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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: modernity

The West within the rest

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Vedas and Mīmāṃsā, Western Thought

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Edward Said, Jawaharlal Nehru, justice, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, modernity, Rammohun Roy, Śāntideva

In the previous post I discussed why academic philosophers have usually focused on the West, and pointed out reasons why some amount of Western focus remains valuable. Above all, I noted: “we are always already formed by some sort of philosophical tradition, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. And a great deal of what forms us is Western.” So exploring Western philosophy is important to understand our own thought better, where we are coming from.

There are at least two important objections to be made to that claim as I have phrased it. Continue reading →

Is “Buddhist ethics” Buddhist?

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

abortion, David Chapman, Disengaged Buddhism, gender, modernity, Peter Harvey, Seth Zuihō Segall, United States

David Chapman has on his blog a provocative new series of posts about Buddhist ethics. You can get a strong sense of the tenor of these posts from their titles: “Buddhist ethics” is a fraud, “Buddhist ethics” is not Buddhist ethics, Traditional Buddhism has no ethical system, Buddhist morality is Medieval, and How Asian Buddhism imported Western ethics. Continue reading →

The blurry boundary between premodern and modern

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ Comments Off on The blurry boundary between premodern and modern

Tags

Andrew Nicholson, Brian Tierney, David McMahan, Donald S. Lopez Jr., G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Michel Villey, modernity, Rammohun Roy, rights, Wilhelm Halbfass, William of Ockham

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two excellent books on very different topics, both of which I’ve written about at Love of All Wisdom before: Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, and Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights.

The idea of human or natural rights has often been taken as something nearly eternal, dating back into antiquity. More careful scholarship, most notably that of Michel Villey, shows us it is not that. Villey takes the work of William of Ockham as a breaking point, a sharp rupture from the previous world that had no concept of rights, which brings in a very different metaphysics where rights now play an important role. The brilliance of Tierney’s work is to qualify this point, showing a gradual transition from the world before Ockham to the world after him. It preserves Villey’s basic point that rights do not go back to antiquity, but shows that the boundary between premodern and modern is much blurrier than previous scholarship had imagined.

The idea of Hinduism has often been taken as something nearly eternal, dating back into antiquity. More careful scholarship, most notably that of Wilhelm Halbfass and Heinrich von Stietencron, shows us it is not that. Halbfass takes the work of Rammohun Roy as a breaking point, a sharp rupture from the previous world that had no concept of Hinduism, which brings in a very different metaphysics where Hinduism now plays an important role. The brilliance of Nicholson’s work is to qualify this point, showing a gradual transition from the world before Roy to the world after him. It preserves Halbfass’s basic point that rights do not go back to antiquity, but shows that the boundary between premodern and modern is much blurrier than previous scholarship had imagined. Continue reading →

A synthesis beyond Orientalism

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedānta

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

A.E. Gough, Andrew Nicholson, Edward Said, generations, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, modernity, perennialism

[Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.]

I am increasingly getting the impression that the debates over Orientalism in Asian traditions have taken a new turn, and one very much for the better.

Few books of the twentieth century have made as much impact as Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism. It is particularly striking that even though Said’s book was entirely about the Middle East, it has been a major scholarly landmark in the study of South and East Asia. Until Said, Western scholarship on Asia was rarely viewed as having a hidden colonial agenda. The perennialism of élitist mystical schools like Theosophy was taken seriously by scholars. And the views of Asian traditions’ popular advocates – such as D.T. Suzuki, Walpola Rahula, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan – were widely accepted as accurate portrayals of those traditions.

After Said, all that changed. Continue reading →

Must we come to terms with postmodernity?

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in French Tradition, Politics, Social Science

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

20th century, David Harvey, Ken Wilber, modernism, modernity, postmodernism

This post is a followup to last week’s, and is best read in tandem with it. I argued that the difference between modernity and modernism (which is to say, the difference between modern and modernist) really matters. The question for this week: can the same be said of a difference between postmodernity and postmodernism?

It is not disputed that there is a set of ideas, however vaguely specified it may be, which became popular sometime after the mid-1970s and has regularly been referred to by the label of postmodernism. Postmodernism has some points of agreement with modernism, but generally tends to define itself in terms of its differences from modernism. But is there such a thing as postmodernity? Continue reading →

Modernity and modernism

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Metaphilosophy, Politics, Social Science

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

conservatism, fundamentalism, Ken Wilber, modernism, modernity

It can feel pedantic to insist on the distinction between modernity and modernism (as I do in my tag cloud). I’ve seen eyes roll when I do it, and understandably so. Two nouns both deriving from the word modern: surely between them is the ultimate example of a trivial distinction, a hair-splitting, a difference that does not make a difference?

