Dewey, Suzuki, and the Elimination of Dichotomies

·期刊原文

Dewey, Suzuki, and the Elimination of Dichotomies

by HAROLD E. McCARTHY

Philosophy East and West, 6, No. 1 (1956) p.35-48

(c) by The University Press of Hawaii.

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P.35

JOHN DEWEY AND D. T. SUZUKI, as Van Meter Ames
has pointed out on more than one occasion,(1) are not
as alien to one another, philosophically, as might
appear at first glance. If one could really get past
the unfortunate assumption that Suzuki is the
spokesman, par excellence, for Eastern mysticism at
its most obscure, paradoxical, and esoteric, whereas
Dewey is the spokesman for American common sense,
scientific reason, and educational know-how, one
might discover that Dewey's naturalism and Suzuki's
Zen have much in common. Such a thesis may not be
welcomed by those who would turn Zen into a special
cult, with or without mescaline as a short-cut to
satori; and, in similar manner, such a thesis may not
be welcomed by those who feel that one of Dewey's
significant virtues as a philosopher was his
tough-minded, thoroughly "scientific" approach to
every phase of human life and experience. But if both
Dewey and Suzuki are approached in terms of their
writings rather than in terms of preformed opinions,
important resemblances can certainly be found
without, at the same time, attempting to deny equally
important differences.
In this paper, then, we shall limit ourselves to
a very modest task: that of noting the attitude of
both Dewey and Suzuki with respect to the conceptual
(or intellectual) dichotomy as an instrument of
analysis and description. We shall not be concerned,
accordingly, with over-all evaluation, nor shall we
be concerned with suggesting, for instance, how a
"synthesis" can be (or should be) brought about. It
is possible that Dewey and Suzuki can, in the end, be
viewed as supplementing (or complementing) one
another; but, if so, that is not the present concern.
Above all, in this paper we shall not be concerned
with pointing out how Dewey and Sutuki differ from
one another either in central or in peripheral
matters; and we leave open the possibility that the
differences may be far more significant than the
resemblances. Our only assumption is this (and what a
dangerous assumption
_____________________________________________________
(1) van Meter Ames, "America. Existentialism, and
Zen," Philorophy East and West, I. No. I (April,
1911), 35-47; "Zen and Pragmatism," ibid., IV,
No. 1 (April, 1954), 1933.

p.36

it is): that, although a complete, comparative study
involves a concern with both resemblances and
differences, an incomplete study, concerned with
either resemblances or differences, is possible and
may be of value.

I

However much Dewey and Suzuki may differ in some
respects, they do, at least, have this much in
common: a deep and distinctive suspicion of dualisms,
all rigid dichotomies, and all logic which is built
upon dualisms and dichotomies.

This suspicion of the dichotomy as integral to
the core of Suzuki's thought may sometimes pass
almost unnoticed; but it should be perfectly clear to
students of Dewey by this time that the rejection of
the ultimacy of the dichotomy as a tool of scientific
and intellectual analysis is one thread which binds
all of Dewey's writings together and, in the end,
gives to Dewey's naturalism its particular and (in
the West) almost unique flavor.(2) And when Dewey
does examine and reject a dichotomy, it is almost nev
er to deny one side of the dichotomy or to "reduce"
one side of the dichotomy to the other, but, rather,
to substitute for the dichotomy itself a continuity
of resemblances and differences which involves no
absolute tensions and no unbridgeable gaps.

With respect to the traditional distinction
between truth and falsity, Dewey worked indefatigably
to replace the usual dichotomy with a continuity, and
partly by challenging the dichotomy between
experience and Nature in such a way that thought
could avoid, once and for all, the hopeless position
which claims that a statement possesses truth by
virtue of an inherent relationship to "things as they
are in themselves" as opposed to a progressively
established relationship to things in the context of
human experience. Defining truth in terms of things
as they are in themselves leads inevitably to a
distinction between absolute and relative truth,
God's truth and man's truth. By way of this
distinction, the reality of absolute truth is
established, but is also established as unknown and
unknowable relative to man since, by definition, it
transcends human experience and human operations
altogether. Thus we are left with a rather
unfortunate distinction between an unknown something
we could not know what and an unknown nothing at all.
But once truth is defined in terms of the procedures
of verification, and once it is recognized that the
process of verification can be carried out only
within
_____________________________________________________
(2) See, for instance, Matron G. White, "The
Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable
Dualism, " in Sidney Hook, ed., John Dewey,
Philoropher of Science and Freedom (New York: The
Dial Press, 1950), p. 316.

