Prospectus

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Introduction

All attempts at a "fundamental ontology" must address the ways one speaks about that ontology. In other words, all philosophy as such must address the problem of denotation. If left unanswered, then how can we trust anything the philosopher says? This isn't so much a problem with philosophies that are outside this "fundamental" purview; nor is it a problem with everyday denotation, including all sciences. It is a problem with fundamental ontology only because it is a self-claim of the subject to offer a universalizing explanation. We must demand of it the same rigor, then.

The problem of denotation is not at all the problem of the Cratylus, and it is not also the logical problem of Sense in the way that Frege or Russell address it (it is the problem of Sense only when considered in an immediate and self-referential way). It had, unfortunately, never been addressed in canonical Western philosophy until Wittgenstein, who was the first to understand the language that he used as not only conventional, but as fundamentally non-denotative. He was the first to develop a theory of the conventional in canonical Western philosophy. Where Wittgenstein went wrong, however -- or moreso, where he did not go the full distance -- was in leaving room for an affirmative element in his system. His misstep is this: when you accept that language does not point outside itself, you resign the world to an unknowability, and you grant language a status outside of the world. The truth is that language is coextensive with the world just as much as the world is coextensive with language. Speaking, while being an incredibly advanced act representing eons of biological evolution, is not ontologically separate from all other acts. And within Action, there is betrayed the more fundamental nature of the world: affirmation. To both speak and to deny speech both presuppose an affirmed movement, no matter how molecular, of the spirit. If nothing can be said, then this statement itself is said. Removing the denotative access language has to the world in no way removes its truer and more presupposed accesses to the world. Wittgenstein spoke the world with every word he wrote; yet he could not come up with a language game alive enough, and precise enough, to reflect back upon it.

The problem of denotation seems small at first, but it shows itself quickly as the problem more central to Western philosophy than all others. Above all, it is the problem of Truth and of Validity. Without its proper explication, no philosophy which aims to set itself up as universal or general truth, whether explicitly arranged as such or implicitly assumed as such, can stand on its own two feet. And in the West, there has only been one ontological system that properly addresses the question of denotation: the Deleuzean one. But, across the globe, and many centuries earlier, the Buddhists also addressed the question, and did so with more completeness and more richness than Deleuze.

My argument is this: the two systems are nothing but unifiable explications of being, and of Life. Together, not only do they offer a complete, thorough, and proper response to a delusion that has been central to the canonical stream of Western philosophy since its inception, but they offer a rich possibility for life beyond that stream. The unified system is one which is essentially non-essential, and which, instead of foreclosing the possibility of philosophy outside of itself, allows for philosophy's fullest expression as a way of life. In this way, it is Western philosophy's Middle Way, its veritable Dharma: its purpose is not to replace, but to clarify; it is negative in that it is destructive, but destructive only insofar as it is a philosophy of pure affirmation, and thus wholly positive; that which it clarifies and destroys is not Western philosophy as a whole, but only a very specific thread which, either by coincidence or by necessity, came to be the primary motivation of all the canonical philosophers, and of what itself became deemed as "proper" philosophy -- namely, the seeking of a representative, or denotative, Truth; what it leaves open, what it does not replace, and what it allows the greatest of space and grace for, is philosophy which is centered on truth (in the way that it is only true, and nothing more), goodness, life, action, social change, art, science, and an infinity of other topics, including ontology itself; it is a unified system only insofar as it is absolutely plural. The shift is absolutely incorporeal. It is a shift from necessity to play; from space to time; from Truth to that which is true; from goodness to the Good. Above all, it is a shift from the correct to the skillful and from the absolute to the applicable.

1.  The Dharma

The ontology of the Dharma proceeds along three axes: the sense bases, the aggregates, and karma (which includes dependent origination).

