The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy: #REF!

3. The Two Faces of Reason

3. The Two Faces of Reason Greece was the mother of Europe; and it is to Greece that we must lool{ in order to find the origin ofour modem ideas, transmitted to us, enriched by the genius of Plato and Aristotle, sharedin by all the races ofwestern Europe. The tale tells how a particular direction ofreason emerges in a race by the long preparation ofantecedent epochs, how after its birth its subject-matter gradually unfolds itself, howit attains its triumphs, how its influence moulds the very springs ofaction 0/mankind. The moral of the tale is the power of reason, its decisive influence on the life 0/ humanity. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World The founding concepts ofphilosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium. When Heidegger says, for example, that "for a long time, too long, thought has been desiccated," like a fish out a/water, the element to which he wishes to retum thought is still-already-the Greek element , the Greek thought of Being, the thought 0/Being whose irruption or call produced Greece. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference A creature that thinks as freely as we do cannot live by mere impulsive drives or social coercion. Born without the required competence for survival in the encompassing web of life, we form our life-styles by taking thought, by maintaining a dialogue with others, by inheriting reflections across many centuries and generations , from one civilization and culture-world to another. 35 36 The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy In all but the most exceptional periods philosophical reflection finds itself locked into the task of keeping the linguistic and conceptual systems clear and relevant amid change. During times of volatile transformations in the conditions of life, however, philosophy may turn its critical eye upon the pretentious claims of ancestral order and tradition, "searching out," in Whitehead's words, lithe unexpressed presuppositions which underlie the beliefs of every finite human intellect." During such times, people like Collingwood are suspected of provincialism in their arguments that some assumptions are so deeply rooted as to warrant being called the "absolute presuppositions of life"j people like Michel Foucault are so suspected for their views that a social paradigm controls the growth of knowledge in a culture and remains inaccessible to analysis until a new paradigm has emerged.l Like the filter-plant monitoring the quality of the water in urban centers, philosophy has now gained new self-understanding enabling it to penetrate the supposedly fixed frameworks of the past. The hypnotic grip of parochial ways is being broken-by travel and migration, by millions of refugees annually on the move, by instantaneous communication between people living on all stages of human development, and by typhoons of information more powerful than the most vulgar ideological mind. As a partial expression of the most radical transformation Western civilization has ever undergone, process philosophy for over a century has been struggling successfully against the natural inertia of thought, freeing the mind from the categories and conceptual systems that have given Western civilization its central core of ideas since it emerged out of the Mediterranean world from origins Hebraic-Christian and Greek. With its new perspective that events and their relations are the ultimate form of concreteness, that immediate experience occurs in, to use Whitehead's phrase, /Ian ocean of feelings," that there is no going behind life's momentary nows to find anything more real, and that the world of becoming is, as Hartshorne says, flendlessly , inexhaustibly creative,"2 process thinking has been imploding the intellectual houses in which generations upon generations in the West have endeavored to dwell. In arguing that simple sense data are the results of abstraction from the momen- The Two Faces of Reason 37 tary now, and by insisting that persons and things are high-level abstractions from this unit of reality, process philosophy is confirmed by thinkers working technically in most areas of contemporary thought.3 "The unity of the momentary experience is taken as primitive," Hartshorne writes; "there is no other unity from which it can be derived."4 Inherited notions, therefore, of an ever-identical self that experiences everything that happens in a lifetime and of the Greek concept of a not-further-analyzable substance are no longer accepted as the mirror image of what is real. Substances fundamental for two millennia...