Considering General Schemas Theory using Bateson’s definition of information as “a difference which makes a difference,” (how) can we inform ourselves with the difference-making schema of pattern-breaking (using both information and meaning)?

I am blown away by this question. Someone actually read one of my papers and asked an intelligent question. It may take me a while to get my bearings in order to respond.

Not only that but someone else apparently responded probably better than I could myself.

***Now for a pause while I reflect on the rarity perhaps cosmic uniqueness of this phenomenon***

Like Craig Weinberg I am having difficulty understanding the import of the question.

But it is always good to back up and try to lay some groundwork. My answer will probably be skewed by the fact that I have been re-reading Being and Time by Heidegger and I also just read Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature which is to my mind a kind of rewriting of B&T within a present at hand mode but is relevant because it treats the Special Systems. The whole point of General Schemas Theory is to set the stage for approaching the nature of the Special Systems.

Terrence Deacon goes through all the basic concepts, like information, energy, entropy and tries to rethink then so there is a way to thing about the possibility of Life and Consciousness. In doing so he mentions Bateson’s Difference that Makes a Difference which is just a way of talking about Shannon information. But Terrance Deacon makes the point that we need Boltzman’s entropy to supplement Shannon’s idealization of information within a communication context, but we also need reference and interpretation as  well which is not part of Shannon or Boltzman’s view on the phenomena they are narrowly studying.

Bateson had a relational view of everything, and his motto about difference that makes a difference is a way of stating that in terms of information. In other words not all differences COUNT. It is only certain differences that are marked as making a difference. Like in the thermostat the temperature that it is set at counts, but not all the differences between the degrees it traverses on its way to the triggering threshold at which the air-conditional turns on again. These higher level differences are relational. They are the real information, the other distinctions are not significant but merely form the background for what is deemed significant either by reference to some ententional phenomena that is an absentional evenity in Terrence Deacon’s neologisms and you also need interpretation that is also outside the purview of the information exchange channel that Shannon is concerned with. So I suggest you see Terrence Deacon’s treatment of Bateson’s statement in Incomplete Nature go give a fuller context for the possible meaning of this phrase.

But also I think that Bateson also has in mind his meta-levels of learning, and one of the things about these meta-levels is that certain terms will mean something different at every meta-level. For instance Truth, Reality, Identity, and Presence change their meaning at every meta-level of Being.

I have another hierarchy I like to extol:

given
data
information
knowledge
wisdom
insight
realization

So we have to see that information does not stand on its own but is part of an emergent hierarchy between data and knowledge. Information contains surprises or as Bateson says differences that make a difference to somebody. One way to think about learning is in terms of the transformation of data into information and information into knowledge. But bateson comes up with a whole series of the meta-levels of learning, and at those various meta-levels I would not be surprised if the meaning of difference itself did not transform. For instance at the first level of learning we are attempting to identify significant information that coheres so we can commit it to memory which is our simplistic model of rote learning.

But Bateson goes on to talk about learning to learn.  How do we learn to learn, well that means identifying some higher order difference between learning techniques and attributing significance to their differences and perhaps selecting different techniques for different persons or occasions.

Then he goes on to learning to learn to learn. Whats that? And so on but it is obvious that difference at this level is different from the differences at the other levels. So one way I like to think about this is to say that differences between meta-levels of Being are in effect the greatest differences that we can make between anything within the worldview. And as it turns out we can take every schema though its meta-levels of Being and what we do when we do that is get different structures and that is what lets us know that the schemas are in fact radically different from each other, we might say incommensurable templates of understanding which we apply to comprehend the extent of something extant in spacetime.

So in effect what we have with the schemas are radical differences in comprehension of spacetime a prior synthesis that we project. But we show ourselves the fact that they are radically different in their essences by taking each one up the meta-levels of Being (commensurate with the meta-levels of learning) to see their difference which is set like and particular.

