Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

88 Edward S. Ragsdale
dependent upon body (sense organs, nervous system) and mind. Phenomenal
characteristics of percepts, which appear to be properties of things in themselves,
maintained even in our absence, are instead relational facts, dependent upon an
experiencing person. Consider the secondary characteristic of color. While
appearing to be an independent physical property, color is instead a relational
fact, arising in the interaction of light waves with our sensory-perceptual systems.
Likewise the tertiary characteristics of meaning and value are relational facts,
though our naive realism may blindly attribute them to objects or situations as
independent, context-free properties. For while naive realism is clearly mistaken,
its error is hard to fully appreciate and correct. As Köhler (1960/1971) notes, and
as Mahayana Buddhism would heartily agree, “We are all naive realists most of
the time” (p. 68).
Commonsense reality thus tends to ignore the dependence of our percepts on
an experiencing person. Consider two particular aspects of relationality within the
experiential field, concerning external interactions between things, and internal
relations within them. First we see that objects of experience are not perceived
independently of their context of other things. Phenomenal objects (percepts,
concepts) do not exist in isolation. They represent parts of larger contexts, and
their specific meaning is influenced by the role they play in completing this larger
whole. Second, it appears that phenomena not only exist in contexts, but also as
contexts. They depend upon internal relations of the parts that compose them.
After all, if Gestalt psychology and Madhyamika Buddhism are correct, nothing
exists as a whole and unitary thing. Such uncompounded elements have not been
found to exist. Neither can we explain the existence of a thing as a summation or
collection of elemental parts – as though its parts represented some ultimate
reality – since parts are no more unitary than the entities they compose. Parts too
are composite, and subject to further deconstruction. Thus both Gestalt psychology
and Madhyamika Buddhism reject elementarism, the view that things are
reducible to summations or collections of basic elements, which themselves are
deemed to be independent and uncompounded, and in a sense more real.
For both Gestalt theory and Buddhism, relationality offers a middle way
between the false extremes of absolutism and nihilism (cf. relativism).
Absolutism (e.g., naive realism) reifies the existence of objects as though their
meanings were a property of the things themselves, independent of other things.
Nihilism, on the other hand, maintains its own implicit form of absolutism, by
reifying the absence of any indwelling meaning, including meaning that is
informed by awareness of relationality. It thus overextends its refutation of
absolute existence to deny relational existence as well, succumbing to a version
of the very absolutism it otherwise rejects. These extremist views share a common
error: the human tendency to absolutize experience as though its contents
represented independent facts. Elementarism seems to represent a blend of
both absolutist and relativist errors. Its reduction of experience to discrete and