I’ve been asked to discuss my emerging philosophy of Fruitionism with a small discussion group with a Buddhist orientation, so I’m sketching this outline to provide some background reading. Coming up with a brief, yet easily understandable, description is a bit of a challenge, since I plan on writing a (long) book fleshing out this concept. So In this essay I will be emphasizing brevity over accessibility.
Let me start by saying that overall, my description of Fruitionism is a mashup (does anyone else still use this word?) of the Neopragmatism of Richard Rorty and the Neotiantaism of Brook Ziporyn. (I am using the label Neotiantaism to avoid any debate about what is intrinsic to traditional Tiantai Buddhism and what is an interpretation by Ziporyn.) So if you’re interested in going even deeper into the conceptual foundation of Fruitionism, eventually you’ll have to dive into them.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been drafting tweet-sized descriptions of Fruitionism as an exercise in highlighting its key aspects. Here is my latest iteration:
Fruitionism proposes a pluralistic, bittersweet rhetoric of ramifying creativity sparking the letting loose of hope: perpetually recontextualizing evanescent fruits (hopes, vocabularies, values) via errant, charitable, reciprocally-constituting improvisational experimentalism.
Each concept in my tweet-sized description will likely end up being the theme of an entire chapter of my book. But for now, I’ll simply describe each one in a few paragraphs or so.
(If a close reading of such a densely conceptual compact description isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to skip to the end to read a description of Fruitionism based on the Buddhist parable of the raft. And then perhaps come back to the conceptual walkthrough.)
Proposes
Proposes is a gesture towards the concept of philosophy as proposal as opposed to philosophy as discovery:
«On the whole, however, I think that most philosophers regard philosophy as an independent discipline and that, tacitly at least, they recognize that it has its affinities not so much to formal or empirical science as to art — and that in its most philosophical moments it functions neither as empirical assertion, theorem, or dogma, but as proposal. And proposals cannot be adjudicated or tested like scientific hypotheses nor can they be examined like putative proofs within the context of a logistic system. The philosophical hypothesis, if one may use the expression, is neither analytic nor synthetic, nor synthetic a priori. It is a proposal and as such, at least prima facie, lacks a truth value. One is tempted to say that, disguise matters howsoever we will, philosophy remains an art, the product of a creative, disciplined imagination. Or to put it in less exalted terms, we sort of make it up as we go along.»
The Cognitivity Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Claims of Philosophy
Fruition is not a (truth) claim about the world or about us; it is merely a proposal for a potentially more fruitful way of engaging with the world, ourselves and others. The only way to assess its validity is to try it out. (See Improvisational Experimentalism below.)
Pluralistic, bittersweet
This is a gesture towards the concept of tragic pluralism. Almost everyone values a pluralistic society, and certainly fruitfulness sounds wonderful, but both entail a tragic dimension:
«What, then, do I mean by the tragic sense of life and what is its relevance to pragmatism? I mean by the tragic sense a very simple thing which is rooted in the very nature of the moral experience and the phenomenon of moral choice. Every genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity in which we ask: “What should I do?” takes place in a situation where good conflicts with good. If we already know what is evil the moral inquiry is over, or it never really begins. “The worse or evil,” says Dewey, “is the rejected good” but until we reject it, the situation is one in which apparent good opposes apparent good. “All the serious perplexities of life come back to the genuine difficulty of forming a judgment as to the values of a situation: they come back to a conflict of goods.” No matter how we resolve the opposition some good will be sacrificed, some interest, whose immediate craving for satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows, will be modified, frustrated or even suppressed. Where the goods involved are of a relatively low order, like decisions about what to eat, where to live, where to go, the choice is unimportant except to the mind of a child. There are small tragedies as there are small deaths. At any level the conflict of values must become momentous to oneself or others to convey adequately the tragic quality. Where the choice is between goods that are complex in structure and consequential for the future, the tragic quality of the moral dilemma emerges more clearly. And when it involves basic choices of love, friendship, vocations, the quality becomes poignant. The very nature of the self as expressed in habits, dispositions and character is to some extent altered by these decisions. If, as Hobbes observes, “Hell is truth seen too late,” all of us must live in it. No matter how justified in smug retrospect our moral decisions seem to have been, only the unimaginative will fail to see the possible selves we have sacrificed to become what we are. Grant that all regrets are vain, that any other choice would have been equally or more regretted, the selves we might have been are eloquent witnesses of values we failed to enjoy.
…
There is a conflict not only between the good and the good but between the good and the right where the good is a generic term for all the values in a situation and the right for all the obligations. The concepts of good and right are irreducible to each other in ordinary use.»
Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life
Thus all our goods (even enlightenment and liberation) are bittersweet because they entail our sacrifice of other goods. Fruitionism highlights the inevitably tragic aspect of fruitfulness — there are always tradeoffs.
Rhetoric
One might have expected that Fruitionism is a philosophy, and if that word works better for you in understanding Fruitionism, then by all means substitute it. But I prefer the term rhetoric to philosophy because the former makes no claims to truth, while typically the latter does. Using rhetoric reinforces the concept of philosophy as proposal. In fact, one could describe rhetoric as a proposal for a fruitful way of speaking instead of a claim of a right or true way of speaking.
Ramifying creativity
Ramifying (i.e., branching) is the heart of Fruitionism, and where it goes beyond the conventional understanding of Pragmatism. Both Fruitionism and Pragmatism are consequentialist worldviews — we judge their value by their consequences. Hence both are also retrospective — we can’t demonstrate ex ante their validity.
However, Pragmatism is focused on usefulness, while the Fruitionism is focused on fruitfulness. The key difference between usefulness and fruitfulness is that the latter manifests some degree of ramifying (branching) new uses. Here is how I define fruitfulness in the context of Fruitionism:
Fruitfulness: The ability of a (conceptual) framework to catalyze open-ended, deep, and ramifying novelty — surprising, (beneficial) changes. Novelty is open-ended to the degree it applies to a wide variety of disciplines, applications, or contexts. Novelty is deep to the degree that it changes things or the way we understand things in a transformative way. Novelty is ramifying to the degree it is self-perpetuating, i.e., each novelty in turn generates more fruitfulness, i.e., another wave of open-ended, deep, and ramifying novelties.
Sparking the letting loose of hope
Given some Buddhists’ aversion to the concept of hope, this aspect of Fruitionism may seem a little hard for them to embrace. But the key qualifier here is letting loose. Though I am not advocating letting go of hope, which most Buddhists would recommend, I am advocating letting it loose in the sense of letting go of any particular object of hope. I believe this kind of hope, which I call boundless hope, is compatible with Buddhism, at least Neotiantaism. Boundless hope is directionless hope because it perpetually aims in new directions. One can also think of it as empty hope — empty in the sense of open-ended.
I emphasize hopefulness in Fruitionism because I believe that people only embrace a way of living (be it a philosophy, a religion, or a rhetoric) if it inspires hope in them. And though I don’t want to spark a distracting side debate here (though I will in my book), I think Buddhism embraces a kind of hopefulness while using various alternative labels (e.g., aspire, resolve, vow) to mask this embrace.
If you’re interested in reading more about the letting loose of hope (an expression used by William James), you can read my two part essay on the topic (What Can Pragmatists Hope for in a Boundless World? and Dewey and Rorty: Sending Pragmatist Hopes in New Directions).
Perpetually recontextualizing
Recontextualizing is the other essential aspect of Fruitionism (along with ramifying).
If I had to boil the description of Fruitionism down to two words, they would be ramifying recontextualization.
I’ve played with a few alternative labels for this concept besides recontextualization: Verwindung, Exaptation, and Bricolage. All of these words convey the central idea that all creativity, novelty, innovation, etc. is a manifestation of turning (old) things to new uses. I currently prefer recontextualize because it’s one of the terms Ziporyn uses in describing the heart of Neotiantaism:
«But all of these descriptions are potentially very misleading, since our understanding of each of these points must be thoroughly modified by the most characteristic premise of Tiantai thought of all, which determines the meaning we intend for the term “thoroughgoing” here: the idea of “self-recontextualization”. As we’ll see in detail below, this is a thinking-through of the basic notion of universal contextualization itself and its constitutive role in the construction of all identities, to the point of seeing it to entail the ambiguating of the identity not only of the contextualized but also of the contextualizer. This notion brings with it a kind of turnaround whereby the full expression of any element of experience, indeed the thorough consideration of any determinate entity at all, intrinsically entails its self-overcoming and self-negation, amounting to its reversal: it is found to include just what it had initially appeared to exclude.»
Tiantai Buddhism (SEP)
At the heart of Neotiantaism is the concept of omni-recontextualization (also called omni-subsumption): anything can be recontextualized to appear as anything else, including its apparent opposite. Such omni-recontextualism is a manifestation of the Buddhist concept of emptiness as interbeing (my preferred term for dependent origination).
