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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Family

Would eternal life be meaningless?

07 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Family, Flourishing, Food, Pleasure

≈ 7 Comments

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Aristotle, Martin Hägglund

I now conclude my series of comments on Martin Hägglund’s stimulating and fascinating This Life. My final point of disagreement with Hägglund has to do with a theoretical possibility: eternal life. Against traditional Christians, neither Hägglund nor I believe that eternal life is possible. But I think Hägglund is right to highlight the question of whether it is desirable.

On his answer, however, I think Hägglund is quite wrong; this is the point where his argument is at its worst. When he rejects the aspiration to eternal life, the rejection appears to rest on surprisingly bad argument. I would agree with rejecting such an aspiration on Stoic or Epicurean grounds – that it is futile to aspire to what we know we can never have. It is wisdom to know that we cannot change the finitude of our life, and so we should seek the serenity to accept that sad fact, as no amount of courage will change it. (There is a hugely significant difference between a 25-year life and a 100-year life, but both remain entirely finite.)

Hägglund, however, rejects the aspiration to eternal life on entirely different grounds:

An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life…. there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven. Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care…. Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal…. (4-5)

I do not think any of this is true.

Continue reading →

Why I am a Buddhist

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Faith, Family, Health, Humility, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prayer, Reading and Recitation, Therapy

≈ 4 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Evan Thompson, identity, Mañjuśrī, religion, Śāntideva, Seth Zuihō Segall

On Facebook, Seth Segall commented in response to my posts on Evan Thompson:

I agree with all the arguments you have made, but I think there is one maining major issue that divides you from Evan that transcends all the other issues. That is, as a “lover of all wisdom,” why would you define yourself as a Buddhist as opposed to someone who is informed by many wisdom traditions but holds a special place in his heart for Buddhism—in another words, how is your stance different from a more cosmopolitan one that is Buddhist-friendly, but not, strictly speaking, Buddhist?

I think I have answered this question before, but there is more to say on it. For a long time – including the first six years of writing this blog – I defined myself in just such a way, as Thompson does. Like Thompson, I went so far as to say I don’t identify as a Buddhist.

Continue reading →

Is it morally wrong to eat your dead dog?

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Death, Disgust, Family, Food, Monasticism, Morality, Sex, Virtue

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Confucius, J. David Velleman, Jonathan Haidt, nonhuman animals, Peter Singer, virtue ethics

Jonathan Haidt opens his The Righteous Mind with two hypothetical examples, “thought experiments” as analytic philosophers would say:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

And

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Haidt asks us: Did the people in either of these cases do something morally wrong? My reaction was, and is, to say yes in the first case but not the second. Continue reading →

In memoriam: Claude Vipond

23 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Family, Protestantism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, autobiography, Canada, Christmas, Claude Vipond, generations, modernity, obituary, Stephen Leacock

My maternal grandfather, Claude Vipond, died peacefully last Tuesday. His life was long – he reached 95 years. Claude was a doctor and a World War II veteran, but I knew him entirely as a grandfather – an often larger-than-life figure at family gatherings, delivering corny jokes with an enthusiasm that made them hilarious. At large Christmas gatherings he would read to the grandchildren, not some sentimental Victorian Christmas story but Stephen Leacock‘s marvelously tongue-in-cheek Caroline’s Christmas.

The irreverence of Leacock’s self-subverting story left a strong impression on me as a boy – much like the movie The Princess Bride, which came out when I was the age of its child narratee. In a different way from my father, “Caroline’s Christmas” helped teach me the pleasures of being an outsider, with an ironic detachment expressed in humour – in ways perhaps more profound than I realized at the time. In many ways I think that story really sums up my grandfather’s spirit. Continue reading →

Reading the deconstruction of the body

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Disgust, Family, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Sex

≈ 3 Comments

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Elisa Freschi, gender, Śāntideva, Stephen Harris

I was honoured to see Elisa Freschi’s post reviewing my recent article on Śāntideva’s metaphysics and ethics. I have a lot to say about both the post itself and the comment threads that followed it. I’ve said some of it in those threads already, but I’d like to pull them together and express a way they relate to more general ideas. Continue reading →

