Love of All Wisdom

It’s become something of a cliché to say that Buddhism is about embracing our “interdependence.” The mechanistic Cartesian worldview, so the story goes, has led us to think of human beings as subjects independent of the world around them, in a way responsible for our current environmental catastrophes. (Depending on who you ask, this idea of independence might also be responsible for patriarchy, racism, homophobia, class exploitation and an inability to express our emotions.) But Buddhists know better: Buddhists know that everything arises dependent on everything else, so we should affirm and celebrate our mutual ties to each other and to the earth. In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, Buddhism on this interpretation offers us an intimacy worldview, distinct from the integrity worldview of the modern West. This idea is perhaps most clearly found in the thought of Joanna Macy, but its spread goes much wider among Western (Yavanayāna) converts to Buddhism, especially (but not only) in the baby-boom generation.

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 samuppāda or pratitya samutpāda) 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. (continue reading…)

In examining my previous question on internalism and externalism I’ve been trying to explore a powerful but complex and difficult answer: that this question is expressed in the very history of Western philosophy.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. (continue reading…)

Possibly the biggest philosophical question on my mind is this: why should we do anything at all? Or, why should we do one thing and not another? What is it to have a reason for action, a reason to do anything? It’s difficult to have a coherent ethics without answering this question in some respect; but in some ways it’s even more difficult to answer the question itself.

There are, I think, two basic classes of answer to this question, which analytic philosophers classify as internalism and externalism with respect to ethical motivation. On an internalist view, to have a reason to do something is to have a motivation, perhaps even a desire, to do it. If you don’t at some level want to do something, or at least feel or believe that you should do it, then you shouldn’t do it. On an externalist view, by contrast, reasons are independent of us. There are things we just should do, period, whether or not we have any desire or other motivation to do them.

Each position faces wrenching difficulties. The externalist view is always subject to the laughing, scathing criticism of a Nietzsche. If you can’t tell me why I would want to do something, then bollocks to your “should.” I’ll do what I want instead. External reasons don’t feel like real reasons; Bernard Williams, indeed, has argued that they only really become reasons for action if we acquire motivations to do them. Yet the internalist view seems to collapse into relativism and conservatism. If our existing motivations are the only source of reasons for action, then how can those motivations ever be criticized? On what grounds can you tell Pol Pot he’s doing the wrong thing by killing his citizenry? You run, effectively, into the problems with classical relativism, which show up in a variety of ways, such as the political problems of postmodernism, or the problems of contradiction for spiritual growth.

Some way of reconciling internalism and externalism, without the problems of each, seems necessary. But what way?

What makes the question of ethical internalism and externalism still more intriguing is that it seems to parallel a very similar theoretical question about truth. Could there be a truth we can’t know? Say, a kind of knowledge only achievable by gods and not humans? If so, on what grounds can we say that something really is a truth, if we can’t know it? If not, do we not collapse back into the problems of relativism, where everything is subjective, since knowledge is reducible to our own minds?

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…)

Skholiast’s blog pointed me to an excellent review of a collection of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on “religion.” (The author goes by “pomonomo2003″ in his review; his own very interesting website reveals his name to be Joseph Martin.) The topic is notable today, at a time when the militant atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grab the headlines – and those whom one might expect to be their staunchest allies, Marxists like Terry Eagleton, have instead been among their sharpest critics.

It is likely to the Communist regimes of the 20th century that we owe Marx’s reputation as a despiser of religion. Stalin and Mao ruthlessly persecuted Christians and Buddhists, and found scriptural support for their actions in Marx’s famous claim in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that religion is “the opium of the people” or “the opiate of the masses.” From there it seems a short step to Mao’s infamous claim to the Dalai Lama that “religion is poison,” as the Cultural Revolution burned so much of Tibet’s great heritage.

But hold on just a second. Martin’s review points to an important insight that blew me away when I first heard it in Geoff Waite’s class on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: opium, to someone of Marx’s time, was not the addictive danger that it seems to us, or to the post-Opium War Chinese. (continue reading…)

This semester, in addition to my teaching, I’m helping out at Stonehill with instructional technology, helping other profs learn the new learning management system (the software that runs things like gradebooks and online discussion forums, similar to Blackboard). It’s great work, helping people out with something they really appreciate.

In the process I’ve noticed something. It’s a cliché that people my age and younger – Gen Y and late Gen X – are more comfortable with computer technology than people of older generations, the boomers and early Xers, since we grew up with it and they didn’t. That’s been my experience on the job so far; I’ve been effective at this work because I pick up tech skills more quickly than the other professors, most of whom are older than me.