Because almost all of Batesons insights are tied one way or the other to Russell’s higher logical type theory I think Bateson is well aware of the different kinds of difference that appear at the various higher logical types and the differences between those types at each level. So in a sense there are pure differences that is rooted in the aspect of identity. But at each level of learning or Being these transform themselves into Deeper or Higher Order differences and Identities. That are themselves all different across meta-levels but also across schemas. And recognizing this is the deeper point that Bateson is indicating. Shannon did not really understand he was dealing with a type structure. But we know it now because our programming languages have type structures built in and information that is exchanged is done within the framework of a type system which by the way supplies some the nested redundancy needed to make the communication channel robust. So another thing that Bateson is indicating is that without understanding that information is structured by types itself, we do not really have a deep knowledge of information exchange. And Bateson I think was touting his relational model of systems as a way to get a deeper appreciation of what information is.

Of course here we must mention Deleuze and Difference and Repetition which studies this problem philosophically, and also his Logic of Sense which I think is the next book on from Russell’s Higher Logical Type Theory (summarized by Copi). I recommend your looking into Deleuze and the light he sheds on these issues.

Basically my story goes like this. Once upon a time there was the Western Tradition that really only recognized one schema which was Form and everything was understood in terms of that. But then Kant came along and suggested that System would be a good addition to the form Schema. Later Mendeleev identified the structural schema which became popular is Science and led to Structuralism as the competing schema to System in the last century. But when we look at the literature in science we can distinguish lots of other schemas that people talk  about now and again, so a general problem becomes what are all the schemas by which we preconceptually understand organization of things in spacetime when we project synthetic a prioris. Oddly enough no one seems to answered that question. I have looked high and low for a precursor in this topic alrea of General Schemas Theory. But once you have it then to kick it off you need a hypothesis about how many there are and how they are related to each other. So that is what the S prime hypothesis is suppose to accomplish getting General Schemas Theory going and getting the arguments started for different hypotheses. Unfortunately no one else has weighed in as yet, so my S prime hypothesis remains unchallenged. Fighters without opponents can hardly claim to be champions. But it stands to reason that there must be some a priori synthetic level beyond the system, because we have multiple types of schemas that we know of so what is the complete set and how are they related together is an open problem in our tradition.

It turns out that a way to understand all this is via the idea of meta-dimensions. Schemas are at meta-dimension zero which gives us n-dimensional space. Kinds of Being as Standings are at meta-dimension one, and Aspects are at meta-dimension two. Interestingly I think all these ideas are implicit in Russell and Bateson’s ideas but no one pulled them out for some reason. When Russell hit the paradox of a class being a member of itself and Godel gave his proof then it is as if the tradition abandoned this line of research into meta-levels and types. Bateson tried to show the are all around us in every discipline but few took up the calling of exploring this horizon of research further. It is not until Deleuze that we get any real advance over what Russell and Bateson were saying.

Amy way this is some background that might be worth considering and may help  you to rethink your question .

This problem has morphed over time and the current version is even more extreme which is the question posed by Badiou of the Multiple, i.e. pure Heterogeneity prior to the arising of the Ultra One which is the basis for both the One and the Many. In other words the One and Many is really a problem under the auspices of countability, but what is the heterogeneity prior to the arising of both One and Many. Badiou in Being and Event and other places calls that the Multiple. The problem is how does the Ultra One arise within the context of the Multiple to produce both One and Many. And the further question is the relation between that and the non-cardinal, i.e. non-dual or non-monadic non-conceptual and non-experiential states like Buddhist Emptiness and Taoist Void. How do non-cardinals relate to the Multiple. This is an open problem. The classic problem of One and Many is a kind  of non-problem because underlying both is countability. Another issue which is related is the problem of the relation between set-like and mass-like approaches to things, i.e. in language countable and non-countable nouns. For instance the Ultra One and the Multiple assume that what ever there is prior to countability is set-like rather than mass like. Heidegger on the other hand in Being and Time distinguishes between present-at-hand which is set-like and ready-to-hand which is mass-like modalities of apprehending things in the world by Dasein (being-in-the-world). Thus one of the flaws of Badiou’s idea of the Ultra One and the Multiple is that it is a present-at-hand distinction, and he does not recognize a corresponding ready-to-hand distinction which probably exists.

