The problem I quickly realized is that romantic marriage is a recent invention, a construct of our own time. It was obvious to me from the beginning that I’d get little help from Indian Buddhism, where sex and marriage are emphasized as fetters that bind us in suffering. I knew that to choose marriage was to side against Śāntideva. Sure, Śāntideva praises the monk Jyotis for breaking his monastic vows and marrying a woman who fell in love with him – but Jyotis, like a good bodhisattva, did this entirely out of compassion. “I’m marrying you out of sympathy” is not exactly the note on which I want to start married life.

Classical Buddhism is an ascetic tradition through and through, as uncomfortable as such asceticism might make us today. But then much the same can be said about classical Christianity, at least as expressed in Paul’s New Testament writings. “Better to marry than to burn”: marriage is a third-best option, not as good as converting to celibacy as Paul did, let alone lifelong celibacy. It is good only because it prevents the worse option, of being led around by sexual lust. For this reason I tend to chafe a bit when I hear the standard wedding reading of 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind,” and so on. Paul is not even talking about familial love, let alone romantic love; that’s the last thing on his mind. He’s talking about agape, compassion, close to Buddhist karuṇā. The King James Bible makes the point well when it renders the passage with “charity” rather than “love.”

But what about the non-ascetic traditions? Clearly some premoderns gave an unqualified endorsement to married life, even if the classical Buddhists and Christians did not. Indeed they did – but marriage so viewed was a very different thing. I touched on the point in my previous post about weddings, but it’s worth coming back to. Traditionally, marriage was not about the couple, it was about the community and its continuity, arranged by parents for the sake of producing and raising new children. And it was often the wife’s job to raise the children and the husband’s to provide materially – or sometimes the job of the extended family, if both were working. This is the married relationship that Confucius praises; but it is not our marriage. We fell in love without our families’ involvement, and we do not intend to have children. All of my family members are hundreds of miles away; hers do not live with us. To top it off, for the moment, she is our breadwinner while I am unemployed and taking care of the household. When classical Jewish or Confucian texts endorse marriage, it is for reasons far removed from ours. While I’ve said that weddings always imply a certain amount of traditionalism, to most traditional audiences our marriage looks a lot more like libertinism.

So the best premodern texts for a modern marriage are likely those which are not about marriage. The last time I got married, we read Pausanias’s speech from Plato’s Symposium, arguing that the best kind of love is pursued for the cultivation of virtue. A great and noble sentiment, and here we are talking about a love closer to modern romantic love – sexually charged eros, not compassionate agape. A good reading, but worth remembering that the eros that’s at issue here is the love Plato knew, between an older man and a younger boy. The dialogue never even entertains the idea that a married couple would feel eros for each other.

So likewise the Song of Songs, that Hebrew text that has made so many wonder “why is this in the Bible?” Not being constrained in our interpretations by tradition, we don’t need to take the strained reading of the text as an allegory for God’s love for the church. We can read it literally for what it is, the erotic passion of two heterosexual lovers, in a text that is nevertheless ancient and passed down by tradition. The text never says these lovers are married; in their time, they probably wouldn’t have been. But their love is much more like ours than is Paul’s agape, Śāntideva’s karuṇā, or the community- and family-oriented Confucian marriage. And so we are having a selection from this text sung at our wedding.

The other premodern reading we’ll have at the wedding is the short closing lines of the Rig Veda (X.191.4): “May your aim be one and single / May your hands be joined in one / The mind at rest in unison / At peace with all, so may you be.” It is also not about marriage in its original context, but about unity among Agni worshippers; and the translation is quite loose. In these respects I suppose it’s really no better than the Corinthians. But my father has regularly sent it as a wedding blessing to most of the couples we know who have married in my lifetime. So it’s become part of our own family tradition, in a way, as well as being an appropriate wish expressed in beautiful English. And all of that matters.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks – because of the wedding, of course! The next week and a half will be frenetic with wedding planning, and after that we are having a week’s honeymoon in New Orleans. (We had intended to go further afield, but immigration issues intervened; we expect to take a longer honeymoon this winter.) Blogging will take a back seat during this period. If I am seized by the urge to write about something topical, it’s possible that there may be a post in the interim; but I expect the blog’s writing to resume on the first of August.

Naturally, comments will remain open during this period; I’m happy that some lively discussions have got going here recently and I would be delighted if they continue. Before I pause, I would like to say a word of thanks to all my commenters and regular readers. You have made writing this blog a tremendously rewarding experience for me, and I look forward to resuming it in August.

