• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Ayn Rand

The Mary Ellen Carter and the secret of happiness

14 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Mindfulness, Pleasure, Serenity

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Ayn Rand, early writings, Laos, music, Nathaniel Branden, Stan Rogers, Thailand, utilitarianism

I originally wrote this week’s post in a handwritten journal at age 21, more than half my life ago, in 1997 – possibly before at least a few of my readers were born. It was a reflection on my travels backpacking around Thailand and Laos, in the middle of the life-changing experience where I was learning to break with utilitarianism and move instead toward Buddhism. I have not made major edits, because I wanted to preserve the in-process nature of my learning at the time, so it retains the somewhat disjointed style of a first draft. I think it gives a very accurate picture of who I was at that time: someone who had discovered some very important things, perhaps even the most important things, but still had a long way to go.

The piece begins by exploring Stan Rogers‘s wonderful song The Mary Ellen Carter. (If you’re not familiar with the song, I would recommend first listening to it or at least reading the lyrics for the post to make sense.) I’ve been delighted to learn that this year’s youth craze – among people who are now the age I was when I wrote this – is sea chanteys and other sea ballads, so this seemed an ideal time to share this long-ago reflection with the world.

Utilitarianism is self-contradicting. The more time you spend trying to “maximize” happiness through sensual pleasure, fame and fortune, the less happy you will eventually be.

I think of this because I was just humming “The Mary Ellen Carter”. A utilitarian would think the narrator crazy: he digs up the boat not in order to be on a boat again (presumably he could get other work fairly easily), but because of a sense of gratitude, to an inanimate object: “She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gale.” The utilitarian would agree with the owners: “Insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below.” The first thing they teach you in management school is to ignore sunk costs. What we have here is literally a sunk cost – and for its sake alone the narrator spends the whole spring diving, catching the bends twice.

And yet the sense of pride, contentment and satisfaction the narrator radiates in his quest is undeniable. This seemingly useless quest gives his life a purpose, brings him to sing some of the most inspiring lines ever written:

Continue reading →

Our need for other people

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Flourishing, Friends, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, architecture, ascent/descent, Ayn Rand, COVID-19, intimacy/integrity, qualitative individualism, Tattvārtha Sūtra, vinaya, Yoga Sūtras

As I write this post, I, probably along with most of my readers, face severe restrictions on normal human social activity, in order to limit the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. Electronic communications have made it possible to continue a social life despite these restrictions – but much of this conversation tends to focus on the virus and the limitations of life under it. I find myself yearning for more conversations about other things, and you may be as well. I also do not think I have anything particularly profound to say about the virus so far. For these reasons, I am not going to write here about the virus, at least for now. Instead, for the next little while I’m going to write about other topics that I’d been planning to write about anyway, but on an increased frequency to suit my and others’ changed schedules: every Sunday rather than every alternate Sunday. This is the first such post. I was not thinking about the virus when I originally wrote it, but perhaps it takes on a different resonance now.

A good human life, in general, requires living with other human beings. Some would take this claim as a truism, but I think it’s important to establish it. The ideal of the autonomous, independent individual is not merely a modern Western conceit, as is usually thought; this ideal is held up as a high ideal by monastic traditions in ancient India, perhaps most prominently in the Yoga Sūtras and Jain Tattvārtha Sūtra which describe their highest ideal as kaivalya, aloneness.

Continue reading →

In which I am interviewed

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Sex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Canada, conservatism, Damon Linker, Disengaged Buddhism, G.W.F. Hegel, George Grant, Heinrich Zimmer, interview, James Doull, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Randall Collins, skholiast (blogger)

The always interesting skholiast, whose ideas have figured strongly in quite a few of my posts here over the years, took what I consider the enormously flattering step of interviewing me about my philosophy, in both oral and written form. He is posting the interview on his blog in two parts; the first of these is up now. I think the dialogue form is helpful for philosophical thought, and if you’re interested in my ideas I would highly encourage you to read it.