My own approach to this issue is to distinguish between Set and Mass and their logics which are Syllogistic and Pervasion logics. Sets are composed of particulars which are not repeated unless we allow Lists. Masses are composed of instances which when mixed give Solutions. An example of a Boundary or a Pervasion logic is Bricken’s use of G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form. This logic is expounded by N. Hellerstein in Diamond Logic and Delta Logic. Buddhist and Chinese logic in general are pervasion logics. Thus both Emptiness and Void both are thought in pervasion logic contexts. But when we ask what is the non-cardinal (non-dual and non-monadic) alternative to both set and mass then we could talk about ipsities in an aggregate. And with that idea we become free of the extreme of the Ultra One and the Multiple which is merely Set-like and for which we do not have an alternative which is Mass-like. However because there is Geometry and Topology we know that there must be such an opposite extreme even if it has not been formulated philosophically because our culture is oriented toward sets and away from masses.

But because we can re-pose the problem outside the realm of countability, i.e. in terms of sets and masses and their logics then we can talk about ipsities in an aggregate as being non-cardinal representations of the problem. But the question that is not known is whether there is a logic that goes along with Aggregates other than just the tetra-lemma itself (A, ~A, Both, Neither). Ipsities would in Buddhist terms be suchness. And of course Buddhism sees all phenomena as aggregates. To talk about an ipsity in an aggregates invokes reference: Thisness. And of course Thisness is Existential when an actual eventity is picked out from the aggregate. Ipsities are somewhat like what Kant calls singulars. We would expect them to be prior to the projection of a priori synthesis that gives rise to space, time and objects.  Space and Time are for Kant both singulars. But we are talking about what is prior to the arising of the object which first is suchness and later becomes Thisness before it shows its essence through the a priori projection of the categories. We might state that suchness appears in the interspace between the object and the noumena as the source of awareness before explicit intentionality of consciousness. Thisness would be the locus of focused awareness without positing a specific thing as such. From Thisness or reference we get eventually to pointing and grasping and thus ready-to-hand and present-at-hand modes of apprehension by Dasein. Dasein is specifically the part of the Human Being that does the a priori projections. Probably Suchness is prior to the SpaceTime projection and Thisness is after the spacetime projection and prior to the categorical projection. And so we are really pealing back the onion of the transcendental subject of appreception here. Suchness is raw sensation as such prior to its being localized, and Thisness is the localization of that sensation prior to its schematization. Schematization takes us into the projection of space and time as templates of intelligibility prior to recognizing what it is that sorts out this from that. Think of the automatic reaction to a snake-like form in your peripheral vision. You will be jumping away from it even before you know that it is there because this reaction is preprogrammed into our instinctual apparatus and occurs mostly unconsciously. What you react to unconsciously is suchness, but the localization of it that gives a vector to your escape that you find yourself doing even before you know anything is there is Thisness, a primordial reference to what you think is there before you even know what it is that orients you in space and time that you discover though your automatic behavior jumping away from it. All this must be prior to ascertaining it as a set or a mass like phenomena. It is a long way from such primordial reactions to the present-at-hand theoretical question of Ultra-one verses Multiple or later One verses Many. However, from the Buddhist perspective everything we see is suchness in aggregates. But suchness is a term for awareness of phenomena in general prior to its instantiation or particularization. When we discuss ipsities then that is something where we can focus on it even though we have not decide what it is yet. Ipsities are the stuff of references which will eventually be taken up by Dasein by pointing or grasping. With reference to Dasein itself they are called existentiells by Heidegger. But with respect to them being non-dasein I have called them ejects previously. Heidegger does not really give a name to what the corresponding non-dasein thing might be prior  to the arising of the difference between subject and object. One question might be how ipsities become either existentiells or ejects. Beyond that we might as how existentiell’s coalesce into existentials such as befindlichkeit, rede, verstehen and falling. On the other hand we can discuss how ejects become ontic and are considered eventually from an ontological perspective.

What we see  in normal everydayness is definitely not absolute reality in any sense. Normal perception is definite not it. But drug induced states are probably not it either. Meditation is probably the route to anything approaching it.

So this is a good departure point to talk about Being and Time by M. Heidegger which is a philosophical work in our tradition that touches on your question. He distinguishes the everydayness of the human self and its lostness in what is called Das Mann or the They which is everyday normal consensus reality. His book is about how one can individuate oneself from this consensus reality by thinking about death and becoming authentic. So for Heidegger you really only have to think about your own death to pull out of consensus reality and to see deeper into life and perhaps a greater reality.

