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.

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.

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. Not all of what follows is said directly in Doull’s work, but it is inspired by it, and I think it is faithful to his spirit based on conversations with Doullian friends.

I’ve seen the point now particularly with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes, which Doull refers to and which I recently taught in my intro religion class at Stonehill. Ecclesiastes paints a picture of the world that differs greatly from more familiar books of the Hebrew Bible. The very message of the book of Exodus, for example, seems to be that God acts in history, that his presence in our lives is real and palpable, working his miracle everywhere one turns, bringing about cosmic justice for his chosen people if not others. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, gives us a remote and distant God, in a world where the wicked triumph and the unjust perish. There isn’t even an afterlife for the expectation of justice; all the dead go to sheol, “the grave” where they know nothing. It’s a moving text, and one which seems to fit the experience of our post-Darwinian age where God’s very existence seems questionable at best.

And yet. In the midst of this God-bereft world, where there is no justice and no reward for virtue, Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us: “fear God and keep his commandments.” It seems, in its way, to be the paradigm of ethical externalism. One wants to ask: why? No reward awaits us for keeping God’s commandments, in this world or the next. And the approach to knowledge, if relatively untheorized, is similarly externalist: the truth is out there in God, whether we know it or not.

A couple centuries before this, Doull notes, the Sophists had innovated by presenting the opposite, internalist, position. Man is the measure of all things; everything, ethical and epistemological, is up to us. But this view runs into the problems I have addressed in recent posts about truth and contradiction. If we have no standards beyond our existing motivations, we have no grounds on which to change others’ behaviour, or our own.

For Doull, it is Aristotle who first resolves this problem, above all in the theory of eudaimonia – a human flourishing constituted by both virtue and happiness. But Doull agrees with the points Alasdair MacIntyre regularly makes about Aristotle – that this flourishing was embedded in the political context of the Greek polis, a community formed around shared ethical standards and practices. When the polis degenerated into a large and impersonal empire, virtue could no longer count on reward; so virtue and happiness became separated in the Stoics and Epicureans, who would define happiness entirely in terms of virtue (the Stoics) or vice versa (the Epicureans). But for both of them, as for Aristotle, internalism and externalism (in the sense of my previous post) remain united: our own motivations and the absolute ethical principle end up taking us to the same place. They could make this move because, unlike Aristotle, they dismissed the importance of external goods: our internal states were all that mattered. Sure, virtue doesn’t get you a public reward, but it gets you the internal state of undisturbed peace.

But the Stoics and Epicureans are in tension not only with each other – is virtue or happiness really the more important one? – but with the world itself. Our virtue is often lacking in spite of our best efforts of will, not enough to make us really happy; and some virtues (like friendship) seem constituted by external conditions that make them possible. This is part of the criticism that Martha Nussbaum has recently made of these Hellenistic thinkers, on quasi-Aristotelian grounds; but historically, the figure who made the point stick, on quite different grounds, was (Saint) Augustine – with help from the Jewish worldview that gave rise to Ecclesiastes.

Augustine accepts what seems like the commonsense view that virtue and happiness are not analytically equivalent. He notes that in this world, so full of suffering and misfortune, virtue is not rewarded with happiness; but further, neither real virtue nor real happiness can be adequately reached in this world, where humans are frail enough that they fall far short of the virtue and happiness they seek. Augustine’s solution is to put it all off into the next world, a world for which we can hope after death.

I haven’t yet been able to follow Doull’s story past this point. Which is something of a shame, for there’s an obvious problem with the resolution in Augustine’s time: we have no more evidence to believe in an afterlife of reward than we have to believe the virtuous are rewarded in this life. Wishful thinking is not an adequate basis on which to build a life. Neither is Pascal’s Wager, the argument that we should believe in God and follow his law just in case there is an afterlife; for it could just as easily be that the afterlife rewards vice. (MacIntyre in God, Philosophy, Universities goes so far as to say he doesn’t think Pascal himself believed the wager was a good argument.)