Remarkably, Rorty also makes recontextualization the central theme of his Neopragmatism philosophy:
«One might insist that the “desire to know the truth,” construed as the desire to recontextualize rather than (with Aristotle) as the desire to know essence, remains characteristically human. … From an ethicopolitical angle, however, one can say that what is characteristic, not of the human species but merely of its most advanced, sophisticated subspecies the well-read, tolerant, conversable inhabitant of a free society is the desire to dream up as many new contexts as possible. This is the desire to be as polymorphous in our adjustments as possible, to recontextualize for the hell of it. This desire is manifested in art and literature more than in the natural sciences, and so I find it tempting to think our culture as an increasingly poeticized one, and to say that we are gradually emerging from the scientism which Taylor dislikes into something else, something better. But, as a good antiessentialist, I have no deep premises to draw on from which to infer that it is, in fact, better nor to demonstrate our own superiority over the past, or the non-Western present. All I can do is recontextualize various developments in philosophy and elsewhere so as to make them look like stages in a story of poeticizing and progress.»
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
Ramifying recontextualization as an end in itself. Discovering that two such apparently different philosophies arrive at such a similar understanding of the centrality of recontextualization deeply astonished me, and greatly increased my confidence of the fruitfulness of such a viewpoint.
Evanescent fruits (hopes, vocabularies, values)
The fruits that are the primary focus of Fruitionism are hopes, vocabularies, and values. These three fruits are mutually constitutive: hopes shape values, which shape vocabularies, which in turn shape hopes. (I’m using vocabulary in a technical sense developed by Rorty. It’s roughly equivalent to the concept of ultimate worldview.)
These fruits are evanescent (connoting fleetingness, ephemerality, transience, impermanence, and even emptiness). I chose this word because of its link to the Japanese concept of mono no aware: a sensitivity to ephemera. All our fruits are born to die (or more accurately, are born by recontextualizing some prior fruits), and are destined die (i.e., to be recontextualized in turn), perpetually. This means not only that everything we value is evanescent, but so are our values themselves — future generations will have hopes, values, and worldviews we can’t currently imagine.
Improvisational experimentalism
(I’m skipping ahead to improvisational experimentalism, then I’ll deal with the adjectives modifying it.) The emphasis on experimentalism is at the center of Pragmatism. In fact, John Dewey sometimes said he preferred to call his philosophy Experimentalism. The pragmatists favored just trying things out — no matter how irrational they may seem — to see if they may be fruitful. This was a push back against the overly theoretical rationalism of various dogmas. This willingness to try out even seemingly bizarre experiments (I don’t just mean in laboratories) is essential to the next concept I discuss, improvisation.
The emphasis on improvisation is to highlight a yes and approach to such experimentation. This is roughly aligned with Ziporyn’s use the metaphor of setup-punchline to explain how every apparent duality, paradox, or even distinction can be recontextualized to reveal their unity while nonetheless preserving their differences:
«The “provisional”, conventional truth, local coherence, is the set-up. The “ultimate truth”, Emptiness, global incoherence, ontological ambiguity, is the punch line. What is important here is to preserve both the contrast between the two and their ultimate identity in sharing the quality of humorousness which belongs to every atom of the joke considered as a whole, once the punch line has been revealed. The setup is serious, while the punchline is funny. The funniness of the punchline depends on the seriousness of the setup, and on the contrast and difference between the two. However, once the punchline has occurred, it is also the case that the setup is, retrospectively, funny. This also means that the original contrast between the two is both preserved and annulled: neither funniness nor seriousness means the same thing after the punchline dawns, for their original meanings depended on the mutually exclusive nature of their defining contrast. Is the setup serious or funny? It is both: it is funny as serious, and serious as funny. Is the punchline serious or funny? It is both, but in an interestingly different way. It is obviously funny, but is it also serious? Yes. Why? Because now that the setup has occurred, both “funny” and “serious” have a different meaning. Originally, we thought that “funny” meant “what I laugh at when I hear it” or something like that, and “serious” meant “what gives me non-funny information” or something similar. But now we see that “funny” can also mean: What I take to be serious, what I am not laughing about, what I am earnestly considering, or crying over, or bewailing even.
But this means also that “serious” means “what can turn out to be either funny or serious”. So both “funny” and “serious” now both mean “funny-and-serious, what can appear as both funny and serious”. Each is now a center that subsumes of the other; they are intersubsumptive. As a consequence, the old pragmatic standard of truth is applied more liberally here: all claims, statements and positions are true in the sense that all can, if properly recontextualized, lead to liberation — which is to say, to their own self-overcoming. Conversely, none will lead to liberation if not properly contextualized.»
