Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

92 Edward S. Ragsdale
may not yet have penetrated. Consider naive realism. While Gestalt theorists have
viewed it as an inevitable, albeit flawed, aspect of common thought, Madhyamika
challenges us to let go of all manner of reification it entails. In raising the bar in
this way, Madhyamika may help clarify the absolutizing tendencies that Gestalt
theorists must acknowledge in their otherwise relational accounts.
Consider that the Gestalt rejection of absolutism and relativism in favor of
relationality was based largely upon comparisons across absolutist viewpoints,
that is, analysis by Duncker and Asch of contrasts in traditional cultural beliefs
and values. These absolutist valuations evince relational determination in exposing
the fitting relation between values and underlying meanings, and likewise
between meanings and their context of beliefs and perceptions. Yet they still
reflect significant absolutization, most clearly manifested in their clinging to their
own specific meanings, which are reified and clung to as absolute truths. This
absolutization of situated values – this attribution of absolute, context-free truth
to culture-bound expressions, returns us to where we began, to the cross-cultural
conflicts that emerge across those encrusted forms, where value differences may
appear absolute.
This absolutization of meaning and value may involve, in Gestalt terms,
insufficient insight into the contexts that govern their relational determination.
Where meanings are shaped by contextual conditions that are effectively outside
of awareness, the merely relational existence of those meanings is obscured, and
they acquire a false sense of absoluteness. What is missing is insight into the basis
of the meanings, that is, more penetrating awareness of their relational determinants,
the contingencies both within and without the boundaries of the object,
upon which its existence and meaning depend. If these bases were more accessible
to consciousness, then the truth claims that proceed from them would be subject
to critical examination, and meanings not fully attuned to their own relational
basis might need to be modified, along with the valuations they support. This of
course is what happens as layers of naive realism are seen through. One’s understanding
of the object is revised as properties previously attributed to it alone are
discovered to be relational facts, dependent in part upon an experiencing person.
Thus conscious contexts may shape and support meanings, but within a constricted
cultural universe that may have trouble seeing beyond itself to substantiate
its own claims. This should come as no surprise. Cultural meanings are not
necessarily assimilated purely on the basis of open-minded appraisal of their
objective merits, or intelligent analysis of the truth-values of underlying beliefs.
Nor does weak justification necessarily diminish one’s emotional investment in
them. There may be other demands at work besides those following from open
appraisal of sensibility. We are all pressed to make sense of our world, regardless
of our variable capacity to do so accurately. Born into human cultures with little
initial understanding of how things work, we take much on faith. We embrace
meanings partly because they are underwritten by the groups that we at least