DzogChen is a mess. At least that is my impression of it after spending a few years reading all the texts I could find that have been translated now about it. Thus the actual nature of DzogChen is obscure. Too obscure for my liking. I really could only find two texts that I am certain are in the mainstream of it which are Gold refined from ore by Manjushrimitra and Beacon of Certainty by Mipham. Fortunately the text of Manjushimitra is at the fountainhead of the tradition as he is the first main student of Garab Dorje. As an outsider I can make these assessments as I have nothing invested in that tradition. All I want is a clear explanation that makes sense in relation to Taoism and Buddhism. And because it spans to Bon it seems to fill the role of a bridge between Buddhism and Taoism within the context of Tibet. It is their equivalent to the Zen tradition in China which they rejected in a famous debate in which the foreigner lost. So my opinion is that meant they had to reinvent the equivalent of Hua Yen Buddhism and Zen Buddhism within their own tradition and in a Tantric context. Of course there was tantric Buddhism in China as well but it was not as pervasive as in Tibet. The sad thing is that we cannot really count on the practitioners of DzogChen to give us a good rendition of it, at least judging from available works. It is too mixed up in Shamanistic and Tantric practices. So we are left with a close reading of Manjushrimitra based on suggestions from Mipham. And there is one contemporary book from the Bon tradition that seems to fit into the same picture which is Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the Logic of the Nonconceptual: Anne Carolyn Klein, Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: 9780195178500: Amazon.com: Books.

Ok, now that we have the accepted sources out of the way, lets try to understand the nature of DzogChen. DzogChen is a Heresy of Buddhism that denies the two truths. Because it goes beyond Buddhism it can encompass both Buddhism and Bon. Unfortunately this is not saying much in Tibetan Buddhism because Bon and Buddhism look like twins. But originally Bon was like Taoism and Shinto, it was an indigenous wisdom tradition that was colonized by Buddhism. Isn’t it interesting that Buddhism is a kind of colonialist religion, taking after its Indo-european roots in this regard. If we look at Taoism instead of Bon then what we see there is that the emphasis is on the nondual Void, which is physical empty space as being the face of the nondual within nature. Buddhism on the other hand focuses on emptiness which is the nondual within consciousness, and the Buddhists deny the reality of physical nature. Buddhism is very phenomenological in this way. Ultimately there are two strands of nonduality which are interpretations of existence, one taking its departure from a denial of Being, and the other being naturally without Being in the first place since the Chinese have no Being in their languages since they are not Indo-European.

Buddhism distinguishes between mundane existence and nondual existence in terms of the two truths. DzogChen denies the two truths at the end of the whole tradition of the evolution of these truths within Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism. DzogChen tries to point at a deeper nonduality which is completely nondual and not dually nondual as the difference between emptiness and void suggest. This difference between emptiness and void was alluded to in very sophisticated ways in later day Chinese Buddhism in Hua Yen Buddhism for instance. Tien Tai Buddhism is another example of a later Chinese sect that attempted to point toward a middle way beyond the two truths based on a possible misreading of a translated line in Nagarjuna. We can see that in the poetry of Stonehouse for example. The nature of DzogChen is to point toward the deeper nonduality before the arising of the difference between emptiness and void as two possible nonduals. In a sense it more or less loops the loop in the unfolding of Buddhism, more or less like Hegel attempts to finesse the transformation of Kant into time while still ultimately gaining the atemporal as well. Manjushrimitra uses the logical ploy’s of Nagarjuna against the two truths saying that they are extremes. It is ultimate because in it Buddhism comes full circle and becomes no different from Bon/Taoism. But going through that circle allows it to point to a deeper nonduality beyond emptiness and void, which I call manifestation. In Hua Yen that is called interpenetration and inter-inclusion of things in the jeweled net of Indra. In Sufism it is called Tajalliat of the Sifat. In Plato it is called the difference between Ratio and Doxa. The same thing was discovered in different traditions. But of course it is not exactly the same thing, as the fragrance of the tradition clings to what ever this deeper nonduality is called.