The virtue of laziness

29 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Self-Discipline, Work

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, Hugo Grotius, justice, Karl Marx, technology, United States

I’m really enjoying my new job at the intersection of academia and technology, and it’s made me want to improve my technology skills. So I’m now preparing for a Master’s degree in computer science, learning to program in modern computer languages. I’ve been trying to think about how to be a good programmer, and looking up some advice on the web. Of course people’s assessments of good programmers are widely different, but there’s one surprising claim that comes up quite a lot: a good programmer is a lazy programmer.

This is the point where programming becomes philosophically interesting. Continue reading →

Why evolution doesn’t explain value

02 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Biology, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, God, Metaphysics, Morality, Self-Discipline

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Denis Dutton, Ethan Mills, G.E. Moore, game theory, Jesse (commenter), Neil Sinhababu

I’ll be the first to admit that last week’s post was insufficiently argued. But I think it may have been helpful as a springboard for further (potentially more carefully argued) reflection; I expect that next week’s post, as well as this one, will follow up on it. I argued last week that attempts to explain value judgements seem to run into trouble when they don’t ground those judgements in a deeper metaphysical reality. I looked at this problem there largely in terms of the early twentieth-century analytic tradition. But I didn’t address one of the most common non-metaphysical attempts to explain value judgements: the evolutionary explanation.

Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.

Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.

But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.

I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point. Continue reading →

How not to think dialectically

03 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Psychology

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Ayn Rand, G.W.F. Hegel, James Joyce, Jean Piaget, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Plato

I introduced the last post by referring briefly to the idea of dialectic, and meant it in a Hegelian sense. But I don’t think I adequately spelled out what I mean by that. It ties closely to the key point of synthesis over compromise, which I did note. A mere compromise can include the bad parts of the two extremes it puts together, as well as the good (as per Shaw’s quip about body and brain); a synthesis qua synthesis takes as much of the good as possible and minimizes the bad, and in doing so is more than mere compromise.

But a dialectical synthesis is more than this. Continue reading →

Ascent and Descent

16 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Bhakti Poets, Christianity, Confucianism, Dialectic, Family, Flourishing, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Caitanya, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, ISKCON, James Joyce, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, pàn jiāo 判教, Plato, Prabhupada, Tattvārtha Sūtra, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

Five years ago, on a language fellowship in India, I had more time to do broad reading in cross-cultural philosophy than grad school usually permitted. I wound up reading a lot of Ken Wilber, and had already been immersed in Martha Nussbaum’s thought for my dissertation. These two thinkers don’t have a whole lot in common, beyond coming out of roughly the same (American baby boom) cultural milieu and having an unusually wide-ranging philosophical outlook. But there is one set of categories that features prominently in both of their work, and I suspect for good reason: ascent and descent.

For Wilber, one of the most fundamental philosophical debates is that between Ascent and Descent: between a spiritual view that aspires to transcendence of the everyday material world, and a materialist view that embraces it. (Like the intimacy-integrity distinction – on which more shortly – the distinction is particularly interesting because it embraces theoretical as well as practical philosophy, metaphysics as well as ethics.) Some of Wilber’s sharpest criticisms are directed against ecological philosophies of interdependence, which suggest that what we ultimately need is to embrace our mutual dependence in the natural world. In Wilber’s eyes, such a view leaves us scarcely better off than the mechanistic individualism it aims to replace, for both views remain squarely within a materialist tradition of “descent,” neglecting the spiritual realm. I have noted before that, while Yavanayāna Buddhists often embrace such views of interdependence, they are wildly at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism, for reasons similar to those noted by Wilber.

Upheavals of Thought, the weighty tome that I would consider Nussbaum’s magnum opus, employs such a distinction through its third, longest and final part – entitled “Ascents of Love.” Continue reading →

Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?

24 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Confucianism, Consciousness, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epistemology, French Tradition, Human Nature, Jainism, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Social Science, South Asia, Unconscious Mind

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Aaron Stalnaker, Anne Monius, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Chan/Zen, Charles Tilly, Confucius, Edward (Ted) Slingerland, Graham Harman, Hanumān, Herbert Fingarette, Immanuel Kant, Pali suttas, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Quentin Meillassoux, René Descartes, skholiast (blogger), Speculative Realism, Tattvārtha Sūtra, technology, Xunzi, Yoga Sūtras

I’ve lately been trying to start understanding Speculative Realism, a contemporary movement within “continental” philosophy. Speculative Realism is of particular interest to me because, it seems, it is one of the first philosophical movements whose social network is focused on the Web. (One of its leading thinkers, Graham Harman, has his own regularly updated blog.) This is not yet the future I’ve been starting to imagine where the Web replaces universities and book publishing as philosophy’s institutional locus, since most if not all Speculative Realists are academics. Still, it’s an interesting first step.

Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.

As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)

The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Continue reading →

The singular achievement of the 20th century

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Family, Islam, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

20th century, Ayn Rand, Christine Korsgaard, gender, Iris Murdoch, John Paul II, Judith Butler, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Martha Nussbaum, Philippa Foot

Pope John Paul II once declared the 20th century to be the most evil of all centuries, and it’s not hard to come up with evidence for such a claim even if one doesn’t share his presuppositions. The Holocaust, other genocides from Armenia to Rwanda, Stalinism, Pol Pot, the threat of humankind’s voluntary self-extinction by nuclear annihilation and then of involuntary self-extinction by environmental catastrophe – the human beings of the 20th century have a lot to answer for.

I sometimes imagine the centuries lined up on some chronological Judgement Day, and the 20th century being shown its great catalogue of horrors and atrocities. A cosmic judge asks that century “What do you have to say for yourself? How can you possibly justify your existence in the face of this destruction?”

In spite of everything, before this cosmic temporal court, I believe the 20th century could make up for it all with three small words: Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Nathan on Is the problem in our heads?
  • Is the problem in our heads? – The Indian Philosophy Blog on Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation
  • Nathan on Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation
  • Dennis Fischman on Why philosophy needs history
  • Nathan on Why philosophy needs history

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum Mencius modernity Pali suttas pedagogy Plato rebirth religion S.N. Goenka Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) T.R. (Thill) Raghunath technology theodicy Thomas Aquinas Thomas Kuhn Thomas P. Kasulis United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (11)
  • Applied Phil (240)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (35)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (12)
    • Health (20)
    • Place (21)
    • Play (6)
    • Politics (136)
    • Sex (18)
    • Work (31)
  • Asian Thought (373)
    • Buddhism (268)
      • Early and Theravāda (104)
      • Mahāyāna (112)
      • Modernized Buddhism (79)
    • East Asia (81)
      • Confucianism (51)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (127)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (15)
      • Jainism (23)
      • Modern Hinduism (35)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (13)
      • Vedānta (35)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (24)
  • Indigenous American Thought (2)
  • Method (224)
    • M.T.S.R. (128)
    • Metaphilosophy (150)
  • Practical Philosophy (325)
    • Action (10)
    • Aesthetics (38)
    • Emotion (138)
      • Anger (30)
      • Attachment and Craving (22)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (17)
      • Fear (6)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (46)
      • Hope (14)
      • Pleasure (25)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (44)
    • Flourishing (76)
    • Foundations of Ethics (99)
    • Karma (42)
    • Morality (59)
    • Virtue (136)
      • Courage (3)
      • Generosity (10)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (13)
      • Patient Endurance (27)
      • Self-Discipline (6)
      • Serenity (26)
      • Zest (4)
  • Practice (105)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (29)
    • Monasticism (36)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (13)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (19)
    • Therapy (9)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (314)
    • Consciousness (14)
    • Epistemology (104)
      • Certainty and Doubt (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (26)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (62)
    • Hermeneutics (49)
    • Human Nature (26)
    • Logic (27)
      • Dialectic (15)
    • Metaphysics (86)
    • Philosophy of Language (17)
    • Self (60)
    • Supernatural (48)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (13)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Western Thought (395)
    • Analytic Tradition (89)
    • Christianity (135)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (20)
      • Roman Catholicism (45)
    • French Tradition (46)
    • German Tradition (83)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (103)
      • Epicureanism (23)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (5)
      • Skepticism (1)
      • Sophists (6)
      • Stoicism (17)
    • Islam (35)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (83)
      • Biology (19)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (134)
      • Economics (24)
      • Psychology (54)

Recent Posts

  • Is the problem in our heads?
  • Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation
  • Why philosophy needs history
  • No opposite for the ultimate
  • The reasons for nondualism

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.