Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
A friend read the previous post on ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva and asked (on Google+) what exactly I meant by “incompleteness”. It was a great question and made me realize there was a bit of confusion in my own thinking.
The point of connection I saw between the two different thinkers was above all at the level of understanding the world. The idea is that both thinkers would say we can’t understand the world just in terms of the set of entities that normally appears to us (like people and trees). Unless we either add God to the picture (ibn Sīnā) or remove the self from it (Śāntideva), we misinterpret everything else. That’s the thrust of the MacIntyre quote that the post had centred around: adding God to the world is not just a +1 to the set of entities, and removing the self is not just a -1. The presence or absence of God or self changes the nature of everything else.
That is to say that the “incompleteness” that the Muslim and the Buddhist can agree on is an epistemological incompleteness. MacIntyre’s original quote noted: “theists believe that nature presents itself as radically incomplete, as requiring a ground beyond itself, if it is to be intelligible…” (emphasis added this time) A world without God, for ibn Sīnā, cannot be adequately understood; it is incomplete in the sense that our knowledge of the entities in the world has a fatal gap, until we add God to make sense of them. Śāntideva – and other Buddhists including Aśvaghoṣa and Dharmakīrti – would say the same about a world with selves. Our knowledge of the world has a fatal gap until we remove the confusion that is the self. It is not just that by positing selves in the world we add one illusory kind of thing that isn’t there (as if we had posited unicorns). It is that by positing those selves we misunderstand the nature of everything else, as ibn Sīnā would say we do if we don’t allow God as an explanation.
But there is also a big difference between the two, one which I wasn’t seeing last time because of the ambiguity in the word “incompleteness”. Śāntideva and ibn Sīnā would not agree on ontological incompleteness – that is, the idea that things themselves, and not merely our knowledge of them, actually are incomplete. For I say that for Buddhists “all of those things [in the world] are indeed taken to be radically incomplete, lacking.” And that is a point on which ibn Sīnā would disagree and disagree strongly. The things of the world would be lacking, radically incomplete, if there were no God. Such a world, I believe, is described well by the existentialists. But of course as far as ibn Sīnā is concerned there is a God, and for that reason the things of the world are not actually lacking or radically incomplete at all. It is only our understanding of them that is incomplete, insofar as we miss the presence of God.
Buddhist views are very different. For Buddhists, unlike for Muslims (or other monotheists), there is a fundamental lack in all the things of the world. They are impermanent, essenceless (which is to say not-self) and unsatisfactory, anitya, anātman, duḥkha. To the extent that there is a lack in the things for ibn Sīnā, it is that they are incomplete without God; they require God to be complete. But – this is the key point I missed – they have God! God exists, for ibn Sīnā, and therefore we can see that things actually are complete if we understand them correctly – they all point beyond themselves to the ultimate truth that is God.
Buddhists, like existentialists, have no God – early and Madhyamaka Buddhists, at any rate. They do often tend to relate to godlike beings, such as the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, but in monotheistic terms these beings are more like angels or even saints than gods; they did not create the world, they do not underlie it. The world itself has no omnibenevolent creator making it, no fundamental goodness and order underlying it. There is karma, but while karma responds to goodness and badness, it is not itself good or bad, it is simply there, as gravity is there. (That is referring to gravity as an atheist would understand it; for ibn Sīnā gravity would need to be fundamentally good, because God created it.) On an early Buddhist understanding, karma is itself something we’re trying to get out of; an arhat, a perfected person, is no longer subject to it.
In short, for Śāntideva, the world actually is incomplete and lacking, and we misunderstand it if we don’t see this lack – a lack at least partially expressed in the notion of non-self. For ibn Sīnā it’s just that the world would be incomplete without God. But since he takes God to exist, for him the world is complete; it is as it should be. The similarity between the two is that we don’t adequately understand the world, it is incomplete in intelligibility, without the key idea of God or non-self.
