Cycling around the south of Taiwan this December, I visited a Buddhist temple located just outside Kaohsuing. It’s a center for Buddhism and is set in the most magnificent grounds and location.
I spent the afternoon talking with the nuns about the relationship between the subject and the object, between life and death, joy and regret... It occurred to me that one of the major issues I have with the western perspective, is that we tend to locate things purely in binary terms. Even our academies promote the notion that the dialectic is the principle process of revealing a universal truth. We create artificial divisions.
For me, the problem with the romantics like their enlightenment counterparts, is their elevation of the heroic bourgeois subject. It is built upon the outdated notion that the self is the only thing that matters.
We exist in a universe filled with living and non-living objects. Our understanding of ecological systems renders the notion of ‘independence’ obsolete. This is a radical notion in western philosophy, but is incredibly ancient in eastern philosophies. This is not nihilism, it is much more profound than that, like the bacteria living in your gut, you are a necessary part of a larger organism.
There are no heroes, and there never were
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