What appeals to me in all of this is a spirit that, in at least one respect, seems the opposite of analytic philosophy as normally practised. One could call Doull’s work synthetic philosophy: rather than cutting ideas up into ever smaller pieces, he puts them together. It’s an approach that I suspect leads ultimately to conclusions that are both truer and more satisfying. This isn’t to bash analytic philosophy or say there’s no place for it; but I do welcome a view that takes this larger scope.

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. To Marx opium was a painkiller, pure and simple, with addiction a possible but unusual side effect – a status somewhere between today’s Tylenol and Vicodin. (A friend once suggested we translate Marx’s phrase as “Religion is the Tylenol-3 of the masses.”)

This point about opium is supported by the wider context of Marx’s quote: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” If religion is an evil here, it is a necessary evil – important to alleviate the pain that arises from living in class-stratified societies. Marx sent a copy of the text containing this quote to Ludwig Feuerbach, the Young Hegelian philosopher famous for urging the superseding of Christianity by atheism. Marx chided Feuerbach (who was far more sympathetic to “religion” than were Dawkins and Hitchens!) for thinking he could make religion go away that easily: it would never disappear until the suffering produced by human material conditions also went away. And so Marx continues:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo. (translation in Tucker, The Marx-Engels reader, p. 54; emphases in original)

Here as in so many other cases, Marx’s ideas were distorted beyond recognition by the 20th-century régimes that attempted to put them into practice. But once we understand what Marx’s ideas actually were, the next question is: was he right?

Here, I would likely make a Buddhist extension and critique of Marx. Yes, much of what we call “religion” can be viewed as a painkiller, something that helps us kill our pain, our suffering. But that suffering doesn’t come primarily from living in exploitative class societies, whether capitalist or pre-capitalist. It comes from being human beings. Imagine the classless society as best you can – wave a magic wand to transform this world into one where everyone is equal, envision hundreds of years’ worth of reflection and gradual transformation, whatever – and you will still end up with a world where people get frustrated, get angry, grow sick, and die.

The traditional biography of the Buddha tells us that he was raised in the sumptuous life of a prince, never leaving the palace, never seeing any suffering – until the very first time he left the palace, whereupon he saw a sick man, an old man and a corpse. And he realized that, no matter what the material conditions of his life, someday these too would be his fate. What cheered him up was the fourth sight he saw: a monk, looking for the way out of the suffering of this world.

I sometimes think of Marx’s thought as leaving us in the Buddha’s family palace, hoping that changes in our material conditions will alleviate our suffering. For Marx, religion is a temporary painkiller that we must take until we get a better world that doesn’t require it. For the Buddha, we live our lives in chronic pain, and this pain that can only be ended by the dharma. I think his vision is more profound and more accurate. Our pain will not be ended by changing the world, only by changing ourselves.

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. The suttas are cagey about describing nibb?na; they’re more ready to say what it is not, and it is not like the sorrowful existence we face in worldly sa?s?ra. Etymologically, the Pali or Sanskrit word connotes “extinguishing,” like blowing out a candle. When they do venture to characterize nirvana the suttas identify it as peaceful, tranquil, undisturbed. And in those same suttas, while one can attain nirvana in life, the death of a person who has attained nirvana is spoken of as the highest nirvana, parinibb?na. The cycle of sa?s?ra and rebirth, on the other hand, is characterized as a weary, sorrowful place from which we would do well to escape if only we could. Seen in this light, an anti-supernatural worldview turns out to be oddly good and hopeful news: we don’t have to go through all the rigours of the Buddhist path to find the end of suffering. We merely have to die.

But if all this is so, the logical consequence seems to be one that would make most Buddhists, and everyone else, uneasy: we should end it all, quickly, with a suicide.

At least, that would seem to be the consequence for Therav?da tradition, in which our own liberation from suffering is paramount. But the consequences for Mah?y?na would seem even grimmer. True, without rebirth, the Mah?y?nist needs to prolong her own life in order to save others from suffering. But how can one best end others’ suffering? One might easily provide the answer: kill them. Universal euthanasia. One avoids suicide so that one can kill others. The conclusion is not as far-fetched as one might wish it were: Wilhelm Halbfass in Tradition and Reflection notes that classical Indian sources refer to a group called the Sa?s?ramocakas, who were said to practise compassionate murder in order to liberate others from suffering. But if we are led to the Sa?s?ramocakas’ position, we have at least prima facie reason to think something has gone seriously wrong, somewhere, with our reasoning.