p.37

the context of experience, and that in this context
verification is never final but at best a matter of
degree, the truth-falsity dichotomy gives way to a
continuity of warrantabilities, and the way is
prepared for a reconstruction, in logic and a better
understanding of scientific method.(3)

As for reconstruction in logic, Dewey was surely
motivated in part by, a desire to remove the dualism
between logic and the existential mechodology of
inquiry. As he writes:

The primary postulate of a naturalistic theory of
logic is continuity of the lower (less complex) and
the higher (more complex) activities and forms. The
idea of continuity is nor self-explanatoty But its
meaning excludes complete rupture on one side and
mere repetition of identities on the other; it
precludes reduction of the "higher" to the "lower"
just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps.(4)

During a period in which reconstruction in logic
almost automatically means in most quarters the
rejection of Aristotelian logic and the development
and elaboration of symbolic logic, it may be
difficult for some to take Dewey's critique of formal
logic as anything but beside the point. It is easy to
say that Dewey was simply not cut out to be a
logician; but the fact remains that Dewey has set
forth a demand for a logic which is more sensitive to
the complexities of human experience and the
operating concepts and procedures of contemporary
science, a logic in which, in the end, the rigid
dichotomies between the formal and the material,
reason and experience, and truth and falsity are
eliminated on the grounds of experiential inadequacy.
Dewey is not a critic of logic as such, but he is
certainly a critic of traditional logics.(5)
When Dewey calls for an extension of the
scientific method and the scientific attitude of mind
into all areas of human inquiry, he is rejecting, of
course, the ultimacy of verification in terms of
tradition, intuition, and pure reason. However, and
in spite of these rejections, no one could recognize
more clearly than Dewey the fact that inquiry moves
within a sociohistorical context, is guided by
reason, and may well make interesting jumps and leaps
by way of what is often called insight, intuition,
hunch, and the
_____________________________________________________
(3) It is true, unfortunately, that Dewey often made
statements about the concept of truth which
were misleading; and one suspects that at times
Dewey was capable of misleading himself. Thus, he
should nor have recommended Peirce's definition
of truth as the "opinion which is fated to be
ultimrrely agreed to by all who investigate,"
since, from Dewey's own procedural point of view,
a definition in terms of "fated ultimate
agreement".. is as empty of empirical meaning as
a definition of truth in terms of ideas in the
mind of God. See John Dewey, Logic, the Theory of
Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt and Co.. 1938), p.
345.
(4) Ibid., p. 23.
(5) It is important to note that Dewey apparently
rejects any two-valued logic. He writes, "If by
'two-valued logic' is meant a logic that regards
'true and false' as the role logical values, then
such a logic is necessarily so truncated that
clearness and consistency in logical doctrine are
impossible. Being the matter of a problem is a
primary logical property." Ibid., p. 107.

p.38

visions of the sleeping self. In calling for an
extension of the scientific method, moreover, Dewey
is not guilty of monolithic methodology, since his
position, again and again, is that scientific method
is concrete only in particular procedures, and these
procedures are necessarily pluralistic, since --if
effective--they must be relevant to what is being
investigated, the questions being asked, and the
specific conditions of inquiry in the diverse and
changing contexts. Dewey does not identify, say, the
procedures of physics with the general method of
science; and perhaps nowhere else is continuity
within diversity more obvious than in his analysis of
scientific method. His only absolute demand is the
tautological demand that statements about the
experienced refer to the experienced and be
(progressively) checked against the experienced
before being recommended for acceptance and action.
As for the distinction between the natural and
the supernatural, it might be argued, and perhaps
convincingly, that here is one instance in which
Dewey--being temperamentally in over his
head--resolves the dichotomy by the simple expedient
of denying one of the terms, i.e., by denying the
supernatural and insisting that whatever is is
connectible within the realm of Nature. On the other
hand, if the supernatural drops out, the transcendent
does not drop out. Man, for Dewey, is a creature who
projects ideals. These ideals are possibles as
opposed to actuals and hence do not constitute their
own realization; but they are not completely chopped
off from actuals. Where significant, projected human
ideals have their roots in the nature of man, his
needs, and his shifting and changing problems; and,
where effective, they function as guides to action
and goals to be actualized in concrete contexts. As
ideals, they transcend the actual; but, where they
transcend the actual absolutely, they cease to be
ideals and become pie-in-the-sky or booby prizes for
those who, having failed in the game, stand in need
of consolation. It is possible to resolve the
dichotomy of the natural and the supernatural by way
of this dynamic analysis of the actual and the ideal.
A more comprehensive and deeper resolution is surely
possible, but Dewey's sensibilities lie in other
directions.