Ni’s talk focused on the Chinese concept of gongfu 功夫, dating from the early centuries CE and meaning any practical art – it could include calligraphy, sports, cooking, good judgement or statecraft. (Although the word gongfu has long ago passed into English with an alternate spelling, it is probably best to keep using the Pinyin spelling rather than confuse people with a term most associate with goofy movies about roundhouse kicks.)

Gongfu as Ni understands it then bears some resemblance to the Greek concept of technē, or Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice, with one crucial difference. Aristotle’s technē involves a telos; it is embedded within a larger determinate framework of human flourishing. With gongfu, on the other hand, Ni agreed with my earlier characterization of the process as a technique. It is open to us to choose our aims; gongfu merely allows us to achieve those aims. There is a gongfu of killing as well as a gongfu of saving. (Ni effectively uses the concept to expand his previous characterization of Mencius into a constructive position.)

Ni urges us to a conception of practical philosophy in which gongfu, thus conceived, takes centre stage. Theoretical philosophy, especially metaphysics, then serves the function not of description but of recommendation. Philosophy is a way of achieving our chosen ends, a set of instructions rather than responsibilities. Philosophies, like other practices, can be evaluated as techniques – on their effectiveness at achieving their aims.

There’s a word for the kind of philosophy Ni is describing, and it’s relativism. Ni’s gongfu is not relativistic with respect to means; a philosophy can be discredited if it fails to achieve its goals. It is, however, entirely relativistic with respect to ends; ultimate ends are up to our decisions and choices, and there is no rational basis on which to criticize them. The value of each gongfu is relative to the incommensurable ends it aims to achieve.

As such, Ni’s approach seems vulnerable to the standard criticisms levelled at relativism. One asks: does this philosophy have any grounds on which to criticize evil actions – of which we might often take Adolf Hitler’s as the paradigm? Ni’s first answer was, to my mind, entirely unsatisfactory: that Hitler’s project failed on its own terms, that he committed suicide and ended his life in misery. This claim is of course true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far. It is not too difficult to imagine a Hitler who succeeded, perhaps by reining in his ambitions a little bit and maintaining the Nazi-Soviet pact. Such a Hitler, maintaining his reign of terror for decades or more, seems worse than the Hitler we know.

Ni then proceeded to offer a strong perspectival defence of sorts: criticism would be part of our own gongfu. We can criticize Hitler from our side, within our own ends; we can and should take this a step further and fight him. Action against Hitler is a part of achieving our aims; it’s just that there’s no objective ground from which to criticize him.

Against such a view, I developed some of the arguments I made in my critique of postmodernism. Relativism privileges the strong. It is no coincidence that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. believed in universal, objective truths; for it was only on such a basis that they could nonviolently shame their oppressors into relenting. Imagine King standing up and proclaiming: “I have a dream that my children will one day live in freedom and justice and brotherhood. But I know that you have a dream of maintaining this world of segregation, and I know that objectively my dream is no better than yours. So I will fight for my dream, and you fight for yours.” If civil rights leaders had all talked that way, even thought that way, it’s easy to imagine the South remaining segregated for centuries.

Moral persuasion works by imagining ideals larger than one person’s given ends. Without it, there is only violent persuasion, persuasion by force – which, by definition, favours the strong. It is no accident that the most powerfully expressed relativist position in Plato’s Republic – the one which ends on a note of “you have your position, Socrates, and I have mine” – is expressed by Thrasymachus, who has argued that justice is merely the interest of the stronger. Without an ability to cross paradigms and argue about ends, the interest of the stronger is what prevails. When the weak prevailed and achieved a more just world, as they did in Gandhi’s and King’s cases, they could only do so because they had on their side a conception of the good beyond their own limited paradigms, one which had a binding authority on everyone.

Knowing this point, those aiming for change could certainly try to lie – to proclaim universal ideals they did not themselves believe in, as itself part of the technique, the gongfu, for achieving their individually derived goals. (I believe that Gayatri Spivak has argued for a “strategic essentialism” that bears a strong resemblance to this approach.) An outsider might refer to such a person as a liar and a hypocrite, but such outside criticisms do not of themselves need to bear any weight on the relativist individual who disregards outsiders’ ends. More important is that such an approach can itself be rather self-defeating – public figures aiming for social change have their words and actions relentlessly dissected and examined. If King or Gandhi had really believed that what they were doing was only best for them and not universal – but proclaimed the opposite – their lies would have stood a good chance of being exposed.