Along the axis of the sense bases, there are six: sight, smell, hearing, taste, body, and mind. Body includes not only the sense of touch, but also of all internal bodily sensations as well. Mind, as conceived of in this axis, is pure passivity. It is the receptacle for all mental experiences, which are considered inputs to the mind sense-base just as much as visual forms are considered inputs to the visual sense-base. To each of these sense bases corresponds a sense element (visual form, tastes, sounds, etc.) and a sense consciousness (eye consciousness, ear consciousness, etc.). (These consciousnesses are completely passive, and will be described further in the following discussion on the aggregates.) The axis of the sense bases by itself is enough to capture the entirety of human phenomenal experience. It is perfect in its totality. Why would we not stop here, then? Why propose anything else? The Buddha realized early on that the point of ontology was not to systematize that which is true. If this were the case, then any true statement could serve as a total ontology; he could say "I am hungry,"[1] refuse to answer any other questions, and be on his way. In the way that "but you ate just yesterday!" is never a logical refutation to the statement "I am hungry," a theory of the six sense bases is never a refutation to other ontological statements which may be true. The Buddha's goal in developing an ontology, first and foremost, was to develop a system which could apply as a tool of practice in all human situations. The means of access to these human situations was meditation, through which he was able to break down experience into its smallest components. So, while the theory of the sense bases is complete in a way, it is not entirely useful.

The axis of the aggregates offers a process-oriented view of the whole matter. It is not to be confused with a temporal view, which is reserved for the karma axis. But it does concern the process by which the three fixtures of phenomena, the self, and the world are generated.

Entering any of the six sense bases is a flux of raw sense data (rupa). For any of this raw data to be accessible at all to the person -- that is, for it to become sucked into the whirlwind of generation and production -- it must come into contact with consciousness (vijnana). This phenomena of contact, or phassa (which is not one of the aggregates) occurs between the three components pertaining to any one of the six sense bases: visual contact, for example, happens when there is contact between a visual form, the sight sense base, and sight-consciousness. Once a bit of data gets packaged up for our[2] access, it gets thrown into the machine of the remaining three aggregates: sensation (vedana), recognition (samjna), and mental formation (samskara). Sensation feels the impact of the contact as either pleasurable, painful, or neutral (neither-pleasurable-nor-painful). Recognition recognizes the contacted phenomena as what it is. Samskara, meanwhile, is where the machine produces its output. There are many competing translations of the term: "mental formations", "volitional formations", "inclinations", and more. In short, based on the vedana of the situation, we incline ourselves in a certain way towards the phenomenon in some way or the other. Importantly, we are not inclining ourselves to a preexistent case; indeed, it is our inclination towards the thing which constitutes itself as that thing for us. If this sounds very Heideggerian, it is because it is so. An apple is never seen as an apple; it is only ever seen as an apple in a certain way for ourselves, as according to our tendencies, wants, and pasts. Since this writeup is only a prospectus, there are many intermediate arguments I am excluding. A longer project will address them, and offer full justifications for the notion that it is samskara which constitute our entire world and our self. For now, the important point is this: our volitional inclinations create our world. This abstracted conclusion is enough for the purposes of this prospectus.

The final axis is karma. It is the axis of time, and it is the axis of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada). There is one line spoken by the Buddha in the Pali canon which resonates here philosophically more than any other: cetanaham bikkhave kammam vadami. "It is intention, I say to you, disciples, which is karma." Every time we feel something as pleasurable or painful, then form a volitional inclination because of it, we are not only constructing a world for ourselves; we are planting a seed of karma which ripens now and in the future, not only setting up, but continuing our world in the image of our wants and desires, and thus continuing our existences. This is not an abstract point in the least. There is nothing more special about the Dharma than its everyday applicability. The workings of karma-as-intention are easily noticed with a little contemplative practice and some thoughtful analysis. The final plot twist, then, is this: the raw sense data, rupa, is nothing more than the ripening of past karma. What Buddhism has achieved here is a flattening of the internal and the external, the real and the transcendental, the empirical and the ideal, onto one single plane. There is no raw sense data which is external to karmic processes. Here, we find the much-needed break from Kant and the phenomenologists. It is not that phenomena are phenomena to us, but rather that phenomena generate their own us-ness each and every moment of their existence, the aggregate of which comes to stand in for a larger Self and the World. But at its base, the plane constructed here is absolutely nonparallel to the horizontal plane of the spatial universe. It is not even perpendicular, for that would imply a line of intersection. It is thoroughly aspatial, and not Real; it is the generative possibility of all that is Real.