As for the other dichotomies that Dewey attacks,
a few more may be noted, but there are too many to
discuss in detail at this rime. The distinction
between mind and body is rejected and gives way to a
pluralistic distinction between the physical, the
psycho-physical, and the mental as shifting levels of
increasing complexity of interaction among natural
events. The dichotomous distinction between man and
Nature gives way to continuity: man not only lives in
a natural world, but he is of the natural world in
which he lives, an expression of what Nature can do
under specific conditions of organization and
interaction. But the recognition that man, biolog-

p.39

ically speaking, is a mammal cancels out none of the
observable differences between man and any other
living creature (plant, animal) one may choose to
specify. In axiology the dualism of fact and value
(sometimes regarded as one of the abiding
achievements of modern philosophy from Hume on down)
gives way to multidimensional continuity as Dewey
insists that warranted assertions about "matters of
fact" presuppose (and hence are "relative to") a
variety of evaluations or evaluational choices and
that evaluations themselves are completely subject
to empirical control in terms of origins, relations,
and outcomes. Finally, in the field of art, Dewey
tells us quite bluntly that his task, as he sees it,
is "to restore continuity between the refined and
intensified forms of experience that are works of art
and the everyday events, doings, and suffering that
are universally recognized to constitute
experience."(6) When this continuity, warranted in
theory, has been established in attitude and
practice, art, Dewey feels, will no longer operate as
something separate from the rest of life-activity; it
will no longer be an escape from life. Rather, the
distinction between "pure art" and "functional art"
will become, once more, as non-existent as it
normally is in a primitive society, where aesthetic
artifacts may be at one and the same rime expressive
and functional without the slightest hint of
contradiction. All in all, one may say with
considerable confidence that completely central to
Dewey's thinking is the attempt to think past the
dichotomy and to think to the broader notion of a
functional and dynamic continuity of process which
preserves differences without turning them into
absolute gaps. Dichotomies for Dewey are, at best,
unrealistic and a priori intellectualistic
constructions which operate only as obstructions to
sound analysis and barriers to fresh experience. Such
dichotomies, socio-historically speaking, may even
reflect the operation of dichotomizing social forms
and processes. At the same time they may help to
preserve these forms and processes by giving them
philosophical sanction. Errors in philosophy are not
always "only ridiculous."

II

But if Dewey is the consistent enemy of the
intellectual dichotomy in science and philosophy,
Suzuki is almost as much an enemy. It may be argued
that allies against a common foe need have little in
common; and it certainly cannot be argued that the
enemy of the dichotomy is necessarily a Deweyian
naturalist. The Vedaantist denies dualisms, but this
does not make him a naturalist. The fundamental
question is: Why is the dichotomy
_____________________________________________________
(6) Juhn Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton,
Balch and Co., 1934), p 3.

p.40

attacked and how is the dichotomy resolved? When this
question is raised with respect to Suzuki's Zen, the
proper answer (which is bound to be complex) reveals
that we are surely dealing with a naturalism, and a
naturalism which both resembles and differs from the
naturalism of Dewry. As for the distinction between
Suzuki's Zen and Zen as such, it must be pointed out
now that for this writer there is no such thing as
Zen as such but only Zen such as it is presented by
this thinker or that thinker. It is pointless to keep
up the fiction chat Suzuki is only a neutral
historian or an impersonal mouthpiece. Even if he
writes as a Buddhist, Kierkegaard wrote as a
Christian, and Kierkegaard is as much a creative
thinker as Santayana, who may have supposed that he
was doing no more than giving the final touches to
the long tradition of materialism. Among those who
are professionally concerned with the problems of men
we may distinguish (broadly and loosely) creative
thinkers and academicians, both of whom work within
some tradition. No creative thinker works in a
vacuum, and there is nothing remotely academic about
Suzuki.

