read more at https://www.bryankam.com/p/samsara-is-nirvana-with-brook-ziporyn