It will be, again, the task of the larger project to show that all experience can be broken down into molecular processes of intention. This will not be an original undertaking; I simply will need to draw on thousands of years of extant literature to explain myself. (In fact, it is true that none of this project is an original undertaking in the Buddhist sense. There is nothing that I am adding to Buddhism as a practice of Life that has not been already elucidated hundreds of times across thousands of years. This is a Buddhist text insofar as it contributes not to Buddhism, but to a non-Buddhist strain of thought in this world that is caught up in a variety of delusions and neuroses.) Again, I will jump to the abstracted conclusion: the ontological achievement of the Buddha was the description of the transcendental plane of karma as immediately and forcefully applicable to every molecular moment of our lives.

There is no good metaphysical reason for why the Buddha stopped his ontology with the three aforementioned axes. Indeed, the frightening depth of metaphysical elaborations of Buddhism in the millennia following his death is testament to the potential of his system. To understand why the Buddha stopped where he did, we must put on the lens of the practical, not of the philosophical. His goal was to identify the root of suffering, and then to offer a solution to it. He created a system insofar as it was helpful for that goal, and nothing more. My goal, on the other hand, is philosophical -- for no other reason than that it interests me, and that I have found it useful. The treatment of Buddhist practice, as mentioned in the last paragraph, has been done by countless others much wiser and much more developed along the Path than me. I have found a space, and I would like to sit within it. This project is the expression of that sitting.

At this point, the original question presents itself again: why do philosophy? The first time, it presented itself after the problem of denotation was raised. Now, it presents itself after the problem of practice is raised. The second time around, in fact, the problem extends beyond even the bounds of philosophy: why do anything at all which is not Practice? Is it simply to suffer? This is a question which the Buddha intentionally did not address explicitly, because it was not needed. But in our time, when everything is highly analytic, and where few things happen without proper analytic justification and explication, perhaps it is worth fleshing out a well-formed response.

2. The Worldly and the Ultimate / Solving Denotation / What is Philosophy? / Nirvana

Maybe the Mahayanists, including Nagarjuna, recognized this need, or maybe they were just playing around, as I am now, when they elaborated the theory of sunyata (emptiness). Either way, it brought the Dharma to an ontological extreme which still, to this day, has not been surpassed. It is Nagarjuna who summited the analytical heights of this achievement, creating the concepts of the conventional and the ultimate.

The argument begins as this: all phenomena arise and cease. This is an implication of the karmic ontology; for any phenomenon to be without arising, or to be without ceasing, would be an ungenerated phenomenon. This is what the Buddha meant when he said that all things are impermanent (anitya). The theory of dependent origination, on the other hand, provides us with the generative conditions for arisen phenomena -- namely, the workings of karma. Dependent origination is commonly thought, and sometimes even translated as, "interconnectedness." But interconnectedness is only a consequence of the theory of dependent origination. It is not that a table is dependent upon its legs, the wood, the construction, and so on, as it's often taught. This is a view of dependent origination that already presupposes a grasper and a grasped (namely, the table). It is, instead, that all the constituent phenomena that form table are all themselves dependent upon the construction of a Self as a grasper. The constituent tendencies of this self, in turn, give rise to the construction of things in-the-world. In other words, there is a grasper and a grasped which must first be established before any "thing" can itself be established. This is the way in which the table, as an entity in itself, is established. Here again, Heidegger is rebuked. The Being of an entity as itself cannot be considered a given, no matter how transparent it may seem. That Dasein is a being that can consider the being of entities -- not just entities as their functions and components -- is not something we are allowed to presuppose.

Dependence, plain and simple, is emptiness. Only when emptiness is taken as emptiness can the possibility of its being considered a negative concept even arise. When taken as the expression of dependence, it comes to be seen as a truly positive thing; the only thing being denied, or emptied, is an object's self-being (svabhava), which itself was an illusion to begin with. The positive nature of the transcendental karmic generation is never denied.

