sufficed: Simplicio, the educated simpleton, and Salviati, the knowledge-
able thinker? What function does Sagredo have? Well, he is supposed to be a
sort of neutral third party, dispassionately weighing the two sides and
coming out with a "fair" and "impartial" judgment. It sounds very bal-
anced, and yet there is a problem: Sagredo is always agreeing with Salviati,
not with Simplicio. How come Objectivity Personified is playing favorites?
One answer, of course, is that Salviati is enunciating correct views, so
Sagredo has no choice. But what, then, of fairness or "equal time"?
By adding Sagredo, Calileo (and Jauch) stacked the deck more against
Simplicio, rather than less. Perhaps there should be added a yet higher-
level Sagredo-someone who will be objective about this whole situation ...
You can see where it is going. We are getting into a never-ending series of
"escalations in objectivity", which have the curious property of never get-
ting any more objective than at the first level: where Salviati is simply right,
and Simplicio wrong. So the puzzle remains: why add Sagredo at all? And
the answer is, it gives the illusion of stepping out of the system, in some
intuitively appealing sense.Zen and "Stepping Out"In Zen, too, we can see this preoccupation with the concept of transcending
the system. For instance, the koan in which Tozan tells his monks that "the
higher Buddhism is not Buddha". Perhaps, self-transcendence is even the
central theme of Zen. A Zen person is always trying to understand more
deeply what he is, by stepping more and more out of what he sees himself
to be, by breaking every rule and convention which he perceives himself to
be chained by-needless to say, including those of Zen itself. Somewhere
along this elusive path may come enlightenment. In any case (as I see it),
the hope is that by gradually deepening one's self-awareness, by gradually
widening the scope of "the system", one will in the end come to a feeling of
being at one with the entire universe.
Jumping out of the System^479