Or, pushing the point further, one might even try hard to believe in a universalist view in order to advance one’s own pragmatic goals. Ni’s interpretation of Mencius (about which I hope to say more) suggested such an approach: rather than deriving one’s ethical or political practice from a metaphysics of the world’s nature, one starts with the practice and employs the metaphysics as a part of it. So one might try to take on a universalist metaphysics in order to advance one’s pragmatic goals, even though one is convinced that there is no such universal metaphysics that transcends each individual’s given ends. I have somewhat more sympathy for this possibility, as I have explored a similar possibility with respect to hedonism. But I concluded there that such an attempt is self-defeating. More generally, from a commonsense point of view, it is bad to believe things one knows to be false; from a philosophical point of view, it is bad to avoid thinking too hard lest one think the wrong things. More specifically, contradictions get in the way of one’s own practice, whether personal or political: when one believes a contradiction, one cannot – pretty much by definition – believe either side of the contradiction wholeheartedly. It is much more difficult to fight for justice (or anything else) when one is already at war with oneself, for such a fight must be fought on two fronts.

Ni made one final reply before the lunch ended: he noted that I was myself arguing merely based on pragmatic effectiveness, not on the grounds of the larger metaphysical truth I hope to proclaim. He was absolutely right about this, I think, but in a way that does not undercut my position. I’ve said a lot here already; this point deserves enough attention that I will save it for another post.

I’ll admit often feeling a certain impatience with philosophers of encounter like Lévinas (which probably makes me what Skholiast called an “ātmanist”). It has never been clear to me why, exactly, we’re supposed to be so limitlessly bound by “the Other” (usually with the capital letters). Lévinas’s philosophy strikes me as ruthlessly Abrahamic: at its core is a bowing and scraping before God, drastically opposed to any embrace of the divine with ourselves, parallel to Sirhindī’s insistence on God’s distance from his creation. As I noted in the comments to that post, Sirhindī advocated not merely intolerance to, but subjugation of, indigenous Indian traditions. Likewise Davis, in our conversation after his talk, noted that Lévinas uses the term “pagan” in an extraordinarily negative sense; his Abrahamism reminds me of Tertullian asking rhetorically “What has Athens do to with Jerusalem?” And while I am somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of humility expressed in a humanist view, I’m even more uncomfortable with trusting an Abrahamic god.

Davis’s talk, however, helped me put many of these ideas in perspective. Nishida’s thought, it turns out, is close to Lévinas’s in a number of ways, though far removed from Abrahamic traditions. (Intriguingly, Nishida even wrote a book entitled I and Thou, while apparently entirely unaware of Buber’s work of the same title.) Nishida tells us that “there is no universal that would subsume I and thou,” for that would deny the individuality and otherness of the two terms. The other must remain other. Nishida has a Zen take on the matter rather than an Abrahamic one: there must be something shared between the self and the other or no encounter can take place; but one must speak of this shared universal as emptying itself out, a “None” rather than a “One.”

But why should we think this way? A particularly evocative quote in Davis’s talk helped give me a clue in explanation: “I am truly myself by way of not being myself; I live by dying.” Now it seems like we are dealing with the paradoxes of hedonism: when all we seek is our own happiness, we don’t get it. We are most fulfilled when we live for something bigger than ourselves; a life centred entirely on the self will fail even on its own terms. Perhaps I’m getting more sympathetic to this sort of view as I approach marriage – realizing the fulfillment in a life choice that requires a certain self-overcoming, requires you to live for someone else as they live for you.

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.” This part of the book explores a strikingly wide range of Western perspectives on partial love (as opposed to universal compassion), and especially erotic or romantic love – from Spinoza’s Ethics to the Kindertotenlieder songs of Gustav Mahler. They are all “ladders” of love in a certain sense, in that they attempt to reform the way we see love. And they are arranged in a dialectical or phenomenological manner, with each one identified as (in Nussbaum’s eyes) responding to the inadequacies of the view before it, and in that respect providing a more adequate view. Such an attempt at dialectical progress is close to the way Wilber understands his project as well, and to the Chinese Buddhist idea of pan jiao 判教 (classification of the teachings) as I understand it. ^*

So far Nussbaum’s text sounds itself like a ladder of sorts. However, the order in which Nussbaum ranks these views is unusual for a philosophical ladder. She begins with Plato and Spinoza as the most inadequate positions, going through Augustine, finding herself after a while in Walt Whitman and ultimately in James Joyce. Why? Because Plato tries too hard to ascend above love’s imperfections; his love is too far removed from the world. Joyce’s Ulysses, on the other hand, takes us down the ladder, lovingly embracing the world with all its imperfections. Likewise in her previous work Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum had described her vision of an ideal transcendence as a “transcending by descent” (379, italics hers). [EDIT, June 17: part of this paragraph was missing when I first made this post yesterday.]