The latter is, however, thrown into a deeply unsettling paradox. (We have not yet reached Nagarjuna's original contributions.) Karma itself and its related metaphysical components (sense bases, aggregates, etc.) all turn out to be dependently originated -- and thus empty - as well. Not only this, but our very approach to these concepts turns out to be dependent and empty. All the concepts we use to talk about it, including the most basic of nouns, pronouns, and verbs, are all dependent constructions. The concept of karma itself is karmically generated. It is a conclusion so violent that we are thrown into a space from which we immediately try to escape. We are thrown out of the world of philosophy altogether. It is a space of incredible potential, if one learns to sit within it; unfortunately, not many people do. And this is why so many competing theories have sprung up about the "nature" of emptiness. Many have interpreted dependent origination in a purely nihilistic light, understanding its consequences to be the utter removal of any possibility of speaking, acting, or being. "What can I say?" becomes a question of despair. On the other hand, there are those who try the opposite move in a desperate attempt to hold on to their convictions about the world: they affirm emptiness itself as a positive concept; they transform karma into a cosmic principle; the Buddha and the bodhisattvas become divine figures, pure expressions of a universal "emptiness". This move, while less suicidal than the former, is still not a proper descent into the terrifying clarity of the Dharma. In order to sit in the newly opened up space, one must realize that they are not in the analytic world anymore. Space has transformed into time.

Deleuze highlights Bergson's achievement in calling out time for what it really is, and in calling out philosophers for spatializing time. But Bergson's achievement can be taken even further. It is not just the concept of time which recovers its own temporality; it is all concepts. For all concepts are spatial. It is only when they are loosened up, when they are able to be slowed down, when the conceptualizer is able to feel the generations, the arisings and ceasings, of the acts involved in the concept, that true temporality is realized. Buddhism, as such, firmly places itself not outside of language, but right next to it. It is the force of language which becomes primary, not its meaning. Meaning is but conventional. This is where the great counter to Wittgenstein can be seen. Language is conventional in its meaning -- but language is only separate from the world when considered exclusively as a tool of meaning. As part of the continuum of action, it is inseparable from the rest of karmic acts. Furthermore, since there is no event, object, or feeling separate from our contemplation and our creation of that object, there is only one place we can end up:

everything is conventional. To speak anything is to participate in conventional reality; but even to shut up, even to only see, hear, taste, smell, and feel -- even that is conventional! Simply put, all dualities must collapse under the weight of dependent origination. Karma itself is empty; there is no action; there is no world; there is no self; but at the same time, there is no nonself; there is no nonworld; there is no nonkarma. Any conceptual reification is an affirmative act on one hand, yet an empty act in the other. Even this denial of the act itself is empty. Thus was born Nagarjuna's famous position: "I have no position."

We still have not yet reached Nagarjuna's innovation. We have reached, however, the Mahayana innovation: emptiness, not as a positive concept, not as a negative concept, and not even as an analytic concept, and even less an epistemological or phenomenological concept, but something else altogether: a practical concept. Nagarjuna talks about the two layers of reality: the conventional truth (samvrti-sathya) and the ultimate (paramarthasathya). The conventional reality is the All This -- the world, its manifold beings, our actions and feelings, our language, and everything else. The ultimate truth, on the other hand, is the world taken as empty on one hand, and as dependently originated on the other. It is the non-worldness of the world, the alogicality of logic, and the elusiveness of all things. Its home is found in the nonexistent center of the tetralemma: not A, not B, not both A and B, not neither A nor B.[3] Not existent, not nonexistent, not both existent and nonexistent, and not neither existent nor nonexistent. Here, finally, we arrive at the Nagarjunian invention: there is no difference between the conventional and the ultimate. To reformulate: the conventional truth is no less true than the ultimate truth. This is a natural consequence of the fact that all duality is erased, and all concepts temporalized. To posit an ultimate reality is itself as conventional as positing a conventional reality. But, annoyingly, to posit the conventional world itself as empty, meaningless, and thus not worth engaging in, is itself a conventional act. These are the ultimate shackles of samsara: conventional reality is absolutely inescapable, even though ultimateness is right under our noses. To reformulate again: the ultimate is absolutely immanent within the conventional. If the question is "how can I say anything", the response must be "are you not saying something?" Staying silent, avoiding constructions, quieting the mind, practicing the Dharma -- none of these are any "closer", nor do they bring a person any "closer", to the ultimate reality, then their opposites. Indeed, a monk is as conventional as a murderer, and a murderer is as empty as the Buddha. Nirvana, in this view, becomes placed on an axis that itself is entirely nonparallel to the axis of the conventional and the ultimate. As Nagarjuna states, there is no distinction between nirvana and samsara. Nirvana becomes not something to be attained, but an empty image of a possibility of being-as-non-being. It becomes a veritable Body without Organs.