So we can say that the nature of DzogChen is to point at the deeper nonduality before the arising of the difference between emptiness and void.

Zen Koans are an example of Supra-rationality. This is something that is not well understood in the West. The problem is that of the limits of the Divided Line of Plato, it is the limit of contradiction, paradox and absurdity that we are obsessed with and so the possibility of supra-rationality is almost completely forgotten in our tradition, even though it is represented as a limit of the Divided Line in the Republic of Plato:  Analogy of the divided line.

The divided line divides experience into doxa and ratio. One limit is para-dox and the other is the supra-rational. Paradox is mixture and confusion.  Note the best example of a study of this is Godel Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.  From Quantum Mechanics this is entanglement. What we don’t have is a good example of the study of Supra-rationality in our tradition. Supra-rationality means that two opposite are true at the same time without interfering. From Quantum Mechanics this is superposition.

Supra-rationality can be seen in Zen Buddhism, and buddhism in general. This and other nondual traditions emphasize the Supra-rational over the Paradoxical. In the West it is part of our Orientalism to expect that Buddhists are mostly referring to Paradoxicality as a limit as we do. But that is part of our mis-understanding of other traditions to expect them to be like us. In fact they are mostly referring to the Supra-rational rather than the Paradoxical limits, because their tradition is the dual of ours in many ways.

There are other ways in which their tradition is essentially different from our own. For instance our tradition is for the most part Set based with syllogistic logic, while the Buddhist tradition is mostly Mass based with pervasion logic.

If we just take these two extreme difference we can see why the Buddhist tradition is so misunderstood in the West, and by Westerners in general. Many of the books that introduce Buddhism to the West are part of this Orientalist tendency. If we just take these two differences and we interpret Buddhist texts in terms of Pervasion Logic and Masses with Supra-rationality we will get a lot further than if we follow our own tradition and interpret everything in terms of Syllogistic Logic and Sets with Pradoxicality or Absurdity as the key to attempting to understand Buddhist texts.

When we see that emptiness pervades consciousness in Buddhism just as Void pervades nature in Taoism then we can understand these forms of nonduality better.

When we see that emptiness and void themselves are non-dual duals of each other then we must ask whether they are supra-rational, i.e. both true at the same time without interfering, or whether their interface with each other produces absurdity that we can see in Ultra Being.

One other problem is that the Indo-European tradition is the only one with Being. Buddhism denies Being with the concept of emptiness within the Hindu Indo-European tradition. China never had Being as part of their tradition because their languages are for the most part non-indo-european. It turns out that there are meta-levels of Being and that eventually those meta-levels run straight into existence, which in terms of Absurdity is seen as the singularity of Ultra Being. If Emptiness and Void are not supra-rationally separate them we get the absurd singularity of Ultra Being as our characterization of Existence.

But just as Emptiness and Void are dual nonduals, so too Absurdity and Supra-Rationality are duals as well. What is not well appreciated is the fact that the lines that divide the Divided Line need to be interpreted. There are three lines that which divide Doxa and Ratio, two of those lines divide each of the divisions of the line and one central line separates Ratio from Doxa. Void separates grounded and ungrounded opinion. Emptiness separates representable and non-representable intelligibles. These are the dual nonduals that are seen as either supra-rational or absurd. But there is also the middle line which represents ‘manifestation’ which is utterly nondual. It is this deeper nondual that is the object of Hua Yen Buddhism, of DzogChen, and Sufism. The deeper nondual is at the center of the Divided Line, not at its extremes. And this is the balance we are looking for in any path that claims to be a middle path. An excellent place to look at this deeper nonduality is the basis of the DzogChen tradition in  Mañjuśrīmitra‘s Gold Refined from Ore. Much of Zen Buddhism is based on Hua Yen Buddhism for its underlying theory. Zen Buddhism uses Koans to teach the variations on nonduality. We see in the work of Stonehouse for example the blending of Emptiness and Void, where there is one line of emptiness and one line of void in certain of his poems. Some Zen koans go beyond this and point directly to the underlying nonduality of nonduality, i.e. manifestation beyond the duality of Emptiness and Void discovered by later Chinese Buddhism. At first the Chinese thought that the Buddhists were saying the same thing as indigenous Taoists. But eventually they learned that Buddhist nonduality related to emptiness is different from Taoist nonduality of the void. Later Chinese explored the supra-rational relation between the two like Stonehouse. But of course it is clear that there must be something beyond that nondual duality which can be subtly indicated and attained if one were able to immerse oneself in what is primordial before the arising of the duality between emptiness and void. I call this primordial archetypal wholeness.