In fact the difference between modernity and modernism can make all the difference in the world. The importance of the distinction may become a little bit clearer when we move from the nouns to their corresponding adjectives. Modernity is simply the noun form of “modern”, as we might expect. But modernism is not. Modernity is merely the state of being modern. Modernism is the state of being modernist. And that is a difference that makes a huge difference. Continue reading →

A way forward for Wilber?

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Dustin DiPerna, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, modernism, modernity, mystical experience, Robert Sharf, Romanticism, Wilhelm Halbfass

I have not yet had a chance to hear a response from Dustin DiPerna on my post replying to his. However, his friend Mark Schmanko emailed me a response which I found utterly fascinating – one which takes up the arguments of my article as well. (I am posting these remarks with Mark’s permission.)

I had argued, following current work in religious studies like that of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass, that replicable mystical experience is more of a modern construction than we make it out to be, certainly not something at the core of premodern traditions. The conclusion in my article argued that, if my claims were true, a Wilberian could take two legitimate options: either rethink Wilber’s model heavily so as to incorporate the non-mystical elements of traditions, or “bite the bullet” and admit that it is accepting only the mystical elements and not other elements that would be closer to the tradition’s cores. Continue reading →

On hating the real world

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Place, Politics, Supernatural

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

architecture, Communism, conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Frank Gehry, Front Porch Republic, Gnosticism, modernism, modernity, natural environment, Romanticism, Simone Weil, Wendell Berry

A few months ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is particularly given to pithy epigrams. We were discussing the Stata Center: a brightly colourful building on the MIT campus, designed by architect Frank Gehry, which is designed deliberately to look chaotic, unfinished, random. It’s not a building that leaves many people feeling neutral. My friend disliked its artifice, disjoint from the things around it. I said I thought it would be terribly inappropriate in the middle of a historic neighbourhood, but that it’s just right for a school like MIT, so focused on progress and the future. She didn’t think it was appropriate anywhere, and added: “Frank Gehry hates the real world.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote while reading articles by Patrick Deneen and others at Front Porch Republic, who would probably agree with my friend about Gehry’s architecture (though not about much else). Continue reading →

On innovation through conservatism

20 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, Shinto, Social Science, Vedānta

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, conservatism, Front Porch Republic, Japan, Ken Wilber, modernism, modernity, postmodernism, Randall Collins, Romanticism, Śaṅkara, Thomas P. Kasulis

I noted two weeks ago how Ken Wilber’s recent post/modern turn (“Wilber-5”) is right in important respects, but suggested important problems with it. Last week I noted empirical problems: sociological data on Christianity show a very different picture from his. This week I want to turn to a deeper philosophical problem, which I suspect underlies last week’s sociological picture.

We cannot go back to premodernity. This much is true and important. Our options going forward must take account of the post/modern world, be developed within it. On all of this I agree with Wilber. But what I don’t think Wilber makes room for is this: one can take account of the post/modern world, understand it, know it, and still reject it. Continue reading →

The Christianity that changes is the one that dies

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, M.T.S.R., Sex, Social Science, Supernatural

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

conservatism, Glenmary Research Center, John Shelby Spong, Ken Wilber, modernity, mystical experience, Paul J. Griffiths, Unitarian Universalism, United States

As I discussed last week, Ken Wilber’s recent work argues that spirituality must be taken to a new and higher level, one associated with the “orange” and “green” worldviews of modernity and postmodernity. What does such a higher spirituality entail? Wilber points to examples of liberal Christianity like Hans Küng and John Shelby Spong. This is well and good; I’ve drawn a lot from liberal Christianity and I think it offers crucial methodological lessons for the study of Asian traditions. But his enthusiasm for them goes much too far. He claims that “any premodern spirituality that does not come to terms with both modernity and postmodernity has no chance of survival in tomorrow’s world”. (IS p225)

I would have little problem with this claim if by “come to terms” Wilber meant only that they must acknowledge and react to the existence of post/modernity – as fundamentalism does, by mostly reacting against it. But in his explanations it becomes clear he means significantly more: they must embrace and adopt it. In this claim Wilber echoes the title of one of Spong’s works, a work he names approvingly: Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. Continue reading →

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