The Body without Organs is the nirvanic body. It is a body which has escaped intentional action and found itself in intentionless action. The enlightened being moves without doing and does without intending. Simply put, there is no such thing as an enlightened being. There is instead an empty image which haunts our every action, calling us towards it, showing us the possibility of a kind of being that is no different, yet somehow of an entirely different bent, from our current being. Those that bow to this image are called monks; those that repudiate it are called murderers. The axis of the conventional and the ultimate is perpendicular to the axis of samsara and nirvana. It would be a mistake to think that samsara is the conventional and nirvana is the ultimate. They are both neither, and both both.

Thus, we have addressed the problem of denotation, and in doing so, raised the next question: why philosophy? The answer that philosophy is simply an upaya -- an expedient means of achieving some practical goal, dharmically speaking -- is unsatisfying. It is unsatisfying because the question is not what philosophy should be, but why do it at all? It is a question that broadens itself into the question of why do anything at all? And here, the answer that all human activity must only be in service of Dharmic practice is much more clearly wrong. We must be careful here to not succumb to another common entrapment: the entrapment of action as fundamentally meaningless, and thus as fundamentally not in need of limitation. This delusion is especially prominent amongst many Westerners who have adopted the Buddhist tendency; it's visible in the hippie and New Age movements, and in contemporary times as well. It arises from the same misunderstanding as earlier, namely, that there is a way of existence which is "closer" to the ultimate truth. No doubt takes a lot of courage to untangle the mess of delusions of essence-think and to move towards a life that is free from such; but it takes even more courage to willingly reestablish yourself as a self in the world as the world, to give the full force of Being to thought and soulfulness, to human relationships and to Goodness, to constrainable action and willful moderation. If Alan Watts is correct in calling all action "playful", it is only true insofar as it is playful in the way that music or dance is playful. In a way, the musician can play whatever they choose, whenever they choose; in another way, the musician creates entire worlds of depth and seriousness within their play-ing, certain ones which enrapture us, others which scratch up our ears harshly, and so on. To "play" music is to play with music, but this does not give us license to break someone else's piano.

It is in the exact same way that philosophy (considered here in a sense closer to the term "ontology") can be considered in its new horizon: as play. Even this philosophy right here, this prospectus, is no "closer" to the truth than a philosophy which is "wrong". It may not even be more useful, Dharmically speaking. Instead, taken in itself, it represents, like all other willingly taken actions, a courageous leap, and an admission of the fact that resigning oneself to not doing philosophy, whether in despair or in confusion, is no less conventional, and no more ultimately true, than to do it anyway. Life and action, and thus philosophy, become matters of skillfulness and tastefulness more so than matters of analysis. It is about skillfulness in navigating the world, in navigating a language whose status is so delicate (but not fragile), and which is always threatening to slip into the absurd and the terrifying (but which never carries through on this threat). In fact, philosophy can only be considered the "creation of concepts" only in that all meaningmaking is the creation of concepts.

This is another step contra Wittgenstein. To explicate philosophy within the bounds of the conventional and the ultimate is not to make a totalizing statement about any other form of human activity. It is not even an attempt to make a totalizing statement about all philosophy itself. What I am doing is ultimately clarifying my own delusions on what "ontology" consists of, moving myself closer towards a Life that is fuller and more in line with what is Good. This philosophy is only applicable to those philosophical systems who delude themselves into thinking they are approaching any form of total and universal applicability, in the denotative sense.