It would be too simple to describe Wilber as an ascent thinker and Nussbaum as descent; both see value in the two different sides and want to incorporate both. (For a pure ascent tradition we might do better with the Yoga Sūtras or the Jains’ Tattvārtha Sūtra; for a pure descent we might look to pragmatism or to Paul and Patricia Churchland.) But I think it’s useful to juxtapose the two because they both use the language of ascent and descent while taking quite different positions on it.

The ascent-descent distinction particularly interests me because of the way it can interact with other distinctions I have used to classify philosophies, especially Thomas Kasulis’s aforementioned distinction between intimacy and integrity. What’s always struck me about the integrity-intimacy distinction is that the integrity side captures something in common between two very different kinds of philosophies: ancient Indian views like the Yoga Sūtras in which the human subject aims to abide in a pure transcendental aloneness, and modern individualist philosophies of which Ayn Rand’s is perhaps the epitome, in which the rational individual aims for mastery of the material world. There’s even a certain rough correspondence here with the three ways of life classification I’ve employed before: “asceticism” is integrity ascent, “libertinism” is integrity descent, and “traditionalism” is intimacy.

But could the distinction be pushed further, so that intimacy too is divided between ascent and descent? I suspect that it can. As luck would have it, on my way to India where I was to have these thoughts, I was accosted in LAX by a group of airport Hare Krishnas. When I told them (perhaps inadvisably) that I knew Sanskrit, they pushed very hard for me to take a copy of their teacher Prabhupada’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. I read some of the introduction on the plane, and it stayed with me. As I thought through these categories, I realized: Prabhupada’s thought is the perfect example of intimacy ascent.

Prabhupada follows in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition of Caitanya, according to which the purpose of human life is to abide in the love of the god Krishna. Prabhupada makes it clear that this love is far superior to any merely human love, which is impermanent and will fade – the ideas of an ascent tradition – while at the same time arguing for a radically dependent view of human beings, according to which human beings can never be viewed as solitary or independent (in the way that Rand and the Yoga Sūtras both do). But rather than depending on each other, as we do in Nussbaum’s thought, we depend on a higher, eternal being. Here intimacy is an ascent. (I suppose Augustine’s view, which Nussbaum also sees as inadequate, is of a very similar kind.) Nussbaum’s thought, on the other hand, takes us to an intimacy by descent – as does Alasdair MacIntyre’s world of “dependent rational animals,” and the relationship-centred world of Confucius.

Two axes, then, to classify philosophies (both theoretical and practical): a vertical axis of ascent and descent, and we might also say a horizontal axis of intimacy and integrity. How robust is it, how well does it work? I’m not sure yet. But it seems like a good start.

* I’m trying to begin learning Chinese characters, and how to produce them online. Please, any readers who know Chinese, correct me when I do this wrongly in this post or any other – as I’m sure will happen along the way.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Well: I posted a little while ago about three basic ways of life, three orientations to theoretical as well as practical philosophy: the asceticism of most Buddhists, Jains, Advaitins and early Christians; the traditionalism of most Jews, Confucians and dharmaśāstra; and the libertinism of Marx, Nietzsche, Rawls, Ayn Rand and the utilitarians. Asceticism and libertinism can each take on more egoistic or more altruistic forms. Stephen Walker challenged the formulation somewhat, noting that Mozi doesn’t comfortably fit it; but a typology like this must necessarily consist of ideal types in Max Weber’s sense, giving us extremes within which real examples take a middle ground, and Mozi seems like an altruist who takes on some elements of all three basic ways of life.

