June 10, 2015

June 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing will be my first response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. I will first respond to the abstract as this will allow me to take some pot shots at this paper.  "Bass believes that Zen poses a “challenge for behavior analysis to explain a repertoire which renders analysis meaningless.” I don’t believe this is the case. Zen doesn’t pose any challenge to behaviorism. To the contrary, Zen is challenged by behaviorism which pigeonholes it as the religious nonsense it really is and has always been. Imagine for a moment that Zen and behaviorism are two different languages which arose from two verbal communities. The aforementioned statement would then read as “Russian poses a challenge to English to explain a repertoire which renders English meaningless.” Such a statement is of course utter nonsense. Japanese is a language,, but Zen is a religion. 

Zen is not a language. It claims that language is not needed, specifically not the scientific language called behavior analysis, which debunks Zen’s authoritarian view. Supposedly, the meaninglessness of analysis “results from” what is triumphantly described as “the unique verbal history generated by Zen methods.” However, there is nothing unique about a religion which makes grand claims,, but which, ultimately, doesn’t and can’t deliver.

“Untying Zen’s verbal knots” presumably requires many years of practice with methods, such as meditation and riddles to suppress and undermine any kind of conversation. The dissociative effects this causes presumably result in “Enlightenment and Samadhi”, but all of these can only be accomplished by strict subservience to a Zen master, someone who is allowed to distract his or her students from their verbal behavior. Zen’s illusive “primary outcomes” are not to be questioned and “cannot be described in any conventional sense”, but “Samadhi or Satori” are said to be automatically reinforcing behaviors. The mystical notion of “stimulus singularity” reminds me of Chomsky’s mentalistic “poverty of the stimulus” argument. I won't go into that.

Could one call that  a Zen koan? Fact remains,, whether one considers, Zen, Catholicism or Islam, religious authority figures have always dominated other people by yanking words around in every language. There is really no need to “untie any verbal knots,” because without religion these knots simply don’t occur.  It is equally irrelevant to imagine what would have happened if Shakespeare had been a Zen Buddhist, Hamlet’s verbal behavior is believed to have been enriched as he would be able to say “To be or not to be or neither.” However, the question why Hamlet became philosophical is answered by the environment from which he gets his ideas. The fiction that someone is capable of moving "beyond a verbal framed normal-life view” and is “enlightened” is based on the inferiority on the disciple and the superiority of the so-called enlightened one. All talk about how Zen practice is done has to be hierarchical .