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from ThisMachine/kills the fascist within
  • Was reminded by this Brook Ziporyn essay on Bob Dylan that we all contain what we hate.

Brook Ziporyn

17 Sep 2026 - 17 Sep 2026
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    • Bob Dylan, Tiantai Buddhism and the Soteriology of Self-Hatred | Moretoitivities particularly good
      • For I want to propose that it is this convergence of hater and hated, the seemingly impossible simultaneous coextensivity of true vileness as a human being with unquenchable contempt that vileness, that has given Dylan’s work its unique power and beauty from the beginning, even when he was struggling to evade it by transformation after transformation, failed solution after failed solution.  He could not outrun it, and it is the essence of his art.   This claim rests on the old intuition that beauty has something to do with the union of opposites.  Kant saw it in the union of purpose and purposelessness: in purposivity without detectable purpose.  Schelling continued this line of thought, seeing genius as the highest category unifying spirit and matter, intended meaning and blind causality, again purpose and purposelessness.
        • Huh tell me about this purpose[lessness] dialectic or whatever it is, seems like something I should be aware of anti-purpose Ask Claude
          • Here's the core of this tradition:
          • Kant: Purposiveness Without Purpose
          • The key text is the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant's third Critique. The problem he's trying to solve: why does beauty feel meaningful — like it was made for us — when we can't actually identify any purpose it serves?
          • Kant's answer is that beautiful objects appear to be "purposive without purpose." An object's purpose is the concept according to which it was made; an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose — if it appears to have been designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects that they affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be found.
          • So: a flower looks like it was designed to please you. But it wasn't. There's no discoverable intention behind it, no function it's fulfilling. Yet something in your mind responds to it as if there were.
          • The aesthetic experience is enjoyable for its own sake — its purposiveness is fulfilled simply by the pleasure we take in the free play of imagination and understanding. It has no purpose outside itself: no cognitive aim in the realm of truth, no practical aim in the realm of goodness.
          • What's happening in the mind during this?
          • The free harmony of imagination and understanding is contingent — "lawfulness without law," as Kant puts it — which attempts to synthesize diverse sensible properties of objects, and hence employs a purposive activity itself.
          • Your cognitive faculties are doing something organized and harmonious, but not toward anything. The experience is complete in itself.
          • This is why beauty is resistant to analysis:
          • it is not just that the purpose for the beautiful happens to be unknown, but that it cannot be known. Still, we are left with the problem of understanding how a thing can be purposive, without having a definite purpose.
          • That irreducible paradox is constitutive of the aesthetic.
          • Schelling: Genius as Resolution of the Deeper Dualism
          • Schelling takes this further. For him, the purpose/purposelessness gap isn't just a feature of aesthetic experience — it maps onto the deepest metaphysical split he's trying to close: spirit vs. matter, freedom vs. necessity, the conscious vs. the unconscious.
          • In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling boldly claims that in his creations the artist is able to resolve the contradiction between the ideal and the real, between the I and the world.
          • The mechanism is genius.
          • There is in each great artist, according to Schelling, a "dark unknown force," a spirit which inspires him to create what he otherwise could not perhaps create alone. And where else can that spirit come from other than from the commonly restrained world which calls on all creators? It is through the hands of the artist that the world is able to speak and finally reveal what it has not yet given appearance.
          • The point: the artist consciously intends something (a purpose), but the work exceeds and escapes that intention — it comes from somewhere unconscious, natural, blind.
          • Schelling puts at the very end of the System of Transcendental Idealism the unity of conscious purpose and unconscious purposelessness as the final consummation and overcoming of all dualisms.
          • The artwork is the one place where these two irreconcilable things — minded intention and mindless nature — actually coincide.
          • Schelling believed that nature and spirit are two aspects of the same reality: nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature.
          • Art is where you actually see this identity rather than just asserting it philosophically.
          • The Connection to Ziporyn's Argument
          • The Dylan essay is applying this to a specific and perverse case. Normally the "union of opposites" that generates beauty is something like: form and content, intention and accident, meaning and materiality. Ziporyn is arguing that in Dylan's case, the operative union of opposites is the hater and the hated being the same person — the self-contempt is so thoroughgoing that it generates a similar structure: there's a kind of purposiveness (the contempt, which has an object and a target) operating without a coherent self to anchor it (because the self is itself the target). The energy circulates without grounding, which is aesthetically productive in the same way Kant's purposiveness without purpose is. The machine runs without a destination, and that's precisely what makes it beautiful.
