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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: music

The opposite of Christianity

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Dialectic, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Alexandra James, Anton LaVey, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, gender, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hebrew Bible, John Milton, music, qualitative individualism, Satan, Satanism, Twin Temple

One philosophical principle I have tried to live by is: there is truth in everything. This is a weaker version of Ken Wilber’s “Everybody is right”: many people are wrong, about many things, but they come to their wrong views for a reason. I take this principle to underlie Hegel’s dialectical method: one should transcend and include every view, which is to say preserve the truth and the reasons underlying a wrong view while leaving aside what is wrong in it.

One thing that led me to this view: as a teenager I was deeply anti-Christian. I saw in Christianity only an oppressive anti-gay, anti-feminist politics – a pillar of Reagan’s Moral Majority coalition. As an adult, though, I came to appreciate Christianity – never adopting its worldview, but coming to see in Christianity a similar kind of self-cultivation to the Buddhist one that had changed my life.

But a true Hegelian, I think, needs to find the truth not only in Christianity but also in its opposite. Hegel himself spends a great deal of time in the Phenomenology looking for truth in Enlightenment anti-clericalism alongside Christian faith itself. In an era later than Hegel’s, though, we now see anti-Christian views taken further than the Enlightenment thinkers ever dreamed: a significant number of people now openly embrace Satanism. And I think it is also important to see the truth in that.

Continue reading →

Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Self, Virtue, Work

≈ Comments Off on Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

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20th century, academia, Catharine MacKinnon, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, generations, Georg Simmel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, identity, Immanuel Kant, interview, John Locke, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Monty Python, music, qualitative individualism, race, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Stefani Ruper, United States, virtue ethics

Stefani Ruper interviewed me for her video podcast a while ago, and the interview is now live. It focuses on the topic of qualitative individualism, elaborating on ideas from my earlier series of posts. It gets into some topics that are a bit more intense than I’ve covered on the blog in recent years, but I’m pleased with it. Thanks to Stefani for this opportunity.

I’ve embedded the video above, so you can watch it here, and I also highly recommend you check out Stefani’s excellent philosophy podcast in general:

iTunes: http://stefaniruper.com/listen

Spotify: http://stefaniruper.com/listenspotify

Youtube: http://stefaniruper.com/watch

Stream & other outlets: http://stefaniruper.com/podcast

 

 

An invisible ideal that we cherish

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex, South Asia, Western Thought

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Charles Taylor, Gretchen Rubin, identity, law, music, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, race, Supreme Court of India

When we study non-Western cultures it is difficult to separate out the study of “philosophy” from the study of “religion”. Those of us who study the brilliant arguments of élite men are often told we should pay more attention to the lived culture, to what people there actually say and do. There are advantages and disadvantages to studying other cultures this way. But one of the things we often don’t do is turn that same gaze on our own.

What if, as philosophers in the West, we paid more attention to the ideas that actually underlie our everyday lives and cultures and arguments rather than to prestigious theories? As “religious studies” scholars do, in ways that do not and should not depend on the concept of “religion”? I think that if we approached contemporary Western philosophical culture in this way, we would discover how much of our ethical life is animated by an important ethical ideal that has not had a defender as philosophically rigorous and articulate as a Kant or a Rawls. Continue reading →

The saksit of Notre-Dame

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, Natural Science, Place, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Abhidhamma, architecture, autobiography, Canada, Hebrew Bible, music, Pali suttas, rasa, religion, saksit, Thailand, Thomas Aquinas, Vannapa Pimviriyakul

Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: [CC-BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Basilique Notre-Dame. Photo by David Iliff. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Basilique Notre-Dame – one of the most magnificent cathedrals in North America – was the first work of architecture to leave a real impact on me, as an undergraduate in Montréal. I visited it again recently for the first time in a long time, and this time it made me think: saksit. Continue reading →

The power of a beautiful temple

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Place, Rites, Serenity, Supernatural

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

architecture, Augustine, autobiography, Four Noble Truths, Japan, music, Robert Wilson, saksit, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Thailand, upāyakauśalya, Vannapa Pimviriyakul

We think these days a lot about Buddhist ethics, which often involves some thought about Buddhist politics. We tend to think a lot less about Buddhist aesthetics.

Now there’s an obvious explanation that could be given for this: the Buddhist dhamma teaches that worldly pleasures mire us in suffering. So aesthetics, insofar as it deals with pleasurable phenomena like art, is something Buddhists should avoid. In response I give you this:

Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Bangkok

Continue reading →

On wanting it darker

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Death, Despair, External Goods, God, Hope, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ Comments Off on On wanting it darker

Tags

Ben (commenter), Chan/Zen, Hebrew Bible, Leonard Cohen, music, obituary

Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008

Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008

2016 has taken many great musicians from us. Early in the year we lost Prince and David Bowie. Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip is still with us for now, but the band played its last concert. And then there was Leonard Cohen.