Zen Koans work by indicating states of nonduality that are supra-rational, or even deeper states beyond the duality of emptiness and void in which like Quantum Mechanics entanglement and superposition are them selves entangled and superpositioned in relation to each other. It is necessary to understand the theory as developed in Hua Yen Buddhism by Fa Tsang and others. These theories were developed further on Soto Zen by masters like Dogen Kaigen and others. Indicating states and transmission of states directly come from the indication within lived situations in which master and student are intertwined in subtle showing and hiding relations with each other. The Zen Koans are very deep when they point to emptiness, then point to void, then point beyond emptiness and void to what lies in kernel of existence. For instance at one point Dogen Kigen talks about Existence Time which is an example of this kind of pointing in the Shobogenzo.

What is really amazing is that although we live in the most dualistic of traditions, which has fought nonduality tooth and nail such as that embodied in the Western nondual heresy called Islam, at the very core of the tradition is the Divided Line that covers the entire spectrum of experience. And at the center of this core is the lines that divided the line, and they are the traces of emptiness and void, but more than that there is the trace of manifestation beyond the duals of emptiness and void as well. And so what is achieved in Sufism, in DzogChen, in Hua Yen Buddhism is there at the kernel of the Western tradition as well in spite of its vehement rejection of nonduality. As Nagarjuna showed logic has within it emptiness, as the difference between the logical operators. This proof is what causes Buddhism to be reabsorbed into Hinduism and gave rise to Advita Vedanta through Shankara’s nondual interpretation of the Upanishads. Similarly we show that the Dualistic Western tradition whose core gives rise to nihilism and emergence as meta-nihilistic opposites has at its center not just emptiness and void but the deeper nondual of manifestation. When we say ‘manifestation’ we take this word from M. Henry in his book called The Essence of Manifestation which is based on the ideas of Meister Eckhart who was the fundamental proponent of these ideas within the Western tradition who was one of the few of such proponents who were not murdered by the Inquisition. Henry accuses Heidegger of having an assumption of Ontological Monism that covers up the possibility of the Essence of Manifestation known by Meister Eckhart as the Godhead, and in Hinduism as the nirguna Brahman. Thus we have in the Western tradition our own Koans like the Divided Line of Plato that indicate various types of nonduality, and we have those who have explained them within our tradition even if they are very rare, like a white hair on a black bull. Thus we have everything that is necessary to understand Koans ourselves if we do not Orientalize by assuming that the radical Other is the same as ourselves.

Zen Koans work just as Plato says in the 7th Letter by staying close to one another seeking wisdom and beyond wisdom nous (prajna), and paying attention to the indications, until a divine spark jumps from soul to soul. Plato says that this practice is all that he is really interested in. And it is this same spark that has been jumping in the Zen tradition, the DzogChen tradition, and the Sufic tradition. And that spark can also still jump in the Western tradition if we take the Homeward Path, the path indigenous to our own tradition. Take that path and you will see wonders.

For me it is just advertisement for more substantive works I have written. There might be someone out there is something a bit more . . . shall we say . . . substantive.

But then I learned that people do not like to have substantive answers to questions. They vote them down. So then my answers turned contrarian attempting to provoke thought. Especially thought about the inadequacies of Quora itself. Nothing like a bit of reflexivity to stir things up. But of course people do not want to be reflexive about the medium they are using either.

So I more or less have given up now. I answer questions that people ask me if I feel they are significant, relevant or perhaps even meaningful.

What is tangible is when answering a question on a subject that you might not have explored you discover something that you would not have known otherwise in the process of tying to answer the question. Those insights are valuable.