My point here, however, was to be that these three ways of life each seems to have a corresponding way of death – an attitude toward death that does not depend on the supernatural. This is true whether they take an egoistic or altruistic form, for others must die as surely as oneself. The traditionalist would take the path most people likely take, seeking immortality through her children. This is the path the Hebrew Bible offers – progeny represent immortality. (Thus the now-shocking happy ending to the book of Job: he loses all his children, but it’s all okay in the end because he gets more!) By contrast the libertine, it seems to me, must follow Lucretius’s advice: do not fear death; nothing bad can happen to you. True, you won’t have any of the things you loved during life, but that won’t matter, because you’ll be dead. You won’t notice any of it.

And the ascetic? Most ascetic traditions do rely in some sense on the supernatural, but I’m not sure that they have to. I’m particularly intrigued by the approach to death in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Our selves are illusion in the first place; the true nature of the world is a simple oneness identical with all our selves, if we could perceive it. Indian gurus will sometimes leave the words for their disciples: “I was not born, I did not die.” This sounds somewhat supernatural, but I don’t think that it must be – at least not if we take “supernatural” in the standard sense of “ideas incompatible with the evidence of natural science.” The Advaita view is not falsifiable by empirical evidence, and is not supposed to be; arguments for it take place at the pre-sensory level of a priori foundations, of what makes empirical knowledge possible.

Now the idea of immortality through one’s children requires a bit more fleshing out, to the point that Job’s version no longer satisfies. The simple fact of having children does nothing to defeat death, for one’s children are not oneself. Children can only offer a sort of immortality because they promise what Freud (or his translator) called cathexis (German Besetzung): the breaking down of self boundaries, so that we come to identify ourselves with our children, and really come to see ourselves as existing partially in those children. It seems unlikely that this happened in Job’s case; if new children were as good as the old ones, he can’t have been that closely cathected with the old ones to begin with. On the other hand, cathexis alone isn’t enough; we surely cathect with our spouses or other romantic lovers, but they will only survive a few decades beyond us at most, and usually not that. Children, on the other hand, can pass on their own cathexis, a new identification with our grandchildren and their descendants.

I suppose a similar kind of cathexis might happen in the attempt to achieve immortality through one’s work: artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. If the creation one brings into the world is closely identified with oneself, and if it is everlasting, then it can similarly keep one around. But both kinds of cathexis face a similar problem: one cannot know at death whether the object of cathexis will survive. Will one’s descendants keep oneself alive, or will their bloodlines die out, as seems to be happening frequently in my generation where so few have children? Will one’s social accomplishments be toppled, will one’s artistic work fade into such obscurity that it is forever lost? (Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) Lucretius’s comfort with nonexistence, and Śaṅkara’s identification with a unified cosmic Self, seem to promise a surer way.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mah?y?na Adhy??ayasa?codana S?tra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mah?y?na s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mah?y?na was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.

Which brings us back to the previous post’s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?

I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.

Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.

Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?

Somehow, Bob and I had also overlooked the fact that even if all you wanted was an ice cream truck, a bartender, and a deejay, you still needed a place to put them. And if you decided it might be nice to have some photographs of the day — photographs that did not scalp anyone, or feature detailed close-ups of your uncle’s thumb — it was best to hire a photographer. And then, as my mother diplomatically pointed out, if relatives were going to travel across the country to witness your marriage, it was probably polite to feed them more than a Fudgsicle and a glass of champagne. And surely, you couldn’t expect older folks to balance a plate on their hand all night: they had to sit somewhere. And since you were going to have tables anyway, would it really kill you to put out a few flowers to brighten things up?

Eventually Gilman even accepts the pouffy white wedding dress of her essay’s title: “My mind might have been that of a twenty-first-century feminist, but my body was that of a nineteenth-century Victorian, and the dress seemed to have been custom-made for my proportions.” And so it begins: as much as one desires to buck tradition, one nevertheless winds up finding reason to embrace many of the traditions one intended to reject. Hegel, I think, would approve: for him, it is important to question the authority of the past, but primarily in order to discover the rationality that underlies existing tradition, the reason things are the way they are. That seems to me exactly what young couples go through these days: however much you might want to reject the tent rentals, the fancy catering, the flower arrangements, the expensive photographer, you find that there are good reasons people go through all of these. You can (and probably should) throw out some wedding traditions, but you throw them all out at your peril.