Cohen began his career as one of the long parade of 1960s singer-songwriters who temporarily changed the phrase “folk music” so that it now referred to the music of educated urban élites. He earned a place alongside Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan – many of whom he played with. In that context he developed his talent for enigmatic, evocative lyrics. But as far as I’m concerned, none of his real greatness comes from that period. If he had died as young as Janis Joplin (or Amy Winehouse), I wouldn’t be writing this tribute, and a few decades from now I’m not sure that he would be remembered.

Cohen’s real brilliance came out in the 1980s and early 1990s, when decades of whisky and cigarettes had lowered his sensitive folkie voice into a gravelly growl, and his music took a darker turn to match. Continue reading →

The theology of Christmas carols

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Christianity, Emotion, God

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Edmund Sears, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, kitsch, Milan Kundera, music, theodicy, United States

I will be taking a break from blogging over the next few weeks’ holiday. When new posts return in January, they will be on a biweekly (or fortnightly, if you wish) schedule: every alternate Sunday rather than every Sunday. I continue to enjoy writing Love of All Wisdom and intend to keep doing so, but as I have tried publishing more conventional papers, studying computer science and teaching a course on top of my day job, the weekly schedule has been too hard to sustain. I hope that alternating weeks will make it easier for me to continue engaging in the wonderful exchanges of ideas that have taken place here.

In Canada and the US today, the Christian aspect of Christmas is likely most noticeable in the music. There are of course a great number of English-language Christmas songs with little or no Christmas element (“Jingle Bells”, “Deck The Halls”, “Frosty The Snowman” and so on). It is increasingly common to hear only these songs played in public places. But one may quickly feel something missing here. Certainly some of these songs are grander than others; it would be a difficult task indeed to argue that “Deck The Halls” is no better a work than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. But even so, there is a certain depth that is missing from them.

By contrast, many Christian carols engage with some weighty theological questions, especially that most significant of all questions for monotheistic believers: theodicy, the problem of bad. If there is a God – specifically, a being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent – how can the world be so full of terrible things? Continue reading →

Kitsch

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Christianity, Modern Hinduism, Pleasure, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

kitsch, Milan Kundera, music, Thomas Kinkade

baby KrishnaI cannot think very long about aesthetics without encountering the concept of kitsch. Perhaps doubly so now in the Christmas season (on which more in coming weeks), but in the rest of the year at all. One of the reasons I haven’t thought that much about aesthetics, I realize, is that I suspect most modern thinkers on the subject would consider many of my favourite artistic creations bad art – if they would consider them art at all. And the concept which would typically be used to describe them is kitsch: works with a lower-class popular appeal.

Among my favourite works of music are several power ballads of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which I enjoy non-ironically. In visual art, I love the bright Indian aesthetic in its popular manifestations: poster art of deities, temples covered in “Christmas” lights. Continue reading →

Freedom of choice: a classical defence

18 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Human Nature, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Ashleigh Brilliant, Ashley MacIsaac, chastened intellectualism, democracy, drugs, Janis Joplin, libertarianism, music, Xunzi

“Freedom” is among the most central concepts in our political vocabulary. I think it is deservedly so. But it’s also a concept with a notoriously large number of meanings. Libertarians identify freedom simply with the absence of state coercion; by contrast, the most widely used Sanskrit term with an equivalence to freedom is probably mokṣa, liberation from the suffering of worldly existence. And the most common use of “freedom” today is something different again: the ability to make unrestricted choices, to decide for oneself what one will do.

Freedom in this sense of choice played a fairly limited role in premodern political thought, and I think this is because the ancients understood its limitations. Continue reading →

Philosophical single-mindedness (1)

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Prayer, Protestantism, Rites, Roman Catholicism, Salafi

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

architecture, Augustine, autobiography, Jesus, Martin Luther, modernism, music, Stonehill College

One of the most common slams made against modernist (Yavanayāna) Buddhism is that it is “Protestant.” I’ve previously written about how there’s more to Buddhist modernism than this, and about the curious quasi-theological assumption that having Protestant influence is seen as a bad thing. At the same time, I’ve been realizing that there are close links between Protestantism and modernism. Not too surprising, perhaps, since the two emerge out of the same historical context, the Europe of the past 500 years – but I think their similarities may go deeper than that. Continue reading →

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