I am a Buddhist

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Grief, Health, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Prayer, Therapy

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

autobiography, identity, justice, Mañjuśrī, Pali suttas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, religion, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Treya Killam Wilber, Unitarian Universalism

Last fall in my house we had some serious bad news: my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. (There have been a number of ways in which I have hoped to emulate Ken Wilber, but this sure wasn’t one of them.) The good news is it was not a particularly severe variety as cancers go; with proper treatment it would not be life-threatening. But those treatments have been rough, with an extended recovery period.

It has, as you may imagine, been a difficult time for both of us. I am happy to say that things are much better than they were, but the hard times are not yet over. My wife’s story is hers to tell, and she has told it magnificently. On my side, something major has happened that I did not expect: for the first time, I have come to consider myself a Buddhist. Continue reading →

Of drowning children, near and far (II)

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Shame and Guilt

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Charles Goodman, consequentialism, Mencius, obligation, Peter Singer, Śāntideva, utilitarianism

Last time, I observed Peter Singer’s proposed radical revision of our moral views – the claim that, when we keep money that we could give to help the starving or diseased without major sacrifice, we are doing something as bad as if we let a drowning child drown. Is Singer right?

At the heart of Singer’s argument, by his own reckoning, is this principle: “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He explicitly states that the implication of this “ought” is duty and obligation, not merely charity and generosity. It is not just that sacrificing one’s own comfort and pleasure to help those in need is good, but that any refusal to do so is bad, something deserving of one’s own guilt and shame and others’ condemnation.

Now on what grounds should we accept this principle, if indeed we should? Continue reading →

Coming to like modern India

03 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Family, Food, Modern Hinduism, Place, Pleasure, Rites

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

architecture, autobiography, Thailand

This post will be a little less philosophical, strictly speaking at least, than is usual here. Readers have found my autobiographical explorations interesting in the past, and I hope this will be similarly so.

I recently returned from India, to have a traditional Indian wedding ceremony. (I’ve been married for two and a half years, but my Indian friends and relatives could not attend that ceremony, nor did it have Indian gods presiding over it.) It’s an unfortunate irony that I have been able to get to India much less frequently ever since I started studying it. My previous trip was at the beginning of 2005; it had been eight years between that trip and the one I just returned from, whereas in my childhood the years between trips were no more than three. And I’m very glad to have had this trip, for it made quite a different impression on me from the previous ones. Continue reading →

Indian intimacy

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Family, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Rites, Social Science

≈ Comments Off on Indian intimacy

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ascent/descent, autobiography, Chad Hansen, intimacy/integrity, Joel Kotkin, Max Weber, Mozi, puruṣārthas, Thomas P. Kasulis

I’m back from a trip to see my family in India, and have an Indian wedding ceremony. It was wonderful to see everyone there, and it also got me thinking.

When I wrote recently about my Indian background, I put some emphasis on how having an Indian background could be misleading in trying to understand Indian philosophy. It had taken me longer to see that Indian philosophy has an integrity orientation because after living in modern India, I’d spent a long time thinking of India as having an intimacy orientation.

But in my excitement over that realization, I think I’d forgotten that I’d held an intimacy view of India for a reason. Continue reading →

Buddhists and “Hindus” against traditional family values

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Family, Jainism, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Social Science, South Asia

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, dharmaśāstra, Dōgen, intimacy/integrity, Jan Nattier, Jātakas, Jesus, Joel Kotkin, New Testament, Pali suttas, Patrick Deneen, Patrick Olivelle, Śāntideva, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra, vinaya

A while ago I wrote about how Indian traditions upset conventional assumptions about family and community being essential to premodern tradition and culture. There, I was responding to a piece by Patrick Deneen, which drew only on Western traditions. As a result, Deneen’s piece had a narrowness of focus, but within that focus it was able to attain some accuracy. Not so for a recent report by urban geographer Joel Kotkin, entitled The Rise of Post-Familialism. Continue reading →

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