So when we talk about the dharma or justify our actions on it, it’s worth noting that it is not really trying to provide consistent episteme. [...] Thus it’s a strange inversion to ask the dharma for episteme-based proofs. It can’t give them, nor does it try, because its episteme is not consistent and cannot be because it chooses completeness instead.
In my view, this seems like a clear failing. The fact that the dharma comes from a tradition where this has usually been the case is not an excuse for not trying to fix it.
Yes, the method requires temporarily suspending episteme-based reasoning and engaging with less conceptual forms of seeing. But it can still be justified and explained using episteme-based models; if it could not, there would be little reason to expect that it would be worth engaging with.
This is not just a question of “the dharma has to be able to justify itself”; it’s also a question of leaving out the episteme component leaves the system impoverished, as noted e.g. here:
Recurrent training to attend to the sensate experience moment-by-moment can undermine the capacity to make meaning of experience. (The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described this as an ‘attack on linking’, that is, on the meaning-making function of the mind.) When I ask these patients how they are feeling, or what they are thinking, or what’s on their mind, they tend to answer in terms of their sensate experience, which makes it difficult for them to engage in a transformative process of psychological self-understanding.
In important ways, it is not possible to encounter our unconscious – at least in the sense implied by this perspective – through moment-to-moment awareness of our sensate experience. Yes, in meditation we can have the experience of our thoughts bubbling just beneath the surface – what Shinzen Young calls the brain’s pre-processing – but this is not the unconscious that I’m referring to, it, or at least not all of it.
Let me give an example. Suppose that I have just learned that a close friend has died. I’m deeply saddened by this news. Moments later, I spill a cup of coffee on my new pants and become quite angry. Let’s further suppose that, throughout my life, I’ve had difficulty feeling sadness. For reasons related to my personal history, sadness frightens me. In my moment of anger, if I adopt the perspective of awareness of sensate experience, moment-by-moment, then I will have no access to the fact that I am sad. On the contrary, my sensate experience seems to reflect the fact that I am angry. But given what I know about myself, it’s quite reasonable to posit that my anger is a defense against the feeling of sadness, a feeling of which I am unconscious as I am caught up in my anger.
Hmm, I feel like there’s multiple things going on here, but I think it hinges on this:
Yes, the method requires temporarily suspending episteme-based reasoning and engaging with less conceptual forms of seeing. But it can still be justified and explained using episteme-based models; if it could not, there would be little reason to expect that it would be worth engaging with.
Different traditions vary on how much to emphasize models and episteme. None of them completely ignore it, though, only seek to keep it within its proper place. It’s not that episteme is useless, only that it is not primary. You of course should include it because it’s part of the world, and to deny it would lead to confusion and suffering. As you note with your first example especially, some people learn to turn off the discriminating mind rather than hold it as object, and they are worse for it because then they can’t engage with it anymore. Turning it off is only something you could safely do if you really had become so enlightened that you had no shadow and would never accumulate any additional shadow, and even then it seems strange from where I stand to do that although maybe it would make sense to me if I were in the position that it were a reasonable and safe option.
So to me this reads like an objection to a position I didn’t mean to take. I mean to say episteme has a place and is useful, it is not taken as primary to understanding, at some points Buddhist episteme will say contradictory things, that’s fine and expected because dharma episteme is normally post hoc rather than ante hoc (though is still expected to be rational right up until it is forced to hit a contradiction), and ante hoc is okay so long as it is then later verified via gnosis or techne.
In my view, this seems like a clear failing. The fact that the dharma comes from a tradition where this has usually been the case is not an excuse for not trying to fix it.
Yes, the method requires temporarily suspending episteme-based reasoning and engaging with less conceptual forms of seeing. But it can still be justified and explained using episteme-based models; if it could not, there would be little reason to expect that it would be worth engaging with.
This is not just a question of “the dharma has to be able to justify itself”; it’s also a question of leaving out the episteme component leaves the system impoverished, as noted e.g. here:
and here:
Hmm, I feel like there’s multiple things going on here, but I think it hinges on this:
Different traditions vary on how much to emphasize models and episteme. None of them completely ignore it, though, only seek to keep it within its proper place. It’s not that episteme is useless, only that it is not primary. You of course should include it because it’s part of the world, and to deny it would lead to confusion and suffering. As you note with your first example especially, some people learn to turn off the discriminating mind rather than hold it as object, and they are worse for it because then they can’t engage with it anymore. Turning it off is only something you could safely do if you really had become so enlightened that you had no shadow and would never accumulate any additional shadow, and even then it seems strange from where I stand to do that although maybe it would make sense to me if I were in the position that it were a reasonable and safe option.
So to me this reads like an objection to a position I didn’t mean to take. I mean to say episteme has a place and is useful, it is not taken as primary to understanding, at some points Buddhist episteme will say contradictory things, that’s fine and expected because dharma episteme is normally post hoc rather than ante hoc (though is still expected to be rational right up until it is forced to hit a contradiction), and ante hoc is okay so long as it is then later verified via gnosis or techne.