I don’t think one can get out of this problem through a deeper examination of the concept of dukkha and its classification. True, the suttas tell us that there are three kinds of dukkha: basic dukkha (dukkhadukkha), dukkha from change (vipari??madukkha), and dukkha from conditions (sa?kh?radukkha). I’ve seen some people try and look to this distinction as a solution: for example, this essay by Omar Moad at the British magazine The Philosopher.

Only basic dukkha is obviously, visibly, immediately painful or sorrowful, and not everything is basic dukkha, it can be the other kinds. But the thing is, the other two are painful and sorrowful as well – we just don’t see it. All three are undeniably bad, and everything is composed of them. And contrary to Moad’s article, even dukkha from conditions, sa?kh?radukkha, does not merely arise from a limited perspective; it is part of the conditioned nature of things. As Moad notes, for those who have attained proper insight, “even the most blissful existence as a deva in one of the Buddhist Heavens would seem to be a miserable Hell.” Buddhists can remain optimistic in that there is a way out of all this – but that way involves transcending it all. And if rebirth is no longer an issue, one way to transcend it would be through suicide – or murder, if one is being altruistic.

Is there a way out of the problem? I can see two. The most straightforward approach, which I have previously taken, is to deny the First Noble Truth: life is good. But in saying this, one denies a great deal of Buddhist tradition, at least as much as one would do by denying karma. A more Buddhist approach would be to take N?g?rjuna’s M?dhyamika lead and say nirvana is merely sa?s?ra properly viewed, so that the life of the bodhisattva is in fact blissful, much better than mere extinguishing. But if that’s true, then if we were to somehow know that someone will not become a bodhisattva, then would it not seem that that person is better off dead?

Such practice seems at first to involve the kind of thing we might normally count as “religion”: meditation, prayer, ritual. But it seems to me that there’s another thinker, not religious except in the broadest stretching of the word, whose worldview also counts as chastened intellectualism: namely, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s message, it seems to me, is very similar to Augustine’s and Xunzi’s: the ego is not the master of its own house. To be saved from oneself, one needs some understanding of the textual learning that Freud saw himself as beginning; but simply reading Freud isn’t going to be enough to understand yourself. Our repression, our defences, are too strong. You need to engage in the practice of therapy (or analysis) at someone else’s guidance.

I tend to suspect that a chastened intellectualist view of humans is correct. I rather wish it weren’t, because its conclusions never seem pleasant. Augustine slams the very idea of human flourishing – because we are weak we cannot live a good life in this world, only in the next. Freud says a very similar thing – but denies that there is a better world to come. All we can do is be slightly less neurotic. Of the three, it’s Xunzi who seems to allow that a life in this world could be good – but only if restrained by the kind of hierarchies that would now seem tyrannical to us.

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

Now, I am no parent, and (as I’ve noted before) have no plans to be one; so my reflections here are not grounded in personal experience, and I urge parents and potential parents to take them with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, childrearing is a central part of life for most people, and our approach to it tells us a lot about what we value, so I don’t expect this to be the last time I dip my toes into these particular muddy waters.

The first of these objections appears the most radical. It would seem to suggest that telling stories is a form of lying or deception. Such a view is hardly without philosophical precedent; we can recall Plato banishing the poets from the ideal city. But in Plato’s work this is clearly understood to be a radical approach, of a piece with his other radical ideas about childrearing (especially, that children should be raised in common rather than by famillies). Do we really want to raise children without stories, without fictions – at least, without fictions that are clearly marked as such? One can tell children stories they will understand, long before they understand the difference between myth and reality. Is this a lie? Perhaps, but one shudders before the implications of an account of truth so unflinching and demanding that it requires all children’s stories be clearly marked as false and fictional. The worldview at issue sounds rather like Dickens’s unsympathetic Mr. Gradgrind; the burden of proof would seem to be on whoever would count such a cold way of life admirable.