From a purely philosophical point of view (and no
one has disliked the dichotomous distinction between
philosophy and religion more than Suzuki, whose
implicit claim is that both religion and philosophy
are properly negated and preserved in the notion of
the spiritual) , the correct approach to the
understanding of Suzuki's attack upon dualisms is by
way of his criticism and rejection of the claims of
traditional logic. As he writes, "the dualist view of
reality has been a great stumbling block to our righ
t understanding of spiritual truth,"(7) and thus "Zen
... if anything... is the antipode to logic, by which
I mean the dualistic mode of thinking."(8) Suzuki. at
least by Western standards, is not a technical
logician and his exhibited grasp of traditional logic
(either Eastern or Western) is neither comprehensive
nor detailed. Yet, he sees keenly what he does see
and knows precisely what he is about. His attack
comes from at least three different directions as he
seems to formulate, both directly and indirectly,
three interrelated contentions:

1. Traditional logic is constructed, ultimately,
in terms of the dichotomy of truth and falsity; but,
however useful such a dichotomy may be in purely
formal analysis, the dichotomy is hopeless within the
context of a full grasp of the complex, changing,
multidimensional processes of experienced Nature.
2. Logic has to do with the ordering (in terms of
the duality of truth and falsicy) of linguistic
symbols; but the non-symbolic processes of empirical
_____________________________________________________
(7) D. T. Suzuki, Living by Zen (Tokyo: The Sanseido
Press, 1949). p 25.
(8) "D. T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
(New York: The Philosophical Library, 1949), p.
38.

p.41

Nature (the "ten thousand things" that spontaneously
arise) transcend, or at least are different from, the
logico-sentential constructions that purport to refer
to these processes.

3. Logic, as the epitome of intellect, claims to
be the only appropriate guide to significant living;
but life is biological and psychological bsiore it is
rational and logical, and thus a life of reason only
is a life of biological narrowness, psychological
blindness, and spiritual frustration.

Each of these contentions points to something of
importance, and each one is full of implications for
the full-blooded naturalist who, with Suzuki, in
asserting the primacy of experience, would agree that
"when words cease to correspond with facts it is time
for us to part with words and return to facts."(9)
Thus, not only are the concepts of truth and falsity,
as absolute and dichotomous, misleading and unwieldy
within the context of scientific practice, but, even
if these concepts were not unwieldy, it would still
be important to remember that they are applicable to
statements only; in short, they are not applicable to
factual processes, and it is clearly absurd (at least
in the middle of the twentieth century) to suppose
that Nature (as opposed to science) can somehow be
analyzed into logically ordered sets of statements.
The ten thousand things spontaneously arise before
mathematical laws of science are constructed and
logically related. The power of the scientist to
construct such laws and find them useful does not
presuppose that Nature is only mathematical in its
structure; indeed, such power does not even
presuppose that Nature is in part mathematical in its
structure any more than it presupposes that Nature is
(in whole or in part) a political commonwealth in
which every entity is endowed with an unfailing
passion for obeying laws. Science can be analyzed
into statements but not the winds that come and go.

Moreover, there are dimensions of and approaches to
Nature which have nothing to do with the logical
ordering of concepts and statements. Natural
processes may be contemplated, natural processes may
be celebrated in rite and ceremony, natural processes
may be participated in, and natural processes may be
taken up and expressed in poetry, painting, song,
dance, and drama. The notion that logic and rational
science provide the only avenue to reality is
juvenile in its simplicity and has never really been
entertained by anyone who has left his calculating
machine or electronic brain long enough to take a
walk, play with his children, or ride the surf on a
sunny afternoon. These things we know without knowing
that we know. When we want to know what we know, the
bifurcating drive of the intellect
_____________________________________________________
(9) Ibid, p. 59. This does not mean, of course, that
a return to facts involves an unbroken vow of
silence. Having returned to facts, one may go on
to more appropriate words.

p.42

takes over (unless ruthlessly held back) and we may
be tricked into taking dichotomies for the tacts of
reality-at which time attention should be drawn to
such a statement as: "last night a wooden horse
neighed and a stone-man cut capers." With the
intellect alert and the sensibiliries dull, insight
may require years in a Zendo or equally long years in
a psychoanalyst's office. In the end, perhaps the
goal is the same: to break through the maze of
intellectualizations, rationalizations, projections,
and distortions (originally set up by the ego as
defense or operating measures, but at the eventual
price of being trapped in its own constructions, the
burden being psycho-financially too great to bear),
and to learn once more what can never really be
taught: that life is biological and psychological
long before it is rational, and, therefore, if health
is cherished, must not be made the victim of a
two-valued intellect.

