This isn't 'directly zen-related', per sé, but it's an interesting view on the written (or any other means of delivery) word - taken from 'Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information', by John Caputo:
I was once criticised by someone who said that he was interested in thinking about the world while I, like all these hermeneutics rascals, was content to think about words. The remarkable thing to me was that, after saying this, he continued to speak. To my astonishment, he continued to use more words, a flood of them, really, and sometimes - he is a fluent speaker and an eloquent writer - with dramatic emphasis on the word 'world'. The more he assured us that he was concerned with the world, not words, the more loudly he kept using the word 'world'. The more tightly he clung tried to cling to the world, the more he clung to this word. That suggests to me - it never occurred to him - that the real distinction is not between thinking about the world and thinking about words, but between thinking about the world by also paying critical attention to words, and, well, not. That is what philosophers call the 'linguistic turn', what Gadamer (followed by Heidegger) meant by saying that being which can be understood is language, and what Derrida meant when he said that there's nothing outside the textual language systems we rely upon to make sense. Let's call it here the word/world problem.
Contemporary linguistics begins with a very simple point. If we look up the meaning of a word in the dictionary, we are sent on to other words. Words are defined by words. This observation is completely innocent and devoid of revolutionary import. Yet a revolution ensued that rattled the world of letters back in the 1950s and 60s, and its aftershocks are still being felt today. It sent the cultural conversatives rushing madly to the exits, shouting, 'Fire!' They were convinced that the post-structuralism it resulted in pretty much meant the end of the world was at hand, certainly the end of the West, definitely of marriage and the family, and at the very least the end of core curriculum. The barbarians are at the gates. God is dead - and the conservatives were not feeling all that well themselves. Post-structuralism spelled - or, better, smelled of - relativism, and the mark of the beast is on the relativists.
Why all the panic? To say. That words are defined by other words is to say that there is never any point where a word folds up its tent, or throws its arms up in frustration, and simply disappears into the world. There isn't any one Master Word that is hard-wired to the world or reality, such that every other word is wired up to the Master Word, like someone on water skis linked on to a linguistic speedboat bent on making it to the other side. But - and buts are important in post-structural theory - that does not mean that words do not have a reference to the world. It just means that words do not have a reference to the world independently of their difference from one another. No reference without difference. This would permanently disturb the sleep of cultural conservatives, who took this to be a sceptical denial of the real world, which consigns philosophy to relativism, reducing morality to a word game and turning the tradition into empty verbiage. They went to bed every night fearful that they would awake in the morning only to find that the post-structuralists had somehow stolen the world out from under them while they slept.
While reading through this book, I've found that hermeneutics is quite the companion to zen, and the interpretation of said texts.
I found the opening paragraph of this section to be quite interesting in terms of vocally expressing ones own beliefs or understandings, and the contrast between how something is said, and the perceived intent of the speaker. The line I find really fascinating is 'there's nothing outside the textual systems' - it can be easy to fall back on unconscious assumptions (eg the basis of which we use to communicate and how that can unwittingly influence ourselves, and what we are trying to convey).
There was a thread on here about 2019 zen masters and where are they? But maybe the search for said individuals is based upon archaic presuppositions and expectations, without willingly deconstructing our current contextual assumptions and views upon which we proceed. As is said a number of times within this book, the future can only be left open if we are willing to deconstruct - or, reinterpret - the past (or current) views.
Submitted February 09, 2019 at 06:18AM by Cache_of_kittens http://bit.ly/2WQTFty
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