Beyond Hegel, the process also makes me think of Confucius. I’ll refer back to comments I made when posting about Christmas:

The Confucians love to talk about how traditional ritual is one of the things that civilizes us, makes us part of the community – it’s the act of participating in the ritual itself that does this, not a historical or theological meaning that the ritual has. And… [ellipsis in original] I think Confucians like their traditional rituals for exactly the same reasons many North Americans hate Christmas (or Thanksgiving, or Passover for that matter): the whole idea is to share activity with family, including family who are very different from us, family who have poor character, family we don’t like. In our individualistic small-household culture, the holidays are among the few large-family rituals we have, which is why many people understandably would rather not bother with them.

Confucius’s prime example of such a civilizing ritual was traditional funeral rites. And indeed, in the mobile and scattered West, the two occasions we are most likely to see our whole extended family are funerals and – weddings. More so even than Christmas or Thanksgiving, weddings are a time when the family comes together, and when family preferences matter, even if the wedding is supposed to be all about two individuals.

In a certain way I would think of weddings as even more supremely Confucian than funerals. For while one can take a funeral to be about only one person, a wedding is always about at least two. Few events have more to do with the intimacy orientation so characteristic of Confucianism (again using Thomas Kasulis’s highly productive distinction). By deciding to get married, to a certain extent one rejects the integrity orientation – both the premodern integrity orientation of the unmarried monk, and the modern integrity orientation of the autonomous libertine who cares only for himself or herself. On my previous account of three ways of life, at a wedding one commits to some degree of traditionalism, against both asceticism and libertism.

There are even some who lament that, in a sense, today’s marriages are not traditional enough. Patrick Deneen points out on Front Porch Republic not only that most marriages in history were based on family contracts rather than individual consent; but also that even when individual consent became indispensable to marriage in the West,

it was still understood by all parties that marriage was most fully a union by and for the greater community. Blessings of parents and the publication of “the banns” was a necessary precondition for a wedding. This was especially because the married couple – by committing to marriage – was not merely joining to each other in an official capacity, but was in fact becoming a constitutive unit of the community and the conduit for the continuation of culture. Marriage was thus essential to the life and future of culture, and could not be permitted to take place between two individuals who happened to love each other but who were culturally unrelated. Rather, and necessarily, marriage was the union not simply between individuals, but between two people who would convey the lived traditions of a culture – most obviously (for instance), a man and woman of the same religious faith (this is one of the main points of Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevye can brook the choices of his two older daughters – even marriage to a communist – because they are both Jews. It is only when his youngest daughter proposes to marry a Christian that he withholds consent). Marriage was most essentially a commitment to a community, not the sum of personal choices of individuals. [emphases in original]

Deneen writes as a conservative opposed to gay marriage, but he sees gay marriage as the inevitable outcome of an individualistic concept of marriage – the kind of concept that we or Gilman tried to follow, where we would decide to move away from established traditions. Deneen reminds me what a modern individualist I am; I’m grateful that I don’t live in Deneen’s world, which would in many ways be Confucius’s. I’m much happier to be in Hegel’s world. We still could throw out all convention, we still could elope, and it’s important that we be able to reserve that right; but because we want to give our families and friends a good time, we start to see the reasons behind a number of the conventions we thought we’d leave aside.

Such a point has implications well beyond weddings. I think it’s what gives rise to the old saw “liberal at 20, conservative at 40″ – though I’d prefer “radical at 20, pragmatic at 40,” as self-styled conservatives, especially of the libertarian stripe, can be far more radical in the changes they wish to see than many are left-wingers. As teenagers, we learn – to our shock – what is wrong with the world around us, and set out to do everything differently from what came before. Only as we try (and typically fail) to do this over the years do we learn why things are the way they are in the first place.

The problem: this view is almost the opposite of what the classical Indian Buddhists – including the Buddha of the Pali suttas – actually taught. To be sure, the autonomous, independent selves that we would like to believe in are an illusion. We must indeed recognize the dependent co-arising (paticca samupp?da or pratitya samutp?da) of all things, acknowledge that everything arises out of a circle of mutually dependent causes.

Here’s the thing: this circle of causes is bad. The first of the twelve links in the chain of causation is ignorance; and out of this chain comes suffering. All of the things conditioned by causation, the First Noble Truth says, are suffering, dukkha. The hope offered by the Buddha, in the Third Noble Truth, is to offer us a way out of this suffering interdependent world of sa?s?ra – to get us to nirvana, something unconditioned, in some sense even independent. You usually won’t hear this part in Yavanay?na affirmations of interdependence. Early Buddhism offers us a worldview strikingly similar to the Jainism that preceded it and the Yoga S?tras that followed it; and these are probably the strongest integrity traditions there are, more “Cartesian” than Descartes himself. We progressively reduce our dependence on the world around us until we transcend even dependence on life itself, entering the ideal state, the Jaina and Yoga version of nirv?na, which is called kaivalya: aloneness.