Along with the rejection of traditional logic,
based as it is upon the rigid dichotomy between truth
and falsity (Ouick! (Quick! and neither yes nor no!),
other dichotomies are challenged, either directly or
implicitly. To begin with (and here is one mark of
Suzuki's naturalism), the dualism ot the natural and
the supernatural is, in principle, challenged to its
roots. But, for Suzuki, the rejection of this
dichotomy does not mean that there is no
supernatural, which is what it meant for Dewey. It
means that the dichotomy does not correspond to fact
and hence is intrinsically misleading, directing
attention in the wrong direction. There is a mondo
quoted by Suzuki which may be of use here. A
student--an absolute idealist, as a matter of
fact-came to a Zen master and asked: "With what frame
of mind should one discipline oneself in the truth?"
Said the Zen master, "There is no mind to be framed
nor is there any truth in which to be
disciplined."(10) The mondo goes on, but this much
can stand alone. And one meaning is clear, namely,
that a mindless or witless question (particularly on
the part of an absolute idealist who claims chat all
is mind) deserves what appears to be an answer in
kind, though nor really in kind, since the master,
mindful of his role, delivers an answer which is both
witty and to the point. What the master knows and
the student does nor know is that one who wants
directions for a frame of mind in which truth will be
disclosed (like one in the West who wants directions
for making world-shaking discoveries in science) has
already exhibited himself as incapable of having the
appropriate frame of mind; indeed, he has no mind,
and hence his question is pointless. In like manner,
one who is spiritually so dull that he wants to know
the way to the supernatural realm qua distinct from
Nature is already looking in the
_____________________________________________________
(10) Ibid., p. 57.

p.43

wrong direction and is already exhibiting himself as
incapable of finding what he might be looking for. He
can only be told char there is no supernatural realm
to seek out and nothing supernatural to be found; or,
more concretely, he may be given an old dirt-scraper.
In short, if one starts with the dichotomy of natural
vs. supernatural one is starting in terms of a com-
pletely unrealistic dichotomy and hence will never
discover what should be discovered and what perhaps
Spinoza, in his way, did discover: the natural in the
supernatural and the supernatural in the natural, or
eternity in the midst of birth and death.(11) If one
is looking for something more supernatural than the
ephemeral reflection of a mountain in a lake, or if
one is looking for something more natural than the
unhappy process of projecting deities so as to be
able to win their favor, then one will find neither
the natural nor the supernatural, but only the
brutally material shorn of its spiritual radiance.

One who starts by viewing the supernatural in
absolute opposition to the natural may well finish up
by regarding Suzuki's Zen as atheistic or
pantheistic. This is just one more intellectual
error. Both atheism and pantheism represent,
ironically enough, the acceptance of a dichotomy and
the complete or incomplete denial of one of its
members. To see things clearly one must start by
challenging the underlying dichotomy itself. When the
challenge is carried though, naturalism is not
necessarily left behind. Whar emerges may be a more
profound naturalism than anything Dewey has been able
to offer.

It is clear (to pursue this last point for a
moment) that no one could have less to say in favor
of traditional concepts of the supernatural than
Dewey, and no one is more desirous of extirpating the
notion of the supernatural once and for all.
Agnosticism, from Dewey's point of view, is only a
"halfway elimination of the supernatural," a "shadow
cast by the eclipse of the supernatural."(12) On the
other hand, Dewey hesitates to identify the elimina-
tion of the supernatural with traditional atheism,
which he finds to "have something in common with
traditional supernaturalism" and also to be "affected
by lack of natural piety."(13) Thus the goal of
Dewey's religious thinking is the naturalization of
the Deity. God ceases to be a particular, personal,
unchanging, supernatural Being, and becomes--by may
of a rather
_____________________________________________________
(11) "To Zen, time and eternity are one. This is open
to misinterpretation, as most people interpret
Zen as annihilating time and putting in its
place eternity, which to them means a state of
absolute quietness or doing-nothingness. They
forget that if time is eternity, eternity is
time, according to Zen. Zen has never espoused
the cause of doing-nothingness; eternity is our
every-day experience in this world of
sense-and-intellect, for there is no eternity
outside this time-conditionedness. Eternity is
possible only in the midsst of birth and death,
in the midst of time-process." D.T.Suzuki, "The
Philosophy of Zen," Philosophy East and West, I,
No.2 (July, 1951), 8-9.
(12) John Dewey A Common faith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1934), p. 86.
(13) Ibid., pp. 52-53.