And even still, even in those systems, there is still nothing wrong with being wrong. The resurrection of what is right and what is wrong in terms of what is closer and what is further from some abstract ideal, even if that ideal is "ultimate truth", is itself not a normative stance. It represents a shift in thinking that is absolutely incorporeal. It has no spatial dimension, and cannot be pinned down conceptually. It is only something which shows itself over time, and is something which shows itself only over time. There is the famous Zen adage: "I used to see mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. Then, I saw that there were no mountains and there were no rivers. Now, I see that there are mountains, and there are rivers." This is a testament to the analytical unresolvability of our situation. Denying the right and the wrong, the good and the not-good, is of little use to us. Denying our psychological and biological realities, denying our relationships with one another, and denying the move towards a better world, is also of no good. Philosophy is philosophy as philosophy. I never deny myself the space to hold some things as right and other things as wrong. If I believed there was nothing valid to this prospectus, nothing true and correct, nothing more true and correct than other competing systems of thought, then there truly would be no reason to write it.

The descent into conventionality is not a descent into pure relativity, nihilism, or libertarianism. This is why, ultimately, the best concept to use is not that of the conventional (samvrti), but that of the worldly (loka-samvrti). There is nothing fake about this world; it is ours, and we are its, and there is no other world to escape to. Instead, thinking, acting, and relating become matters of the light and the heavy: walking with soft footsteps and a profound weight in the stomach. They become matters of slowness and speed, of the martial artist who reacts in an instant, yet who takes a full minute to respond. This is the transformation of unity and plurality to unity-in-plurality. Matters of skillfulness are not a practical habit laid out upon some theoretical basis, but instead coextensive with their actions as contemplative in and of themselves, and as philosophical in and of themselves, the truths of their analysis not universal, not particular, but singular.

3.  Deleuze

Deleuze offers us a vast and rich explication of the karmic ontology perfectly suited to Western philosophy. Through and through, he is a philosopher in, of, and for the West. He pushes the dialectical analysis begun by Plato to the furthest extremes it has yet gone, and in doing so, arrives at a place beyond language, and indeed, beyond analysis. In doing so, he finds a new way into the world of karma, an ontology and a cosmology which both successfully answer the problem of denotation from a new, fresh, and invigorating direction, offering us a novel pathway into the positive depths of emptiness.

Earlier, we asked about the problem of denotation. With that now addressed, and the world now reaffirmed (with even more force than before -- i.e. the third step of the Zen adage), there is a new question which all philosophy must answer: the problem of unityin-difference. The question presents itself as the following dilemma: how can there be an undifferentiated pre-individuality (or pre-individual phenomena) but differentiated individuality (or phenomena)? From modernity onwards, the egoistic turn happened, where the Subject came to be held as the great individuator. Apart from the question of Self (what individuates the supposed Self?), there is the question of what must be present within the undifferentiated mass that allows the subject to insert its differentiating power. If the answer to this is "nothing", then the dilemma becomes a paradox; if the answer to this is "something" (any something), then we concede that the undifferentiated is already differentiated -- we only push the problem down a level. If we instead accept that the undifferentiated really is differentiated (the second option), just at a minute level (or even the infinitesimal, if we remember that we are dealing still with difference conceived of as difference between, i.e. as a negative principle), then we must also concede that the interaction between Subject and the world is not one of only creation, but also of access, or mapping. We then are forced to ask what the laws of the noumenal world are -- and it ceases to be the absolutely unknowable noumenal. Again, the problem only gets pushed down another level. In this way, the dilemma is already a paradox: whether or not the undifferentiated is differentiated, the empirical & rational powers of the Subject never get the chance to be actualized. Why in the first place did Kant need a noumenal world? If it was to provide a grounds of pure potential (but no character) for the phenomenal, then we must ask about this potentiating power. On the other hand, if it is a true nothingness, then we have not (dis)solved the problem of duality, but simply transposed it to within consciousness itself. Kant may have been better off not positing the noumenal at all. It is no surprise that Deleuze is shaped profoundly by thinkers such as the Stoics, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Bergson. If there is one thing that these thinkers have in common, it is that they flatten out the world, and thus dissolve the distinction between grasper and grasped.