      • the process of Tiantai meditation is simply to see oneself as finite, to make one’s finitude explicit, and in so doing to experience the incoherence of this finitude and hence the inescapability of one’s particular form of finitude.   Not just inescapable to oneself, which would still be a kind of definite coherence unique to oneself, but inescapable everywhere.  One’s own peculiar finite craziness is universal and omnipresent.   It is here that I hope to find a way to understand the genius of Dylan’s work.   For what is accomplished here is the universalization of the sense of wrongness, of the unease of evil, anxiety, guilt, melancholia, finitude, which both preserves and overcomes it.   The first step is to become acutely aware of this sense of wrongness, to accept it and develop the capability of recognizing it clearly in all its subtle manifestations, to feel it intensely precisely as this qualitative wrongness, infecting even the apparently good and pleasant things which circumscribe it and in contrast to which it is defined (the role of repentance rituals, combined with classical mindfulness contemplations, in traditional Tiantai speaks to this need).   Then one investigates what this feeling feels like, what it is to feel this feeling.
        • Tell me specifically about those repentance rituals Ask Claude
          • Here's a specific account of the Tiantai repentance rituals Ziporyn references:
          • The Key Texts
          • The central repentance ritual in the Tiantai tradition is the Fahua Sanmei Chanyi ("Lotus Samādhi Repentance Ritual").
          • It was compiled by Zhiyi (538–597), the founder of the Tiantai tradition.
          • He composed this Lotus Samādhi Rite of Repentance based on the Lotus Sūtra, and it is still performed by contemporary Chinese Tiantai and Japanese Tendai monastics.
          • Zhiyi also wrote several other repentance texts:
          • the Vaipulya-samādhi Repentance Practice, the Repentance Ritual of Petitioning Avalokiteśvara, and the Golden Light Repentance Practice.
          • The Two-Level Structure: Phenomena and Principle
          • The single most important structural feature of these rituals is that they operate on two distinct levels simultaneously:
          • Tiantai repentance rituals like the Lotus Repentance, the Invocation of Guanyin Repentance and the Great Compassion Repentance include both "repentance through activity" — involving prostrations, offerings, chanting, recitation of mantras — and "repentance through principle," in which practitioners contemplate the emptiness of all phenomena.
          • These are technically called shi chan (phenomenal repentance) and li chan (principle repentance).
          • The Tiantai patriarch Zhili outlines three types: the repentance of conducting rituals (repenting based on precepts); the repentance of auspicious signs (eliminating sins by contemplating the Buddha's appearance) — both falling under repentance through phenomena; and the repentance of non-arising, categorized as repentance through principle.
          • The five-fold repentance framework (wuhui) structures the activity level:
          • the "five repentances" include prostration, repentance, invocation, rejoicing, and dedication, and are classified as Li (Principle) and Shi (Phenomena).
          • What the Ritual Actually Does Functionally
          • The phenomenal repentance layer — prostrations, chanting, ritual acts — serves to intensify and make vivid the felt sense of wrongness and karmic defilement. The principle layer then turns that acute feeling into an object of meditation. The scriptural verse from the Samantabhadra Meditation Sūtra that grounds the Lotus Repentance captures the pivot between the two:
          • "The ocean of impediment of all karma is produced from one's false imagination. Should one wish to repent of it, let him sit upright and meditate on the true aspect of reality. All sins are just as frost and dew, so wisdom's sun can disperse them."
          • This is directly relevant to what Ziporyn is describing: the ritual doesn't aim to simply eradicate the feeling of wrongness through some act of purgation, but to intensify it at the phenomenal level and then investigate its nature meditatively — which is precisely the sequence he describes (feel it intensely, then investigate what that feeling is).
          • The Samantabhadra Sūtra sets forth a detailed meditation on the bodhisattva that includes repentance for sins committed with the six sense faculties, and Zhiyi incorporated this ritual of repentance into the Lotus Samādhi, the third of the "four kinds of samādhi" taught in the Tiantai meditative system.
          • The six-sense-faculty framing matters: it means the wrongness being repented isn't just moral transgression but the very structure of how one perceives and engages the world.
          • The Song Dynasty Elaboration
          • The Song Tiantai patriarch Zhili defended Tiantai ritual practices like the Lotus Repentance ritual against interpretations of sudden enlightenment that could undermine such practices
          • — i.e., he insisted the ritualized, gradual, phenomenological dwelling-in-wrongness was indispensable, not a mere preliminary to be bypassed.
          • He also composed the Dabei Chan (Great Compassion Repentance), which has remained one of the most popular and commonly performed rites in contemporary Chinese Buddhism.
          • Connection to Ziporyn's Argument
          • The repentance rituals do exactly what Ziporyn says: they function as a technology for dwelling in the sense of wrongness — making it explicit, structured, repeatedly enacted — before the meditative investigation of what that wrongness is begins. The ritual enactment (prostration, confession, chanting of wrongdoing) is the first step; the emptiness contemplation is the pivot; the result is neither elimination of the wrongness nor mere wallowing, but its universalization. That's the Tiantai soteriological move Ziporyn is mapping onto Dylan.
    • Reading his new translation of Tao Te Ching, was amused to see "it's not a bug it's a feature" in the introduction. That someone so in the thick of the humanities has picked up on hacker jargon...kind of weird.