It is very easy to write long answers. You actually think about the question, and then you provide an in-depth and substantive answer. Which is worse, torturing humanity though ignorance or though knowledge? Torturing though ignorance is what is most common. This is when you give a quip answer that has no meaning. It seems easy but it is really just another example of nihilism. The nihilism builds up and you realize that almost all answers are superficial, because they only tell you what you want to hear, what is cute, what is common, what titillates. Then occasionally someone writes a long substantive answer to a question, attempting to make it meaningful. Sure it is painful to read it, try to understand it, and there is the danger you might learn something, but hey what the heck you can try anything once. And perhaps it hits a chord and you think about the answer, and maybe go so far as providing a meaningful response. And then something strange happens . . . meaningful dialogue . . . do you think it is possible on the web? Actually using the possibility of interaction to interact, to say something relevant, significant perhaps even meaningful to ones fellow-man (or woman as the case may be). You are right this is all too painful. Better to stay with being what Nietzsche calls the Last Man . . . blinking . . . blinking . . .

Dialectics are a way of seeing what happens, it is not necessarily what happens itself. The best thing to do is to read Phenomenology of Mind because the dialectics in that book are not so reified as we get in Hegel’s logic. The basic point is that what ever different ways of looking at things that arise together in relation to each other all in a sense cancel each other out or contradict each other so that the only way to see your way out of the situation is to rise to a higher level of understanding that at once accommodates the contradictions and rises above them. This move is called aufhebung but then it eventually causes a proliferation of viewpoints at the next level that are irreconcilable. Maybe we could call aufhebung the reconciliation of the irreconcilable.

It is one of those things you can see everywhere if you are keyed into looking for it. This is because our lives are full of contradictions and impossibilities that we continue to live with everyday To the extent that the various contradictions and impossibilities balance each other and we can take a higher view of them such that they actually fit together with each other, then we get the effect of aufhebung, i.e. the production of a higher synthesis that encompasses thesis and antithesis. But when the higher synthesis is produced then it merely spawns a lot of differentiation at the new level that again needs to be reconciled.

So I have often spoken in different answers that by struggling with fascism and communism we have become like them. Our current globalization economic policy is in many ways an aufhebung of the disparate tendencies between capitalism, communism and fascism. Communism and Fascism did not go away but by reacting to them and fighting them we became somewhat like them. And what we have now is an amalgam of the reactions to communism and fascism in the last century. I call that synthesis corporatism. It leads with the doctrine that imaginary legal “persons” set up as a facade to protect wealth and allow accumulation of wealth across generations should have the same rights as human citizens. This results in a de-facto oligarchy. The state ends up serving the corporate interests rather than those of the human citizens, for instance with its too big to fail policy for large banks. What is that but socialism for corporations. Corporations deserve welfare but not citizens. Representatives serve special interests instead of the people. Lobbyists write the bills that the Representatives pass without reading them. Political Action Committees work to sway local elections to serve their own interests.  This system we have is nothing like what the founders of the country envisioned and is a far cry from what we had prior to the end of WWII. How did it get the way it is? In reaction to struggles overseas with big powers both fascists and communists that caused changes at home and we are still living with the fall out of those social structures and institutionalization today. Capitalism, Fascism and Communism struggled with each other throughout the last century and our system still bears the signs of that struggle which we claim to have won. Gorbachev said to Reagan roughly, I am going to do the worst possible thing to you, I am going to take away your enemy. Zizek talks about how we think we live in an age in which we have overcome ideology, and he rightly says that such an age is the most ideological, because other ideologies do not exist to restrain the dominant ideology from hubris, like  we saw in the Iraqi war for instance.

The Western Tradition even though it has taken over the world and studied foreign cultures remains relatively isolated in itself in as much as it only takes itself seriously. Thus thinkers from other traditions are not well integrated into our overall understanding of intellectual history. Therefore not only are there thinkers not well known because they are not part of our cannon who are from within our tradition, there are many thinkers from other cultures that were colonized who are even more obscure.

So for instance someone from within the tradition that is not known well but should be is Michael Henry who wrote The Essence of Manifestation which is a Critique of Heidegger based on the work of Meister Eckhart. This is just one example. There are myriad lesser lights who did not make the Canon in the Western Tradition that are important.