In order for identity, even infinitesimal identity, to be generated, and not presupposed, the task of ontology becomes clear as the task of providing a complete theory of difference. Deleuze finds his inspiration for a solution in Leibniz. In Leibniz, difference becomes differentiation. In other words, a picture of the universe as buzzing with a trillion little insects gets replaced by a universe of nonuniform fog. Even at the smallest level, there is no presupposed Thing; it's differentiation all the way down. The calculus of Leibniz allows Deleuze to conceive of difference not as an emptiness constituted by elements in relation with one another, but as an emptiness constitutive of elements in relationship. The differential dx/dy is the empty value, a veritable zero, which contains in it the virtuality of the relationship between x and y, and an infinity of possibilities for their constitution. A curve is not made of points, but of differentials. Anywhere you look, you will never find a point. Freezing time, as in the paradox of the moving arrow, is only and can only be a theoretical exercise. The true "points" are moving zeros.

In this way, a direct line is drawn between two concepts: emptiness on one hand, and movement on the other. The two are two sides of the same coin. The differential is nothing but the expression of movement, and movement is nothing but the expression of the differential. Herein lies the next great Deleuzean move: to equate not only the differential (which, from now on, I will simply call difference) and movement to each other, but to equate both of these to activity, to equate activity with expression, to equate expression to Being, and to equate Being to desire. There is an intense circulation between these six concepts.

Expression is a simple and unavoidable fact of life. The world is constantly expressing itself in an infinite continuum of ways. To move is to express; to differentiate (and even to combine, for combination is still the movement of difference) is to express. Expression is as intrinsic to the world as movement and difference, and to differentiate is to generate, and to generate is to express, and to express is to mean, and to mean is to make sense. All being is sense-making. Language, as not separate from the continuum of activity which constitutes a moving and differentiating world, speaks before it ever says. It carries with it a forcefulness of being which is unmatched by its denotative (or manifestative or significative) powers. Language is, first and foremost, an affirmation. Here again we are led into the terrifying depths, because the non-denotative power of the language we use to even talk about the Deleuzean philosophy itself cannot truly point to the thing it talks about. Luckily, we are already well equipped to handle this abyss, and we keep our head above water, and we realize: Deleuze has constructed for himself his own version of the conventional -- the worldly -- truth. Unlike with Wittgenstein, we are still allowed to speak with force, and not just for "therapeutic" purposes.

The final Deleuzean step is the bringing-together of the two worlds, of the Deleuzean world and the Buddhist world. With the help of Guattari, he correctly identifies movement, difference, and expression with Desire -- and thus, Intention. In doing so, he provides the first Western explication of intention that is neither psychological nor mechanistic. Even the phenomenologists could not conceive of intention in a way that was separate from the faculty of the will. It seems, at first, absurd to conceive of intention as "just" movement. Where is the desirous force behind it? Where is the telos? For so long, it had been thought that intention was the move toward something, and so much so that to think of it as a phenomenon in and for itself appears utterly deluded. There were those who conceived of the universe as purely mechanistic, and thus intention (and desire) were but ephemeral feelings predicated upon a pre-organized flow of phenomena. Deleuze rejects both of these conceptions: there is a very real agency to intention, but it is not an agency for anything other than itself. It is movement, plain and simple, but there is nothing simple about movement. This is the Deleuzean thesis: to move is to intend. Our common conceptions of intention and desire as the move towards something presuppose, he says, a deeper force of intention and desire which are already in motion for nothing other than themselves. These are the libidinal "investments" that are presupposed when discussing the secondary structures of desire. To be hungry is to want food, but being hungry is a whole array of positive movements that translate themselves into certain feelings, expressions, and meanings, which in turn constitute themselves in the second order as desire for food. As he says in Difference and Repetition, the world is nothing but "a thousand little contemplations" (qualified, again, that we think of each contemplation not as a little buzzing critter, but as a post-fact of analysis in a qualitatively differentiated and foggy cosmos). How absurd to think of a tree and a rock as intentions in motion. This is the Deleuzean pratityasamutpada -- the oxymoronic transcendental plane of immanence that is presupposed by and that generates spatiality. It is, as a plane which is thoroughly nonparallel to the spatial plane, indifferent to the distinction between grasper and grasped. It is, as a plane of intention, a plane of karma. The Buddhist conception of karma, after all, also distinguishes between "little" intention and "big" desire. The pure, foundational ripenings of karma are the dharmas, the constitutive elements that form all experience. From this perspective, all human experience can be viewed as epiphenomena of the movement of what Is. This is tathatha, or suchness. In this view, agency and intention are but an illusion of the movement of ripening karma. There is no generation, no intention, and no towards. At the other level, however, is karma treated as desire in the defiling sense. It is karma generated when one wants food, wants company, wants pleasure... It is karma conceived of in the second order, but can only be as such because of a deeper underlying movement.

