The Observer and the Taste of Presence · Chapter 4 · Part II
Two Logics
Watch a candle burn for a minute. The flame leans, steadies, shrinks when the door opens, and recovers. Ask what is happening, and the answer arrives before any thought: the flame is changing. Something is there, and something is happening to it.
Even after the arguments of Part I have been followed and accepted, this picture tends to return the moment attention is off duty. One still sees a something undergoing change. The persistence of that picture is the subject of this chapter. It is not a stray belief that a counter-argument can remove. It is a way of reasoning. Call it the logic of substance. It starts with things and then asks what happens to them. Do they arise, last, move, end, stay the same?
The analysis of this book starts one step earlier. It does not begin with things. It asks how anything is identified as a thing in the first place, and it finds that it is identified only in dependence: on parts, causes, contrasts and the designation under which it is picked out. No thing stands there before that identification. Call this the logic of dependency. The two logics use the same words, change, cause, identity, continuity and the path. But because they begin in different places, the same words lead them into different worlds.
Do we actually think substantially?
Before the two logics can be compared, an honest question must be faced. Does anyone actually reason in the substantialist way? Ask people whether things have fixed essences and most will say no. Everything changes, they will say. Everything is connected. Nothing lasts. Many have read enough to call themselves process thinkers. If the logic of substance is a position nobody holds, this chapter is arguing with a ghost.
The test is not what people say when asked, but what they do when they are not asked. Three places show it.
In space. Asked, few people will say that space is a thing. Yet almost everyone pictures it as one: a vast, empty room in which objects are placed, which would remain if every star were removed. Newton wrote the intuition into physics, holding that absolute space stays always the same, without relation to anything outside it. The picture shapes casual speech: there is room for a sofa, nothing between the stars. What is never met is space apart from distance and reach. The room that would survive the removal of everything is not found. It is assumed.
In time. Time is held more tightly still. It is pictured as a river flowing on its own, carrying events whether or not anything happens. Language treats time as a substance in two ways at once. It is a moving thing: the deadline approaches, the years went by. And it is a stuff: we spend it, save it, and run out of it, the pattern Lakoff and Johnson called "time is money". Cultures differ in the shape of the picture, and speakers of Aymara, Núñez and Sweetser found, place the past in front and the future behind. But the substance remains: a time that is somewhere, apart from the events placed in it. The general anaesthetic of Chapter 10 is the plain counter-evidence. Three hours pass on the clock and none in experience. No river was found that flowed by itself.
In grammar. Every sentence about change has a subject and a predicate. The flame flickers, the market falls, I have changed. The subject is held still so that the predicate can happen to it. This is not a theory anyone chose. It is the shape a thought takes before it becomes a thought. Saying that everything changes does not escape it, since "everything" becomes the subject and is still pictured as the thing doing the changing.
The answer, then, is yes, but with a qualification that matters. We do not think substantially all the time. Much of practical life already runs on relations. A cook judges dough by how it responds, not by its essence. A driver reads the traffic, not the cars in themselves. The habit is a default that switches on at particular places: when we explain and when we name. Those are the places where the logic of substance does its work, and they are where the logic of dependency has to be tested.
What "logic" means here
"Logic" has a precise sense in this book, and it is easy to hear it in another. It does not mean that Madhyamaka has a special logic of its own, and it does not mean that emptiness is reached by going beyond logic. It means the necessity of a consequence. Whoever proposes that something exists from its own side must say what it is. To say what it is, they must pick it out by contrast and designation, and so make it dependent. The argument borrows its premises from the opponent and shows that they cannot be stated without undermining themselves.
Three features follow. The logic is not inductive: it does not survey the world and report that no essences have turned up. It shows what anyone proposing an exception must already be doing. Its conclusion is a negation without a thesis, a negation that removes inherent existence and installs nothing in its place. And it does not break the ordinary rules of reasoning. It relies on non-contradiction throughout. The chariot cannot be both identical with its parts and different from them. Fire cannot be both one with its fuel and other than it. The analysis has its force because it holds the opponent to exactly these rules.
What, then, of the famous refusals: neither existent nor non-existent, neither arising nor ceasing? These are not contradictions, and they do not suspend the law of excluded middle. They refuse a presupposition. "Is the present king of France bald?" cannot be answered yes or no, because there is no present king of France. The question fails before either answer could be true. "Does the self exist, or not?" and "Does this moment arise or cease?" fail in the same way. Each presupposes a bearer with a status of its own. When no such bearer is found, both answers fall together. Logic has not been suspended. The question had nothing to be about.
This is the difference between the Middle Way and its imitations. A view that claims to transcend logic can say anything, and so says nothing. The logic of dependency says one thing exactly: what is proposed as standing on its own is not found to do so, and the proposal undermines itself.