Neither does this integrity orientation change where one might most expect it to change: the rise of other-oriented Mah?y?na, where one remains in the world to free others. In Indian Mah?y?na thinkers like ??ntideva, this freedom is itself understood as independence. ??ntideva teaches the importance of the kaly?na mitra, the good spiritual friend – but this friendship is understood in a necessarily unbalanced and hierarchical way. When I was a TA for Diana Eck, she gave me some wise advice about the proper boundaries for a teacher: “You can be your students’ friend, but they can’t be your friend.” And this is exactly the way the kaly?na mitra works. The kaly?na mitra is a guru, someone more liberated than you are; you can trust, rely on depend on this guru, but the guru can’t depend on you. Ultimately, the goal is to become a kaly?na mitra for others, to allow them to depend on you – but they can depend on you because you are advanced enough not to depend on anyone else.

Where all of this does change, as far as I can tell, is in East Asia – where the intimacy worldview was philosophically entrenched long before Buddhism arrived o the scene. I’m no expert on East Asian Buddhism, but as I understand it, schools like Huayan do indeed stress the world’s interdependence and see it as a good thing. This point, however, seems to have much more to do with East Asia than with Buddhism. It’s part of the reason I see Buddhism as the exception that proves the rule in Asian philosophy, the constant between South Asia and East Asia that does more to show their differences than their commonalities. Buddhism is an integrity philosophy like Jainism and Yoga when it’s in India alongside those philosophical systems; it’s an intimacy philosophy like Confucianism when it’s beside Confucianism in East Asia. Macy, however, tends to act as if the Therav?da Buddhism she has learned from is Confucian in this way, when it really isn’t, and she’s not alone in thinking that way.

Now why stress this point? I do think that acknowledging our dependence is a good thing in many ways, especially if we’re not going to try and go it alone in a monastic lifestyle. Yet at the same time, there’s something important to the idea of controlling our emotions and reducing our attachments. Feminists of the boomer generation, like Macy, fought against the stiff-upper-lip ideal of men who repressed their emotions, and there’s surely something to their critique; at the same time, there’s something to that ideal as well. It’s valuable to get our emotions under control so they don’t control us; that doesn’t mean we need to repress them. Similarly, as much as we do need to acknowledge our dependence on others, we also need to cultivate some amount of healthy independence, to be comfortable in our own skins independent of what others think of us, to be the “rock” that others can lean on. In my view, classical Buddhism as it was, and Macy’s distortion of it, both tend to be one-sided.

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. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.

The second comparison is a bit more far-reaching, and I think more intriguing. The more I read about Speculative Realism, the more this thought came to me: the basic goal of Speculative Realism is to make Western thought less Indian and more Chinese.

A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (r?pa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.

Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)

Either way, though, the lack of attention to the subjective world in classical Confucianism is striking. Aaron Stalnaker’s comparison of Augustine and Xunzi is instructive here. Both Augustine and Xunzi are deeply concerned with the bad tendencies in human nature; but for Xunzi this remains almost entirely at the level of behaviour. Not for him Augustine’s pained reflections on memory, worrying that he still enjoys the memory of past sins even after he’s stopped sinning; nor Augustine’s worries that he still sins in his dreams. The problem for Xunzi isn’t with what we think and feel; it’s only with what we do. On a first glance at Speculative Realism, this Confucian world seems a lot like the intellectual world they’d like to create. Nor is the nonsubjective world of Chinese philosophy limited to Confucianism; Ch’an Buddhism itself attempts to decentre the subject in favour of the natural world (rather than the mental aggregates of Indian Buddhism).

I recall Harman once saying something on his blog to the effect that you could tell the essentials of any philosopher’s thought from that philosopher’s aesthetics; and the point seems very much validated by classical Indian and Chinese aesthetics. Anne Monius once pointed out to me that classical Indian aesthetics are extraordinarily anthropocentric. Until the medieval Indian Muslims, and perhaps even after that, one does not find any paintings or statues depicting the natural world by itself, or even at the centre of a picture. The centre of every art object is a human or humanlike being. The closest one gets to a painting of a nonhuman is anthropomorphic animal deities like the monkey god Hanumān. It is the human(oid) subject that matters. The most characteristically Chinese style of painting, by contrast, is the landscape, in which human beings’ presence is tiny. This is object-oriented art.