p.44

fearful semantic magic--the dynamic unity of values,
or ideal ends, to, which one is supremely
devoted.(14) Such a conception, however repugnant to
the true believer, is still within the Western
supernatural-religious tradition; and from this point
of view Dewey's redefinition of God is little more
than what is left when the traditional, divine
substratum drops out, leaving the divine attributes
(now become mutable) circling in the sky like planets
which have lost their crystal spheres.(15) Dewey
assures us that God, relative to his redefinition,
has ideal but no actual (or metaphysical) status, for
values, projected beyond the actual, have their roots
in the actual and function properly as goals to be
achieved. Unfortunately, the truth remains, from a
Zen point of view, that Dewey is as much a victim of
(transcendent) God-consciousness as the atheist who
devotes his life to the denial of the Deity he cannot
for a moment forget. In like manner, Suzuki himself,
in spite of his protestations to the contrary. has
nor completely achieved (in his writings, at least)
what he speaks of as a Zen goal: the obliteration of
the last trace of God-consciousness.(16) At times he
is capable of sounding like a rather traditional
theologian, whereas Dewey, al worst, sounds only like
a Unitarian.

With the criticism of the dichotomy between the
natural and the supernatural there goes the equally
trenchant criticism of the dichotomy between man and
Nature. Thinking in terms of a man-Nature dualism is,
for Suzuki, one more intellectualistic distortion of
fact, a distortion of fact which Suzuki finds
particularly characteristic of Western thinking, and
a distortion which, when carried over into individual
and social practice, leads to the alienation of man
from Nature and thus to spiritual impoverishment.
These themes are recurrent in Suzuki's writings. The
dichotomy itself and as it functions in Western
thought issues, Suzuki suggests, "from the Biblical
account in which the Creator is said to have given
mankind the power to dominate all creation,"(17)
creation having been divinely established for man.
There is surely insight here. Both the Christian and
the Jew (apart from such notable exceptions as St.
Francis and Albert Schweitzer) have been
traditionally loath to acknowledge and to live the
fact of belongingness to the rest of
_____________________________________________________
(14) Ibid., p. 42.
(15) This is not quite fair to Dewey, for whom the
"movement" of ideals is no more mysterious
than the movement. of planets.
(16) The koan, "Empty-handed I go, and behold the
spade is in my hands " (An Introduction to Zen
Buddbism, p. 60) is interpreted to mean, at one
juncture, that "God's hands are also holding the
spade" (Living by Zen, p. 51). This is pure
intellectualism at its worst and probably
represents no more than an attempt to
communicate with those who want to know and to
preserve their ignorance at the same time.
(17) D. T. Suzuki, "The Role of Nature in Zen
Buddhism,"in his Studies in Zen(New Yord: The
Philosophical Library, 1995), p. 177.

p.45

Nature, as if the only way to preserve the dignity of
man is by degrading the rest of Nature. Even at the
present time (not to mention a hundred years ago) men
who should know better are, in principle, unable to
accept themselves as highly complex mammals or, for
that matter, to accept with friendliness their
mammalian and reptilian ancestors. But there is more
than Biblical background here--for, if in the science
of Aristotle man was inherently a part of Nature
(albeit a Nature conceived in terms of a natural
hierarchy of being), and such a part of Nature that
knowing on the part of man was as natural as
digesting, the whole tendency of modern classical
science was to alienate man from a Nature defined
exclusively in terms of quantitied processes, to make
human knowledge itself a mystery or impossibility,
and to reduce the relationship between man and Nature
to a thoroughly practical one--a relationship of
controlling or being controlled, of man manipulating
Nature before Nature victimizes man. There is more
here than either Biblical or Hellenic ideology.

Modern classical science, from a socio-economic point
of view, reflects the shift from the earlier
agrarian society to the modern industrial-urban
society, and hence reflects an actual, progressive,
alienation of man from the soil and the water as
defined in terms of the pre-industrial techniques of
farming, hunting, and fishing, with the concept of
co-operation within precariousness giving way to the
concept of conquest, subjugation, and control:
social, political, geographical, economic, and
scientific. Here, for Suzuki, is one of the sources
of the spiritual impoverishment of the modern West
and the progressive spiritual impoverishment
wherever exclusively Western ideas go.(18)

Thus it is that one of Suzuki's aims is to stress
again and again (directly and in terms of an entire
arsenal of metaphor and poetical imagery) the actual
unity of man with the rest of Nature. This unity is
not presented as an abstract or mystical unity but as
a functional unity. Sutuki does not deny for a single
moment the differences between man as a mode of
Nature and any other mode of Nature one may select.
As Suzuki writes:

