Dōgen and the Linguistics of Reality (original) (raw)
2021, Reiligions
The goal of this article is to show how Dōgen’s views of language, perhaps the most “mystical” part of his thought at first glance, can be interpreted in a framework that is wholly rational in the broader sense of the word. Dōgen belongs to a pansemioticist tradition and indeed maintains that being is tantamount to signification, but unlike previous pansemioticists, such as Kūkai, he does not posit a signifying subjective Other to whom the “message” of reality can be attributed. In Dōgen’s view, the meaningfulness of an event is a concomitant characteristic of its very reality, because the availability of reality for us to experience is already a linguistic phenomenon. The article argues that this is not a mystical thesis, but a view that can also be articulated in a more familiar and fully rational idiom, and that it bears similarities with many different Western thinkers and theorists, such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Peirce, Jakobson, and others.
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