Resumen de An Ontology of Non-Discriminatory Love: The Resurrection of the Triune Self in Ueda Shizuteru’s Appropriation and Critique of Meister Eckhart
In The Buddha-Christ as the Lord of the True Self: The Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School and Christianity, Fritz Buri critiques Ueda’s account of ethics on multiple fronts. First, (i) he argues that if the self were really selfless, then it would not be a self. Second, since he believes that one must have objective knowledge of the self and its situation in order to act ethically, (ii) if one ceases to take the self as an object of discursive knowledge, then one could not in principle act ethically. For this reason, he claims that “Ueda cannot show us how from a selfless self in the theoretical sense there can appear a man who conducts himself self-lessly in the ethical sense.” Finally, Buri argues that (iii) ethics is only possible if there is a self that has discursive knowledge of itself as a subject, and takes itself to be responsible for its conduct. Buri appears to be working under the assumption that without an autonomous (and thereby responsible) self, who is distinct from its negation, namely selflessness, ethics would be impossible. In what follows, I offer a defense of Ueda against Buri’s objections. In order to fully respond to Buri’s charges, a closer investigation of the relation between discursive reason and Ueda’s conception of the selfless self is in order. Because Ueda presents his Zen ontology by means of an interpretation and appropriation of Meister Eckhart’s philosophy, in order to work through Ueda’s ontology of the self, I reconstruct Ueda’s comparison between Zen and Eckhart in his Gottesgeburt. Because Ueda’s account of ethics is grounded in the total ontological and epistemic reversion of the self to selflessness, I reconstruct the ontological groundwork of Ueda’s ethics of compassion.