While separating himself from Nature, Man is still a
part of Nature, for the fact of separation itself
shows that Man is dependent on Nature. We can
therefore say this: Nature produces Man out of
itself; Man cannot be outside of Nature, he still has
his being tooted in Nature....(19)
_____________________________________________________
(18) In these prosaic days of ours, there is a
craze among the young men of Japan for climbing
high mountains just for the sake of climbing;
and they call this conquering the mountains.'
What a desecration! This is a fashion no doubt
imported from the West along with many others
not always worth while lenrning. The idea of the
so-called 'conquest of nature' comes from
Hellenism, I imagine, in which the eatth is made
to be man's servant, nnd the winds and the sea
are to obey him. Hebraism concurs with his view,
too." D. T. Suzuki, "Zen Buddhism and the
Japanese Love of Nature," The Eastern Buddhist,
VII (193&1939), 67.
(19) Suzuki, Strtdies in Zen, p. 183.

p.46

I am in Nature and Nuture is in me...When we come
to this stage of thinking pure subjectivity is pure
objectivity, the en-soi is the pour-soi; there is
perfect idenriry of Man and Nature, of God and
Nature. of the one and the many. But the identity
does not imply the annihilation of one at the cost of
the other. The mountains do not vanish; they stand
before me. I have not absorbed them. nor have they
wiped me out of the scene.... Nature as a world of
manyness is not ignored, and Man as a subject facing
the many remains conscious of himself.(20)

Granted that Dewey would not use some of these terms
and expressions, we still have in these statements
the core of a humanistic naturalism which Dewey would
have responded to immediately. We also have a
poetical apprehension of truth which transmutes
without altering what for many starts out by being
too obvious to mention and finishes up by being too
false to discuss seriously: the identity in
difference which constitutes the continuity between
man and the rest of Nature. In affirming, in
principle, that man is as much a part of Nature as
the pine tree on the mountaintop, Suzuki is not
denying that men and pine trees are different.
Nature, he tells us, lacks consciousness: "It is just
the reed and not a 'thinking reed.'"(21) But it does
not follow from this that consciousness is not a part
of Nature or that man is absolutely "alienated" from
the rest of Nature because he possesses, or carries
on his activities with, consciousness. Even if it is
consciousness that distinguishes and thus "separates"
man from every other creature, or natural mode, it is
still consciousness which is the basis of the
recognition of the fact that conscious man is as much
a part of Nature as unconscious pine tree and
unselfconscious dog, even though misguided
intellectual reflection as a mode of consciousness
may persuade some men that man is really not a part
of Nature at all. What distinguishes man does not
necessarily separate man. Actually, nothing can
separate man from his natural matrix, not even his
own self-delusions. A man, like a dog, has no
alternative to living in Zen if he is to live at all;
but, unlike a dog, he can live by Zen: "man alone can
live by Zen as well as live Zen."(22)

In terms of this recognition, man is not alien to
the rest of Nature, and the rest of Nature is not
alien to man. On the other hand, Nature was not
created to serve man's needs and interests, and yet
man is dependent upon Nature for his very being.
Nature, therefore, is not (in the first instance)
something hostile to conquer and subdue; nor is
Nature something which, in being alien, can be
contemplated only at a distance and with a
hotelwindow eye. Nature is something to live with, to
co-operare with, to sympathize with, and with the
directness and sincerity with which a man would live
with and co-operate with his own self. The man-Nature
dichotomy is as empirically empty and as misleading
as the God-Nature dichotomy, and
_____________________________________________________
(20) Ibid., p. 188.
(21) Ibid., p. 181.
(22) Suzuki, Living by Zen, p.3.

p.47

they are both difficult to shake, as Dewey knew as
well as Suzuki. As Suzuki writes:

the two categories in Western thinking of... God and
Nature. or of Man and Nature...are all of human
creation. and we cling to them as...something
inextricably, fatalistically unescapable We are our
own prisoners. We defeat ourselves, believing in
defeatism, which is itself our own creation. This is
our ignorance, known as avidyaa in Buddhism. When
this is recognized we realize that we are free, "men
of no-business" (Wu-shih chih j坣).(23)