Someone on the other hand from outside the Western Tradition is Mipham who lived in Tibet in the 1700s I believe who in my opinion is probably the greatest intellectual of all time. He wrote commentaries because he was ordered to by his teacher, but his commentaries are some of the best work done in the Tibetan Tradition. Only now is his work coming to light and being translated by Tibetan scholars. Important in this tradition is Dzong Ka Pa who was probably the ultimate analytical philosopher of enlightenment. Mipham was answering his work and attempting to establish again the true basis of DzogChen from the Nyingma point of view. Tibetan Buddhism is the natural extension of Buddhism as a living tradition which was reabsorb into Hinduism in India. And as the continued living tradition of Buddhism it reached even more amazing heights than were achieved in India and China, but of course had its degenerations as well. But this is an intellectual tradition to be reckoned with because it combined meditation practices leading to higher realms of consciousness with philosophical sophistication.

Another person in the Chinese Buddhist tradition of great import is Fa Tsang who was the greatest of the intellectuals in the Hua Yen tradition. To my mind this tradition is the most sophisticated intellectual tradition on earth ever and their work became the standard interpretation that lay behind Zen Buddhism. In Soto Zen there is Dogen Kaigen who is an important intellectual who wrote the Shobogenzo. important in the formation of Buddhism is of course Nagarjuna who established that Emptiness was part of logic. My favorite Chinese poet who combined the Zen and Taoist traditions is StoneHouse, one of the great masters of the later period of the development of the Chinese Tradition.

In China apart from Buddhism my favorite is Lo Chen Shun who wrote Knowledge Painfully Acquired. He was trying to recover the essence of the original Chinese tradition before the onslaught of Buddhism.

A good book to see all these lesser known philosophers is The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change: Randall Collins: 9780674001879: Amazon.com: Books. Someone made a Visio diagram of the entire tradition mentioned in that book which sought to display precursors and teachers and the chains of influence all over the world and it was really long and intricate and it was amazing to see it when it was printed out, because it has many of those lesser known or unknown characters who played an important role in the development of the world-wide intellectual tradition which due to our insularity are unknown to us.

But I must say that when I look at the Western Cannon the amazing thing is that for the most part within it are those works that should be there, and the good thing about the Western intellectual tradition that many are forgotten or do not make the canon but they are still for the most part available to be read if one so chooses, and the causes of many of these lesser lights get taken up by scholars and their works are translated into English in many cases, but of course so many writers from other languages even in the western tradition are not translated and so their influence on English scholars are then less than they would be otherwise. Since for the most part we are not multi-lingual in our tradition now at least in America much of the richness of the tradition is lost due to the fact that not everything has been translated that would be good to have translated. But things are getting better and more and more important things are being translated into English and because English has become the common language many works are first written in English these days so that they can have wider impact within the overall tradition that is now forming around English as the universal language (for better or worse as the case may be).

My own view which is limited by being only a reader of English is that it is difficult to exhaust what is available in English, but of course I wish I had the facility with language that used to be the standard in European education. But this is a great time to be a scholar such as myself who is limited to English because so many of the works that are important in Europe are being translated into English if not written in English in the first place. And so we are seeing more of the tradition than used to be the case from the vantage point of English. So we are indebted to those scholars who spend their time in the painstaking work of translating important works into English.

Be that as it may, the key is that one can get a pretty wide view of other traditions or the western tradition itself from the vantage point of what is in English now. And so if we are diligent in seeking out these other works in other traditions we can have a much wider view of the intellectual tradition than was available even 50 years ago. And so it is a good thing to do to explore these other resources and not to limit ourselves just to the Western Canon but to explore the lesser lights in our own tradition, but I think more importantly to explore the other traditions that are now available in English and to become as much as possible familiar with the wider intellectual history of humanity which is the context for the Western tradition. When you do that you find that the Western tradition is fairly limited, and is not necessarily the height of human achievement that it believes it is.

The defining characteristic of the philosophers of the Western tradition starting with Thales and the pre-Socratics is Wonder at Nature, and it is no accident that Physics we have today came out of that along with all the other sciences of nature. Socrates sought to change that and turn the interest of philosophy to study human beings, and his work was a major turning point in philosophy, and the legacy of that development was wonder at human nature. If we were to boil that down to a characteristic it would be the capacity for wonder at nature, including human nature.