But I also notice they have something I don’t. When I show them the system’s capabilities, they’re impressed and delighted. They really appreciate how this software can make their teaching careers easier. But me, when I first started learning the software, I first noticed its gaps, the things it can’t do but should. (“You’re kidding! This piece of crap doesn’t have any way to separate out two sections of the same course?”) I’m finding myself a little envious of their gratitude, their ability to appreciate technology. I worry that I’m on a technological hedonic treadmill: I’m surrounded by so much technology that my expectations are higher, and it doesn’t make me any happier to have it.

Ah, the jaded cynicism of youth, and the wide-eyed wonder of the years. David Wedaman, an instructional technology specialist at Brandeis, said a little while ago on Twitter: “Augmented reality is about as amazing as anything I can think of. I think I’m getting old.” If he is, I think he’s lucky.

Stanley Fish, self-proclaimed “contemporary sophist,” recently weighed in on the “religion and science” question in the New York Times. For him, the chief problem we have in this area is that we’re too bothered by contradictions: “The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.”

As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.

More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. (continue reading…)

Found an interesting news article from last fall in the Manchester Guardian: British employers, a judge has ruled, are forbidden from discriminating against employees because of their environmental convictions. The case in brief: employers at London’s Grainger real-estate company mocked one employee’s devotion to remedying climate change, even taking steps to provoke him – in one case ordering him to fly to Ireland just to deliver a BlackBerry his boss had left behind. Eventually, he was fired – and a judge says he has a case. The relevant 2003 British labour law, indeed, is worded to prohibit discrimination and harassment on the grounds of “religion or belief.”

Generally, such a law strikes me as overdue. I’ve long been uncomfortable with the idea of giving legal protection only to “religious” convictions, for the idea of “religion” so often tends to obscure more than it clarifies. Aside from the obvious difficulties in classification (does the term “religion” apply to yoga exercises? To meditation? To brushing our teeth?), the term leads us to ask the less important questions, about differences between traditions rather than within them. For these intellectual reasons I suspect it’s a category we’d be better off without, if we could be.

But here the problems with “religion” are more than intellectual. On what reasonable grounds can we proclaim that this man’s refusal to fly on frivolous grounds is less serious, less important, less well considered than, say, a Jew’s refusal to eat pork? I disagree with politically activist views that see commitment to environmental or social causes as our fundamental moral duty; but then I disagree with much of the Qur’an’s moral teaching as well. Anti-discrimination laws are specifically designed to protect those with whom we disagree. Either the law should protect all deeply and sincerely held beliefs, irrespective of their “religious” status, or it should protect no such beliefs at all.

(No post this Sunday, as I’ll be out of town, as well as starting a new semester.)

Great article by Ethan Watters in the New York Times last Friday, called The Americanization of Mental Illness, which deals with questions at the heart of cross-cultural philosophy. (Watters also has a book on the subject coming out, and a blog.) The article notes how “mental illness” remains a category far more culture-bound than psychological studies are typically willing to admit. The DSM, American psychologists’ scripture, has a seven-page appendix (pp. 897-903 in the DSM-IV-TR edition) for “culture-bound disorders,” such as amok (a condition in Malaysia where men get violently aggressive and then have amnesia) or pibloktoq (an Inuit condition involving a short burst of extreme excitement followed by seizures and coma). It’s telling that few of the disorders in this section are culture-bound to the United States; and those which are, are quite telling: “ghost sickness” is “frequently observed among members of many American Indian tribes”; locura, nervios and susto are found among Latinos; sangue dormido is found among Cape Verde Islanders and their immigrants to the US; “rootwork” and “spell” are “seen among African Americans and European Americans from the southern United States.” That is, the only “culture-bound disorders” to be found among white Americans are found among those weird Southern hillbillies who live beside black people. Normal white Americans, the kind who live in Cambridge, MA or in Manhattan, don’t get “culture-bound disorders.” Their disorders are just part of the universal human condition.
(continue reading…)

I’ve often heard it said, rightly I think, that Buddhism cannot do without a concept of karma; it is too central to Buddhist thought. I don’t see this as a big problem in itself, even for those (like myself) who would wish to do without the supernatural elements in Buddhism. For karma, as Dale Wright has proposed, can be naturalized on Aristotelian grounds: virtue makes our lives better, because it makes us happier on the inside. In that sense, our good and bad actions come back to us as good and bad results, without any supernatural causation being involved. Buddhism may require karma, but we can have karma without rebirth.

The question troubling me now is: can we have Buddhism without rebirth? There’s a basic problem posed here by the First Noble Truth, the classic Buddhist idea that all is dukkha: all is suffering, painful, unsatisfactory, sorrowful, bad. If this is so, why not commit suicide? For a classical Buddhist, rebirth is the answer to this question, and the obvious answer. Suicide makes your dukkha even worse; as a bad, un-dharmic activity, it will trap you in a far worse rebirth, leave you far more sorrowful and suffering than you are.

But if there is no rebirth? Then death starts to look disturbingly like nirvana. (continue reading…)