Tiantai Buddhism (SEP)
So one can try to understand some good as the punchline of an evil, and vice versa. (Successful safety standards in civil engineering (good) are the punch line to civil engineering disasters (evil) that prompted them.) So rather than trying to demonstrate the falsity of some viewpoint apparently opposed to mine, I yes and that viewpoint to its utmost extreme, and by doing so, reveal that it is the same as mine. I know this sounds utterly bizarre; that’s why Ziporyn has written several books explaining it and working through examples. He gives this unity of all opposites a variety of related names. The one I currently prefer is omni-recontextualization: anything can be recontextualized as anything else.
So this process of improvisational experimentalism with recontextualization is my proposal for how we should live our lives and orient our cultures.
One last point on improvisation. When we improvise, we acknowledge that the game we are playing is playing us. Take comedic improv as an example. Each improviser plays with the narrative by sending it in new directions, but because of the principle of yes and, the narrative plays with them — they are constrained in their play by what has been established in the narrative so far. (Note that the unity of opposites — the player is the plaything — is a perfect example of Neotiantaism’s omni-recontextualization!)
Now let’s turn to the adjectives modifying improvisational experimentalism.
Charitable
Charitable is pretty straightforward since it is somewhat entailed by the yes and principle of improvisation: we should treat the beliefs of others as charitably as possible, which is a principle in the philosophy of language (see principle of charity).
Reciprocally constituted
Reciprocally constituted is a gesture to player/plaything specifically and to the Buddhist concept of interbeing. If you deeply grok interbeing, which is the same as saying if you deeply grok emptiness, then omni-recontextualism just seems obvious. Reciprocally constituted is just another way of saying reciprocally recontextualized.
Errant
Finally, errant is my attempt to highlight two important senses of error: violating a norm and wandering aimlessness. (The etymological root of error is wander off.) Fruitionism is directionless, or as I prefer, boundless — there is no wrong direction in which to go, there is only wandering. See the concept of knight errant.
Fruitionism also turns fallibilism on its head: rather than just be wary of error (in the sense of violating a norm), we should also valorize error as the source of all fruitfulness. A paradigm of the fruitfulness of error is the emergence of homo sapiens from innumerable genetic errors. (Did you catch that the unity of fruitfulness and error is another instance of omni-recontextualism? If so, you’re on your way!)
If all of that conceptual unpacking made your head swim, let me close with Ziporyn’s variation (recontextualization) of the Buddhist parable of the raft, which I think beautifully and intuitively captures the essence of Fruitionism:
«The key lies in the change from Two Truths to Three Truths. In Two Truths theory, conventional truth (and upaya) is a raft used to get beyond rafts. It [sic] ability to lead beyond itself is the criterion of its validity. In Three Truths theory, conventional truth is the only kind of truth-content there is. All truths are conventional truths (even Emptiness and the Middle are also conventional truths). But, vice versa, conventional truths are now seen to have the property of also being Empty and the Middle. That is, they still lead beyond themselves, but they themselves are this beyond. How? Each truth — each content, each proposition, each percept — is still a raft. But the raft does not lead beyond rafts — there is no such beyond. Rather it leads to all other rafts. It leads to the raft factory from which all rafts are made (Emptiness, the Middle) and the infinite rafts, including back to itself, that are produced therefrom. The raft factory, in fact, floats on every raft; to be a raft is to be equipped to transcend itself and create other rafts. The raft of conditionality leads not to the “other shore” of unconditionality, but to the “raft factory” of the Lotus Sutra, the creation of infinite rafts. This has an analogue in the Lotus Sutra and its huge jumps in causality, or in the final stage in Zhiyi’s descriptions of various meditation regimes, where any cause can lead to any effect — because any cause can always be further contextualized by some further factor that will retrospectively change or extend its effect (set-up/punchline). That is, the liberation from subordination of means to end, or present to future, is found not in the isolation of all moments (or entities), but of the end of one-way subordination. The overcoming of subsumption is not fragmentation into atomistic momentariness, but intersubsumption of all moments as eternities, each consisting of all other moments.
Applying this to the present case, we can see that accepting any one of these rafts leads to all the other rafts.»
Wholly Imaginary, Absolutely Real: Zhiyi’s Treatment of Guanyin
The far shore of enlightenment and liberation is not the casting away of the rafts of conventional truth (contexts), it is a raft factory that perpetually recontextualizes old rafts into novel rafts, old contexts into new ones. Fruitionism is a recontextualization of the far shore of Nirvana as innumerable raft-based raft factories: perpetual ramifying recontextualization of conventional truths to create ever more ramifying raft factories. Fruitionism views all rafts (conventional truths) in term of their ability to ramify into myriad other rafts.