Whether or not he knew it, Deleuze was a philosopher of the Dharma, and more so than any other Western thinker to come before him.

4.  Ontology Under the Applicability Thesis

Because we are in the domain of philosophy, the question of right and wrong comes to the forefront. What is the new basis that fundamental ontology must rest on, if not on the basis of matching the world to the words? The Buddha's original project provides us the answer, which has remained unchanged all this time: the power of an ontology is its applicability in all moments.

Empirically, we find a consistency in the world: we hit a drum and it produces the same sound every time. This is the Humean subject of study and the basis of the Humean maxim: necessary cause and effect is an illusion of repeated encounter of the Same. The Humean position, however, is not a true idealism because the twin fixtures of the Self and the World still stand. Any idealism that upholds these fixtures (which is to say nothing of the third, God), forces itself into a position of needing to address their ontological structures.

Kant falls into the same trap. By allowing for an absolute consistency at the level of phenomena, he implies an absolute ontological structure of potentiality within noumena.

This is an internal contradiction.

We call the tool that applies the abstracted consistency of phenomenal behavior logic. In all our collective lives we have yet to find an instance which truly defies logic. There has never been the case where 1 = 2. So, even if one accepts the applicability thesis, it's very easy to begin transmuting it into a sort of Kantianism. We might start asking about the structures of the world that allow for the consistency of applicability. Even if we let there not be any world at all, or say that the world is absolutely ineffable, and never make any attempt to try and flesh out these structures, we are still acquiescing to a world. The world, however, is necessarily and precisely only that which is implicated by structure. The buddhist move is not only a move of ineffability; it is a complete and total flattening of the possibility of unarisen, nondependent structure.

This resettling back into the world is deceivingly just yet another way in which we try to establish the comfort of home when confronted with a disturbing fact. The model of the unknown is no longer the abyss, but the egg. We must remember that while the conceptual opposite of consistency is inconsistency, its true opposite is nonconsistency. To ask why, if consistency (or its potentiality in some inexpressible world) is itself a dependent concept, our logic serves us, and has served us, so well, and why, if the same is true, there is never a tree that begins walking or a number which begins a quantity it is not, is to miss the point.

The point is that it is not only language which expresses. Expression is Being. If we quiet down our thoughts and words about consistency, and then still wonder why the world is still walking one foot in front of the other just as predictably, are we not still creating exactly that which we're trying to question? Concepts are not only dependent as a dependency on our words; dependent origination is not just the statement that "language creates reality". To be is to express, to express is to generate karma, and to generate karma is to create the world. "Stay silent" is not a linguistic maxim, and definitely not a moral maxim, but an ontological one.

This is the prospectus for a new possibility of ontology. A system which is applicable in all cases does not foreclose the rest of philosophy, but invites instead a frightening possibility for the creation of new concepts. What are the implications for logic, science, and art? What are the implications for speaking and acting? The implications for truth and for Practice? What are the implications for social change, for decolonization, for resistance and morality, for the imagination of a better world? What are the implications for desire and love? For mistakes and being wrong? For the renunciate and the layperson? Such questions are what this prospectus points to, and are what deserve contemplation and care.

Footnotes

1.  This response to a metaphysical question is not far off from what many teachers of the Zen tradition do. The irony itself becomes a rich metaphysical solution.

2. This does not refer to a transcendental or preconstituted Self. It is just a means of talking.

3. Nagarjuna's formulation of the catuskoti.