27 Sunday Dec 2020
Posted in Anger, Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, Friends, Human Nature, Judaism, Pleasure, Rites, Virtue, Zest
Last week my wife and I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – the original Chuck Jones cartoon, not the later remakes. As we talked about it, I realized that that Christmas special, and the original book, are a great depiction of eudaimonism – perhaps even in a Confucian form.
Continue reading13 Sunday Dec 2020
Posted in Confucianism, Human Nature, Morality, Politics, Virtue
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Brad Raffensperger, Donald Trump, Frans de Waal, Han Feizi, James Doull, law, nonhuman animals, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Xunzi
One of the more pressing questions in political philosophy is how to prevent the arbitrary use of power. I think Thomas Hobbes and Xunzi were sadly right to diagnose an abiding darkness in human nature: left to our own devices, human beings can easily degenerate into disastrous crimes. Primatology suggests a confirmation: among our closest (or nearly closest) living relatives, the chimpanzees, a jockeying for power and status can lead to vicious rivalries and even murder – even in the idyllic situation where all their material needs are provided for. The evidence of existing human history does nothing to suggest that language or other human capacities have made us better than that.
But Hobbes, as far as I can tell, offers the worst possible solution to this problem: to concentrate power in a single sovereign person. Then that one person becomes able to tyrannize everyone else in a way completely unrestrained, just as he pleases. (It is rarely a she.) The twentieth century gives us too many chilling examples of mass murder and terror from a sovereign given arbitrary power.
A more reasonable approach to the problem asks how we can contain the dark impulses of all people – and of the sovereign leader most of all. It is likely no mystery why I’m asking this question living in 2020 in the United States.
Continue reading26 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in Confucianism, Flourishing, Human Nature, Monasticism, Politics, Social Science
≈ Comments Off on Political philosophy beyond the state
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Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Great Learning, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Pali suttas, Śāntideva, Thomas Hobbes
Modern liberal political philosophy has tended to take among its central questions: what is the proper relationship between the individual and the state? What rights does the individual have against the state, how do we select which individuals make decisions for the state? These are the central questions explored by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Likewise the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, produced by Abraham Bosse in collaboration with Hobbes, depicts a giant man (the monarch) who is made up of hundreds of smaller people – the state and the individuals.
These are, I submit, the wrong questions for political philosophy to ask. A key problem with the Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau approach is it doesn’t think enough about what individuals are and why they would need a state. “Protection from violence” is the usual answer to the latter question, and it’s a venerable one – the idea that a state is established to protect its people is found in the Aggañña Sutta, in a passage that modern treatises on Buddhism quote all over the place (though it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it passage in the original). But individuals need much more than protection from violence!
Continue reading18 Sunday Aug 2019
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Bryan Van Norden, Confucius, Dai Zhen, Dīpavaṃsa, Heinz Bechert, Justin Tiwald, Mahāvaṃsa, Mencius, Randall Collins, Sri Lanka, Steven Collins
We are surely familiar with the pattern by now: members of an Asian tradition are concerned about supposed corruptions in their tradition which depart from the intentions of the tradition’s historic founders, so they turn with renewed focus to the historical texts that they take to be at the tradition’s centre. We, with our historical hindsight, now know that this Asian concern with texts and founders is an alien importation, the work of colonial subjects aping their Protestant missionary rulers’ search for textual historicity.
Except for one thing: it isn’t.
27 Sunday May 2018
Posted in Buddhism, Confucianism, East Asia, External Goods, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Stoicism
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academia, Bryan Van Norden, Epictetus, Fazang, James Stockdale, Jay Garfield, Mencius, Milindapañhā, Paul Ricoeur
If you are the sort of person who reads comparative philosophy blogs, you probably remember the widely read New York Times article that Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden wrote two years ago, calling for the study of non-Western philosophies in philosophy departments. I agreed with their overall point, surprising nobody that I can imagine, but had strong reservations about their underlying reasoning, then as now: in urging the study of non-Western thought they said nothing about anything valuable it actually would have to teach us, treating geographical diversity as sufficient.
Van Norden has now expanded the article’s point into a book, Taking Back Philosophy. (He invited Garfield to join in writing the book, but Garfield was too busy with other projects.) Columbia University Press sent me a free copy of the book in the hope I would review it on Love of All Wisdom and/or the Indian Philosophy Blog; I mention that as a disclaimer of sorts, though there were no specifications on the content of the review. I offer my thoughts here. Continue reading
05 Sunday Feb 2017
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Death, Disgust, Family, Food, Monasticism, Morality, Sex, Virtue
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
07 Sunday Jun 2015
Posted in Confucianism, Health, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Reading and Recitation, Self, Serenity, Therapy
Calling myself a Buddhist, it turns out, was only the beginning. Buddhism was there for me in this dark time, not only as a way of focusing prayer, and certainly not merely as the resource for a hypothetical chaplain. The Buddhist ideas that taught me so much before were still there and a great comfort. And there was more still: I have now begun to practise Buddhism as I see it, on a far deeper level than I ever had before. Continue reading
15 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in Confucianism, Epics, Islam, Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Politics, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā
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Anthony S (commenter), Arthaśāstra, Bhagavad Gītā, Disengaged Buddhism, Fred Dallmayr, Hitopadeśa, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahābhārata, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pañcatantra, Rāmāyana, Rammohun Roy
On the Indian Philosophy Blog, commenter Anthony S asked an important and difficult question: what are good resources for thinking through Indian political philosophy?
. I’m interested not so much in comparative philosophy as comparative political thought/theory, specifically in terms of Indian and “Western” thought regarding the international/global. While I am happy comparative philosophy seems to be taking off in recent years, I wish the intensity was the same in political science/theory. If anyone has some good thoughts/resources regarding any of this, I’d be very appreciative.
I started replying in my own comments, but I think the topic deserves a post of its own. Continue reading
18 Sunday Jan 2015
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
04 Sunday Jan 2015
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Karl Polanyi, Kenneth McRobbie, Mencius, Peter Drucker, Peter Singer, trolley problem, utilitarianism
The image of a drowning child is a vivid one – enough to make it a key example in two very different traditions of moral philosophy. In ancient China, Mencius used the image to illustrate humans’ natural inborn moral benevolence: we would all “have a feeling of alarm and compassion” at such a sight, and not out of any form of self-interest. Thousands of years later, in the early 1970s – when Chinese philosophy was known to the West but it would rarely have occurred to a Western philosopher that he should study it – the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer used the same image. In his famous article “Famine, affluence and morality”, written in 1971 and published 1972, Singer says this:
if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.
But Singer puts the image to a very different use than Mencius. Continue reading