Can Buddhist and Daoist ideas about emptiness, no-self, and transformation be made philosophically rigorous without collapsing into nihilism or contradiction?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Jenny Hung is a visiting assistant professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, working with Yao Zhihua. She has two PhDs, one in philosophy, another in nano-physics.
2. Interview Summary
Jenny Hung opens by pushing back on a common misreading of Buddhist ‘emptiness’ as nihilism: the tradition is goal-directed (nirvana, and reducing suffering), and its teachings are meant to be practically transformative, not merely theoretical. The first major segment focuses on her interpretation of Nagarjuna: the apparently paradoxical “everything is real / not real / both / neither” style claims are best understood not as violations of classical logic, but as pedagogical speech-acts whose surface contradictions arise from a listener’s false presupposition that things (and sentences) have intrinsic natures (svabhāva). She explains this in terms of a systematic mismatch between enlightened speaker and unenlightened audience: students “reify” language into a substance ontology, while the teaching is meant to undermine that very reification—so the point is to break the presupposition, not to endorse inconsistency.
The second segment turns to Yogācāra and a model of “no-self” that tries to make enlightenment psychologically intelligible rather than wholly mysterious. Drawing on Jean Piaget’s notion of cognitive schemas, Hung proposes that the ordinary sense of self is a learned organizing schema that structures experience into subject–object form; meditation can interrupt this structure. On her reconstruction, “no-self” experience is (at least temporarily) experience as pure sensation without perception—raw conscious episodes without the subject–object dichotomy—and repeated “in-and-out” exposure can train a stable no-self schema that still allows normal interaction afterward. She also defends reading ‘manas’ (the seventh consciousness) not as a constant occurrent thought, but as an always-operating psychological mechanism/schema that drops out in advanced meditative stages. Along the way, she distinguishes debates about reflexive awareness from the subject–object split, and she sketches two broad ways to read Yogācāra about the external world—an idealist “mind-only” reading versus a more Immanuel Kant-like “filtering” reading—while noting she leans idealist even though her paper’s main aim is the no-self model rather than full ontology.
The third segment discusses her work on Zhuangzi and a tension she sees in the text: Daoist “oneness” and process metaphysics (the world as dynamic transformation rather than independent substances) seems to undercut robust individual selves, yet famous stories (like the butterfly dream and the Lady Li death analogy) appear to presuppose a persisting subject who survives radical change. Hung’s strategy is to reconcile these by appealing to a “thin” subject of experience compatible with process metaphysics—helped by Galen Strawson’s way of combining process-friendly metaphysics with an insistence on experiential subjectivity. This lets her interpret claims like “I lost myself” as shifting between a thin ‘I’ (subjectivity) and a thicker, bodily/psychological self, and it also supports her discussion of Zhuangzian transformation—sometimes via a panpsychist-leaning reading that treats even strange transformations (into “box arms,” “rat livers,” etc.) as intelligible only if consciousness is more widely distributed than we typically assume.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:35 - Nagarjuna’s Catuskoti and the No-Thesis View
09:20 - Negative and positive Catuskoti
12:16 - Everything is real
16:07 - Everything is empty
20:38 - Rejecting substance ontology
23:13 - Better language?
26:58 - Conceptual fictions
30:25 - Connection to Russell
33:36 - Early Yogācāra theory of no-self
42:22 - No-self
46:19 - Raw experience
50:24 - Reflexive awareness
54:15 - Representationalism
56:20 - Nature of thought
1:00:53 - Perceptions as constructions
1:05:43 - Idealism
1:10:51 - Theory of the Self in the Zhuangzi
1:17:48 - Substantial self
1:19:39 - Thin notion of the self
1:22:41 - Transformation
1:25:55 - Galen Strawson
1:30:05 - Pain without things that have it
1:34:53 - Physics and philosophy
1:38:54 - Interpreting philosophy
1:42:37 - Limits to reconstruction
1:44:41 - Recommended reading
1:46:18 - Conclusion
