Tag Archives: perennialism

Perennial nondualism

30 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in East Asia, God, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Neoplatonism, Self, Sufism, Vedānta

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I have spent a good deal of time criticizing the idea of a “perennial philosophy”, the idea (expressed by Ken Wilber and others before him) that the great sages of the world have always basically agreed on the really important things. In the past I had said there were perennial questions but with different answers; now I’m not even sure whether that is the case.

And yet I am struck by a particular phenomenon from which the perennialists draw a great deal of inspiration – and that is the pervasive influence of nondualism. “Nondual” is a literal English translation of the Sanskrit a-dvaita, the name of Śaṅkara’s school of Vedānta philosophy. But the core idea of nondualism has been asserted by a very wide range of philosophers around the world – from people who could never have heard of Śaṅkara, to Śaṅkara’s enemies.

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Roots of a project on method

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Buddhism, Dialectic, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

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How should one do philosophy across cultures? This is not an easy question, though too many people treat it as if it is. Mid-twentieth-century answers leaned to a perennialism like Ken Wilber’s, where at some deep level all the traditions are basically the same. That perennialism does not stand up to critical scrutiny: philosophical traditions are quite different from each other, and disagree with each other (and within each other) on crucial points.

But once one acknowledges those differences, one is still left trying to figure out what to do with them. It will not do to take one’s starting standard as given and judge everything that one encounters according to it – an approach characteristic of analytic philosophers, but also taken by Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought. Once one does that, there is scarcely much point left to thinking cross-culturally at all, for one already knows the answers. Given human finitude and fallibility, such confidence seems more like gross arrogance. But no better is the converse approach – typically labelled relativist – which views all the different traditions as equally right. Such an approach is a logical absurdity, since very few traditions themselves hold such a view: by declaring them right it declares them wrong.

What approach then should one take? Continue reading →

Choosing a few traditions

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy

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I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical traditions of the world into a full synthesis. Ken Wilber’s work has to date been the most valiant attempt anyone has made to fulfill that ambition. But I have argued in many ways that this attempt has failed. It must fail, in the perennialist form Wilber’s work takes: to claim that all the world’s wisdom (or “religious”) traditions are basically saying the same thing. That claim makes the attempt at putting the traditions together much easier. It is also false. Continue reading →

A synthesis beyond Orientalism

19 Sunday Jan 2014

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

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[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 →

The insufficiency of the state-structure distinction

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Consciousness, Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R.

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My recent article, which I summarized last week, appears in the issue of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice devoted to integral religious studies. Fellow blogger Dustin DiPerna also contributed an article to the journal, which takes an approach very different from mine. As I understand it, DiPerna discusses the history of religious studies in order to explain how it might be done from an Integral (i.e. Wilberian) perspective. Recently, Gerard Bruitzman critiqued DiPerna’s article online, and DiPerna offered a response. Happily, DiPerna’s article is available as a free PDF, and the responses are freely available online as well.

I’m excited by the conversation between DiPerna and Bruitzman because I think it opens up an opportunity for online dialogue about Wilber’s approach and its merits and flaws. Continue reading →

Précis of “Beyond enacted experiences”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Dialectic, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Vedānta

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I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.

The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading →

The trouble with phenomenological similarities

23 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Philosophy of Language, Roman Catholicism

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This week’s post is a slightly abridged version of a paper I wrote eleven years ago for Robert Gimello’s class on Buddhist meditation traditions. I’m posting it now for a couple of reasons: because I still enjoy its punchy rhetoric, because it’s a useful corrective to Wilberian and similar perspectives that assume “religion” is fundamentally about mystical experience, and because I think it’s likely to be relevant to posts I want to make in the months ahead. I also still agree with it to at least some extent, but I am not entirely sure what that extent is, and that is something I hope to be sorting through.

In his chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of the Cloud of Unknowing?”1, Ninian Smart argues that “there are phenomenological similarities between the differing practices despite the contrast in language and style between Buddhaghosa and the author of the anonymous 14th-century Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing.” Although Smart never defines “phenomenological”, I believe from the context of the article that he uses the term to refer to similarities of experience, and specifically mystical experience.

To what extent does Smart’s chapter succeed in its project? Continue reading →

New article published on Wilber

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in M.T.S.R.

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I’ve just published a new article critiquing Ken Wilber‘s recent work in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, a journal devoted to his thought. Sadly, it’s behind a pay wall, as JITP is a conventional academic journal rather than a free online journal. (This is entirely understandable, since unfortunately free online journals do tend to get less academic credibility, despite making their work available to a much wider audience.) Most universities don’t have this journal yet, but if you’d like to see the article and you’re academically affiliated, you can request it through interlibrary loan (or better yet ask your library to subscribe to the journal!) Here’s the reference:

Lele, Amod. 2012. “Beyond enacted experiences.” Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 7(2): 72-87.
[JITP is published by SUNY Press in Albany.]

At some later point I might post a blog-post-length précis of the article here, but for now I’ll just say the article criticizes Wilber’s perennialist view that mystical experience is at the core of the various “religious” traditions. The critique is primarily historical, but I also make sure to address the implications of the historical critique for constructive philosophy and integral thought (which I think are pretty major).

Multiple perennial questions

07 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, East Asia, Epistemology, Flourishing, Free Will, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Politics, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

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I’m returning today to the idea of perennial questions: questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy, where both sides of a debate keep getting articulated in many different places. The key feature of these perennial questions, to my mind, is that they are large: they cannot be narrowed down to a single precisely defined question within a single philosophical subfield, of the sort that analytic philosophers aim to ask, but extend their ramifications across multiple fields of theoretical and practical inquiry.

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? Continue reading →

Perennial questions?

06 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in East Asia, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth, Vedānta

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On my recent post about the ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity classifications in philosophy, skholiast asks an important question: “what is the itch in us to make such schematisms?” What is the point of trying to classify philosophies this way? Clearly many philosophers do attempt to so classify them – but is that anything more than the kind of obsessive interest that characterizes Asperger’s syndrome?

I thought of one important answer to this question because of some friends who are interested in Frithjof Schuon and his fellows in the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. The members of this school believed, and continue to believe, in a philosophia perennis, a kind of philosophical wisdom that persists across cultures throughout the ages. Central to this perennial philosophy is the idea of an ultimate Reality distinguishable from the everyday world we perceive with our senses – an ultimate One which Plato, Śaṅkara, and Zhu Xi might all arguably be said to have found, more or less entirely independently of one another. The perennialists tend to believe that the reason so many came to this conclusion in so many places is because it was the truth – it was really there, to be observed or deduced by any human being anywhere if they cared to take a serious look.

As for me, one reason I find classification of philosophies so important is that I’m only willing to meet the perennialists halfway. Continue reading →