La ricerca di una via di mezzo alla descrizione della coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista porta a considerare la secolare tradizione orientale che pone le basi di una via di mezzo tra i due estremi descrittivi dell'assolutismo e del nichilismo, la scuola Madhyamika della tradizione buddhista:
Steps to a Middle Way
We have already seen in our exploration of human experience through the practice of mindfulness/awareness that our grasping after an inner ground is the essence of ego-self and is the source of continuous frustration. We can now begin to appreciate that this grasping after an inner ground is itself a moment in a larger pattern of grasping that includes our clinging to an outer ground in the form of the idea of a pregiven and independent world. In other words, our grasping after a ground, whether inner or outer, is the deep source of frustration and anxiety.
This realization lies at the heart of the theory and practice of the Madhyamika or "middle way" school of the Buddhist tradition. Whether one tries to find an ultimate ground inside or outside the mind, the basic motivation and pattern of thinking is the same, namely, the tendency to grasp. In Madhyamika, this habitual tendency is considered to be the root of the two extremes of "absolutism" and "nihilism." At first, the grasping mind leads one to search for an absolute ground-for anything, whether inner or outer, that might by virtue of its "own-being" be the support and foundation for everyting else. Then faced with its inability to find any such ultimate ground, the grasping mind recoils and clings to the absence of a ground by treating everything else as illusion.
There are, then, two fundamental respects in which the philosophical analysis of Madhyamika is directly relevant to our predicament.
First, it explicitly recognizes that the search for an ultimate ground - whattoday we would call the project of foundationalism - is not limited to the notion of the subject and its basis in what we have called ego-self; it also includes our belief in a pregiven or ready-made world. This point, realized in India centuries ago and elaborated in the diverse cultural settings of Tibet, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia,has only begun to be appreciated in Western philosophy in the past one hundred years or so. Indeed, most of Western philosophy has been concerned with the issue of where an ultimate ground is to be found, not with calling into question or becoming mindful of this very tendency to cling to a ground.
Second, Madhyamika explicitly recognizes the link between absolutism and nihilism. Our ethnocentric narratives tell us that concern with nihilism-in its precise Nietzschean sense-is a Western phenomenon due, among other things, to the collapse of theism in the nineteenth century and the rise of modernism. The presence of a deep concern with nihilism in Indian philosophy from even pre-Buddhist times should challenge such an ethnocentric assumption.
Within the tradition of mindfulness/awareness meditation, the motivation has been to develop a direct and stable insight into absolutism and nihilism as forms of grasping that result from the attempt to find a stable ego-self and so limit our lived world to the experience of suffering and frustration. By progressively learning to let go of these tendencies to grasp, one can begin to appreciate that all phenomena are free of any absolute ground and that such "groundlessness" (sunyata) is the very fabric of dependent coorigination.
We could make a somewhat similar point phenomenologically by saying that groundlessness is the very condition for the richly textured and interdependent world of human experience. We expressed this point in our very first chapter by saying that all of our activities depend on a background that can never be pinned down with any sense of ultimate solidity and finality. Groundlessness, then, is to be found not in some far off, philosophically abstruse analysis but in everyday experience. Indeed, groundlessness is revealed in cognition as "common sense," that is, in knowing how to negotiate our way through a world that is not fixed and pregiven but that is continually shaped by the types of actions in which we engage.
Cognitive science has resisted this view, preferring to see any form of experience as at best "folk psychology," that is, as a rudimentary form of explanation that can be disciplined by representational theories of mind. Thus the usual tendency is to continue to treat cognition as problem solving in some pregiven task domain. The greatest ability of living cognition, however, consists in being able to pose, within broad constraints, the relevant issues that need to be addressed at each moment. These issues and concerns are not pregiven but are enacted from a background of action, where what counts as relevant is contextually determined by our common sense.
This realization lies at the heart of the theory and practice of the Madhyamika or "middle way" school of the Buddhist tradition. Whether one tries to find an ultimate ground inside or outside the mind, the basic motivation and pattern of thinking is the same, namely, the tendency to grasp. In Madhyamika, this habitual tendency is considered to be the root of the two extremes of "absolutism" and "nihilism." At first, the grasping mind leads one to search for an absolute ground-for anything, whether inner or outer, that might by virtue of its "own-being" be the support and foundation for everyting else. Then faced with its inability to find any such ultimate ground, the grasping mind recoils and clings to the absence of a ground by treating everything else as illusion.
There are, then, two fundamental respects in which the philosophical analysis of Madhyamika is directly relevant to our predicament.
First, it explicitly recognizes that the search for an ultimate ground - whattoday we would call the project of foundationalism - is not limited to the notion of the subject and its basis in what we have called ego-self; it also includes our belief in a pregiven or ready-made world. This point, realized in India centuries ago and elaborated in the diverse cultural settings of Tibet, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia,has only begun to be appreciated in Western philosophy in the past one hundred years or so. Indeed, most of Western philosophy has been concerned with the issue of where an ultimate ground is to be found, not with calling into question or becoming mindful of this very tendency to cling to a ground.
Second, Madhyamika explicitly recognizes the link between absolutism and nihilism. Our ethnocentric narratives tell us that concern with nihilism-in its precise Nietzschean sense-is a Western phenomenon due, among other things, to the collapse of theism in the nineteenth century and the rise of modernism. The presence of a deep concern with nihilism in Indian philosophy from even pre-Buddhist times should challenge such an ethnocentric assumption.
Within the tradition of mindfulness/awareness meditation, the motivation has been to develop a direct and stable insight into absolutism and nihilism as forms of grasping that result from the attempt to find a stable ego-self and so limit our lived world to the experience of suffering and frustration. By progressively learning to let go of these tendencies to grasp, one can begin to appreciate that all phenomena are free of any absolute ground and that such "groundlessness" (sunyata) is the very fabric of dependent coorigination.
We could make a somewhat similar point phenomenologically by saying that groundlessness is the very condition for the richly textured and interdependent world of human experience. We expressed this point in our very first chapter by saying that all of our activities depend on a background that can never be pinned down with any sense of ultimate solidity and finality. Groundlessness, then, is to be found not in some far off, philosophically abstruse analysis but in everyday experience. Indeed, groundlessness is revealed in cognition as "common sense," that is, in knowing how to negotiate our way through a world that is not fixed and pregiven but that is continually shaped by the types of actions in which we engage.
Cognitive science has resisted this view, preferring to see any form of experience as at best "folk psychology," that is, as a rudimentary form of explanation that can be disciplined by representational theories of mind. Thus the usual tendency is to continue to treat cognition as problem solving in some pregiven task domain. The greatest ability of living cognition, however, consists in being able to pose, within broad constraints, the relevant issues that need to be addressed at each moment. These issues and concerns are not pregiven but are enacted from a background of action, where what counts as relevant is contextually determined by our common sense.
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