I don’t know nearly enough about Speculative Realism to say anything about whether they’re right. My sympathies usually lie with Indian over Chinese philosophy, and strongly against eliminative materialism; so I view this new tradition’s ideas with considerable caution. But I’m not trying here to engage with them constructively yet – just to see if I can get a first grasp of what they’re up to. And it does seem like the idea, put crudely, is to make us less Indian and more Chinese.

In reading Graham Priest’s work, I was particularly struck by a point Priest makes at length in his Stanford Encyclopedia article: that Hegel believes there can be true contradictions, and is in that sense a dialetheist. I think Priest is technically right, but the point can be a bit misleading.

First, Hegel accepts the normative force of non-contradiction, in a way that Priest also does but tends to push to the sidelines. That is: while it’s possible for contradictions to be true, there’s also something about them that is epistemologically bad. As I noted last time, Priest accepts this point himself, so that when he says “What is so bad about contradictions? Maybe nothing,” he is effectively being disingenuous for rhetorical effect. For Priest, contradictions are epistemologically bad only in that the probability of a contradiction being true is generally low. For Hegel the problem with contradictions is something significantly bigger: a true contradiction eventually and inevitably becomes false.

This point leads into a bigger difference that goes well beyond Hegel’s and Priest’s work, which is what I really want to address today. Priest generally imagines contradictions as existing between linguistic truth-bearers of some description. He says at the beginning of the SEP entry that “we shall talk of sentences throughout this entry; but one could run the definition in terms of propositions, statements, or whatever one takes as her favourite truth-bearer: this would make little difference in the context.” But some objects taken to bear truth could, I think, change the nature of the claim significantly. Priest’s truth-bearers are statements, beliefs, propositions – all mere linguistic mental or verbal objects. But not everyone has taken truth-bearers to be of this kind. The most vivid exception may be Saint Augustine, about whom Alasdair MacIntyre put the matter beautifully:

for Augustine it is in terms of the relationships neither of statements nor of minds that truth is to be primarily characterized and understood. “Veritas,” a noun naming a substance, is a more fundamental expression than “verum,” an attribute of things, and the truth or falsity of statements is a tertiary matter. To speak truly is to speak of things as they really and truly are; and things really and truly are in virtue only of their relationship to veritas. So where Aristotle locates truth in the relationship of the mind to its objects, Augustine locates it in the source of the relationship of finite objects to that truth which is God. (Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 110)

Here not merely statements or beliefs but things are true – by virtue, I think, of their genuineness, their closeness to a Platonic Form of goodness which, for Augustine, turns out to be God himself. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in lamenting the reliance of religious studies on the concept of belief, claims that on a classical or even medieval Western understanding ejusne philosophia vera est? would mean not “does he hold a correct set of philosophical beliefs?” but “Is his love of wisdom genuine?” Only in this kind of light, I think, can we understand more recent claims like Gandhi’s frequently expressed opinion that “Truth is God.” On the account that truth is borne only by propositions or other linguistic formation, such a claim appears ludicrous; whatever else God might be, he is not merely an attribute of statements or beliefs! So too in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy, language is explicitly deconstructed and shown to be inadequate in the face of a truth that is beyond language.

And in Hegel’s case, the contradictions are there in social reality. MacIntyre in Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (pp. 362-6) gets at this point when he employs the notion of an epistemological crisis: traditions are superseded by other traditions when their worldviews and social practices are contradictory in ways the traditions cannot themselves resolve. Hegel adds a telos to MacIntyre’s view: it is just such crises that cause the world’s spirit to develop and progress.

In Hegel’s case, one could argue that the contradictions remain within the mind and even within language, because for Hegel a linguistic mind or spirit effectively constitutes reality. One cannot make this case with Hegel’s disciple Karl Marx. For Marx the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is that production is appropriated by a group that does not itself produce. This is a contradiction in reality that must necessarily work itself out. Mao tried to develop the point further in his On Contradiction.

Augustine, Gandhi, Śaṅkara, Marx, Mao and probably Hegel: not a group that has a whole lot in common. What they do share, it seems to me, is a conception that truth and contradiction extend well beyond mere propositions in individual minds. This conception tends to be dismissed in most contemporary philosophy (especially but not only analytic philosophy); but I suspect that in at least some respect it is probably right.