[MD] Reifying carrots

[MarshaV]

"Reification decontextualizes."    I need to borrow this sentence...    



The Middle Path between Dualism and Materialism (from 'A Buddhist Response', by Prof. B. Alan Wallace, in Consciousness at the Crossroads, Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism, edited by B. Alan Wallace e.a., Ithaca, New York 1999) The Madhyamaka, or Centrist, view adopted by Tibetan Buddhism at large challenges the assumption that any phenomena that comprise the world of our experience exist as things in themselves. Thus, not only does this view reject the notion that the mind is an inherently existent substance, or thing, but it similarly denies that physical phenomena as we experience them are things in themselves. For this reason, the notion of an absolute, substantial dualism between mind and matter is never entertained. According to the Madhyamaka view, mental and physical phenomena, as we perceive and conceive them exist in relation to our perceptions and conceptions. What we perceive is inescapably related to our perceptual modes of observation, and the ways in which we conceive of phenomena are inescapably related to our concepts and languages..

In denying the independent self-existence of all the phenomena that make up the world of our experience, the Madhyamaka view departs from both the substantial dualism of Descartes and the substantial monism that seems to be characteristic of modern Materialism, or Physicalism. The Materialism propounded during this conference seems to assert that the real world is composed of physical things-in-themselves, while all mental phenomena are regarded as mere appearances, devoid of any reality. Much is made of this difference between appearances and reality. The Madhyamaka view also emphasizes the disparity between appearances and reality, but in a radically different way. All the mental and physical phenomena that we experience, it declares, appear as if they existed in and of themselves, utterly independent of our modes of perception and conception. They appear to be things in themselves, but in reality they exist as dependently related events. Their dependence is threefold: 1) phenomena arise in dependence upon preceding causal influences, 2) they exist in dependence upon their own parts and/or attributes, and 3) the phenomena that make up the world of our experience are dependent upon our verbal and conceptual designation of them.

This threefold dependence is not intuitively obvious, for it is concealed by the appearance of phenomena as being self-sufficient and independent of conceptual designation. On the basis of these misleading appearances it is quite natural to think of, or conceptually apprehend, phenomena as self-defining things in themselves. This tendency is known as reification, and according to the Madhyamaka view, this is an inborn delusion that provides the basis for a host of mental afflictions. Reification decontextualizes. It views phenomena without regard to the causal nexus in which they arise, and without regard to the specific means of observation and conceptualization by which they are known. The Madhyamaka, or Centrist, view is so called because it seeks to avoid the two extremes of reifying phenomena on the one hand, and of denying the existence of phenomena on the other. 
 
         (Dalai Lama,Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brainscience and Buddhism)
 
 
 
 
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