The Grammar of Difference: Limits of Yogācāra in Social Philosophy

This paper asks whether Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy can contribute to social and political projects that depend on robust concepts of difference. Using a grammatical heuristic, it asks in what syntax must liberation be spoken. First-person authority over one’s own attitudes and the irreducibility of the second-person address indicate a crucial asymmetry in ethical relations to ourselves and others. This asymmetry does not stand in the way of genuine care but as the condition for it. Yogācāra’s three natures doctrine comes into tension with this asymmetry, posing the threat to reduce persons into subpersonal causal processes or inexpressible nonduality. This flattens precisely the asymmetries so vital to our political and ethical projects by resolving instead of recognizing alterity. The paper argues, however, that Yogācāra’s account of multiple, incommensurate worlds offers a more promising path, preserving genuine difference without retreating into the essentialism.