Just as the man-Nature dichotomy is an
intellectual error, so, for Suzuki, the mind-body
dichotomy is also an intellectual error. As he
writes, with a directness and concreteness that a
Western naturalist might emulate. Whatever the
philosopher or spiritualist may say about our bodily
existence, we are hungry when we do not eat, we are
thirsty when there is nor enough to drink--such are
concrete facts of human experience; we are all made
of flesh and blood and it is in these facts that the
truth of Zen is made manifest.... But from the Zen
point of View it is a great mistake to make a
distinction between mind and body, and to take them
as irrevocably differentiated the one from the other.
This dualistic view of reality has been a great
stumbling block to our right understanding of
spiritual truth.... One of the objects of Zen
training is to crush the dualistic idea of mind and
body.(24) From a traditional Western point of view,
the "crushing" of the dualistic idea of mind and body
might be viewed with alarm as the crushing of one of
the basic truths to which philosophers must return
again and again whether they like it or not; or it
may be viewed with joy (by some, though not by all,
warring sects) if the crushing involves the reduction
of mind to body or body to mind. But Suzuki, like
Dewey, is not concerned with anything so simple (or
so impossible) as a simple reduction. Indeed, if
everything is literally reduced to one, then to what,
one may ask, is the one reduced--a question which, if
properly understood, is precisely similar to the
question posed to the proponent of the cosmological
argument: If everything in Nature is ultimately
caused by the supernatural One, then by what is this
One caused? Suzuki's implicit contention is that
there is no need for a theory to relate the mind to
the body, let alone a theory to reduce the mind to
the body or vice versa, since we do not start with a
mind and a body but with a human being. Suzuki's goal
is not to provide a theory of mind-body, but to
provide insight into the nature of man and his
"original face"--of man who, of Nature and in Nature,
lives and works and talks with his friends and
commemorates the past and peers into the future long
before the distinction of mind-body supervenes upon
his reflection (which, ceasing to be
_____________________________________________________
(23) Suzuki, Sludies in Zen, pp. 202-203.
(24) Suzuki Living by Zen, pp. 24-26.

p.48

mythological, ceases to be poetical) and proceeds to
mold and to compel his practical attitudes and
orientations.

In tentative summation, we appear to have in the
writings of Suzuki the rejection of the ultimacy of
the dichotomy between truth and falsity, and with
all that this entails; the rejection of the dichotomy
between the natural and the supernatural, and perhaps
with greater naturalistic insight than even Dewey
shows; the rejection of the related dichotomy of time
and eternity, a dichotomy which Dewey is seldom
concerned with because of his one-sided obsession
with temporal processes, although, as Randall po ints
out (with friendly apologies to Dewey), there is in
naturalism room "for man's concern with the eternal
and with what Plato calls the 'deathless and the
divine'";(25) the rejection of the dichotomy of man
and Nature, and with insight that Dewey marches and
Santayana sometimes misses; and, finally, the
rejection of the dichotomy of mind and body. At no
time, however, does the rejection of these
dichotomies mean with Suzuki a reduction to, or a
mechanical denial of, one of the original terms of
the dichotomy. In each case, the dichotomy itself is
challenged by way of a return to the facts, and what
emerges is a dynamic and functional unity in
difference. Or, from another point of view, perhaps
it can be said that what emerges, or what should
emerge, is the recognition of what Santayana saw so
clearly in terms of his naturalism: that whatever is
spiritual has its material roots, and that whatever
is material has its spiritual culmination. Finally,
there emerges what appears to be from the point of
view of Zen an ironical by-product of Suzuki's
analysis, ie., the growing recognition that, although
the intellect may be the never-failing source of
conceptual bifurcations, the intellect in turn may
turn upon any particular bifurcation and destroy it.
The destruction of one bifurcation, however, does not
mean that every bifurcation is destroyed, since a new
bifurcation may arise to carry on at l east some of
the work of the discarded bifurcation. Moreover, the
intellectual recognition that all bifurcations are
suspect does not guarantee that the recognition will
be carried over into practice to become a quality of
living itself. What, from this point of view, seems
to be particularly important about Suzuki's
orientation is this: that, having disposed so
completely of certain vicious dichotomies, he is
happy, apparently, about keeping other dichotomies
(specifically the distinction between the natural
and the unnatural and the distinction between
praj~naa and vij~naana as ways of knowing) which a
more thoroughgoing naturalist would regard as equally
vicious. To this matter we may return at a later
date.
_____________________________________________________
(25) John Herman Randall, Jr.," Epilogue, The Nature
of Naturalism, " in Y. H. Krikorian, ed.,
Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 358.