I’m not totally convinced that Shantideva or other Madhyamikas would see the world as incomplete and lacking because phenomena are without “self”. That is the way that conventional existents exist, that’s all: they lack something we think they have, but this lack isn’t problematic. It is morally neutral, and in fact beneficial, as it allows change. We could not be liberated or enlightened if phenomena were not empty in this way. So the world isn’t really “lacking” anything; it has everything we need. Nevertheless, I think this is an issue of wording: you are making a point about the world, saying that, in itself, it does not ultimately exist as we perceive it; it is dependent on unseen things. So just as for ibn Sina it is dependent on God, for Madhyamikas it is dependent on perceiving minds. But because the words “lacking” and “incomplete” suggest some kind of negative judgment, “dependent” vs “independent” might be worth considering.
Thank you, Donna, and welcome.
I suppose at the ultimate level a Mādhyamika would not say that existents are lacking – but they are also not *not* lacking, nor both-lacking-and-not-lacking nor neither-lacking-nor-not-lacking. Conventionally, though, I think that for Śāntideva the lack is very problematic and there is a negative judgement: things have the three marks of being empty (non-self), impermanent – and suffering. The emptiness allows change, yes, but that change is only necessary because of the suffering that comes from our being enmeshed in the apparent things.
Yes, I hear you… and yet the cause of our suffering is not the lack of self in things, is it? Even if they had a self, we would suffer! We might suffer more if they had a self because they would be so inflexible. (It would be fun to debate whether we would suffer more or less if things had a self). We suffer from phenomena because our karma and delusions make us suffer when we contact them: the cause is not the phenomena themselves or their incompleteness. To use your words, is it not the “enmeshment” that causes suffering, rather than the apparent things?
I have little knowledge about Ibn Sina, so you will need to tell me whether what I’m about to say holds true of him; I know a bit more about Thomas Aquinas, who was Ibn Sina’s intellectual descendant, though even then my knowledge is only second- and third-hand. I hope maybe a comment on him would be helpful here.
It seems to me that for Aquinas the world is incomplete without God and that, since the world is not wholly redeemed, it therefore is ontologically incomplete. The world has God, yes, but only somewhat. There are two sides to this (which are really one side, but coming from two lineages): the Classical Greek in Aquinas would see each object in the world as having a telos which is not yet wholly achieved, and so it is incomplete in the sense that it has a potential into which it ought to grow (or be brought, if it has no agency) but which has not been entirely achieved; meanwhile the Christian in Aquinas sees the world as Fallen from its perfect state and in need of restoration, and so it is incomplete in the sense that it was complete but has been severed somewhat from God and can only be complete again when restored to God. In putting these together, Aquinas suggests (at least as someone like Feser reads him) that these are the same basic story: objects in the world can only gain their lost perfect state through God’s intervention (ie. grace). So yes, the world is incomplete without God and, yes, the world has God, but only in part: completion, either epistemological or ontological, must wait for the eschaton.
I don’t know for sure that this is an accurate reading of Aquinas; I know only that this is how he is often read, from what I can see. I also know that Islam generally places far less emphasis on the world’s Fallenness (indeed, may not even conceptualize it as such) but instead emphasizes the world’s dependence and contingency on God. That radical contingency might make it harder to say, with Christians, that the world only somewhat has God; the distance here from the Jewish sense of the world as exiled from God is greater than the distance Christians have from it. But insofar as Ibn Sina is an Aristotelian I have to wonder if he would also see every object as having an inherent telos which has not been fully realized and is therefore in this sense ontologically incomplete, and how he would articulate that in relation to an Islamic worldview. But, like I said, I know hardly anything about Ibn Sina, so this is just conjecture.
Now, this clearly all still differs from what you’ve said about Santideva, I think? It doesn’t seem like completeness is even possible or sensible for Santideva. And it differs from the view of any materialist who considers the universe as neither fallen nor teleological.