White’s second objection is close to my heart, since I’m enthusiastic about Buddhist critiques of wealth. The objection would seem to apply not merely to the Santa myth, but to Christmas gift-giving in general: we will make our children better and happier people if we don’t train them to value material goods. While I’m sympathetic to the position, the advice seems to overestimate the influence that single decisions can have on a child’s emotional development. If a parent withholds Christmas gifts and gives a child only the bare necessities, will that teach the child Buddhist/Epicurean moderation, or will it teach the reverse? My empirically uninformed money is on the latter: a child raised in relative poverty will crave possessions far more, because she will not have had the opportunity to learn the fleeting nature of wealth’s pleasures (let alone the hedonic treadmill they might put you on). I suspect this is a reason the historical Buddha was (said to be) a prince: we do better to find out for ourselves that wealth is inessential (or worse) for our happiness and well-being.

The third objection is very Rawlsian, in a way particularly close to the heart of the young Rawls but in keeping with Rawls’s mature work as well: we deserve nothing, our station in life is determined primarily by external factors. Now while the point seems largely true to me on a macro level, it seems like it does not need to be true at a micro level. Within the household, parents are quite capable of setting up an environment in which children are rewarded with material goods for acting well. (It would seem important, however, that the parents follow through with such rewards and the denial of the rewards, holding them back when children have been genuinely “naughty”; if they’re not prepared to do so, it may not be appropriate to spread the Santa myth.) I think here of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of goods internal and external to practices, an account which is also central to his more general account of virtue (at least in After Virtue). It is no coincidence that he introduces the distinction with a discussion of childrearing: specifically, how to teach an intelligent child to play chess when he or she does not want to play. At first, one offers the child some candy if she wins, and then her motivation is always to win, so that the child will cheat if she can.

But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands. Now if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself. (After Virtue, p. 188)

Chess, for MacIntyre, is one example of a social practice, and virtues are those qualities that allow us to achieve goods internal to practices – such as the good of enjoying the challenge of chess, for its own sake. One teaches children to be virtuous first through external motivation, such as candy, in the hope and expectation that soon they will discover motivation internal to the practice. It strikes me as entirely reasonable to see Santa as analogous to the chess-player’s candy: he is the external motivator for virtue, who we expect will give way to internal motivation as the child matures.

In short, I don’t think White’s objections to Santa are compelling individually or collectively. Nonetheless, it’s a thought-provoking short piece, exactly the sort of challenge to social convention that philosophical reflection should provoke us to from time to time.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy:

• Asceticism: probably the most common answer in Indian philosophy, this is the favourite answer of the historical Buddha, and many traditions both before him (early Jainism) and after him (the Yoga S?tras, Advaita Ved?nta). It became highly popular in Christianity too, with its monastic traditions and suspicion of worldly desires. Everyday life is suffering, a suffering caused by our everyday desires, which arise from our ignorance of the true good. We need to take ourselves out of that everyday mode of life, to a higher and better way that disciplines those desires – renounce the everyday world, take up the chastity and poverty of a monk. Asceticism usually takes up a metaphysics in which the world as we know it is in some sense unreal, or a poor reflection of a higher reality.
• Traditionalism: probably the most popular answer in the history of philosophy, because it tends to accept “common sense,” unlike the other two which make a radical critique of our everyday views. It’s probably argued for most explicitly by Confucius and Hegel, though it’s implicit in oral traditions that preserve older ways of life, such as dharma??stra. Here the best life accepts time-tested practices and social conventions, passed down to us by our ancestors. We should start a family and raise children, as our parents did for us; we should do the work that they did, or work that preserves and contributes to the social structures that took so many centuries of others’ effort to build. Epistemologically we want to “save the appearances,” as Aristotle put it: our knowledge starts where it is, and intellectual innovations need above all to make sense of that starting point. In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, traditionalism is likely to take an intimacy orientation, whereas the other two lean toward integrity.
• Libertinism: an answer increasingly implicit in modern forms of life. Premoderns who expressed this view (Mozi, Aristippus the Cyrenaic, the C?rv?ka-Lok?yata school) usually didn’t stick around for too long; but it has become more and more widespread in the modern era, especially now among the urban educated classes. The view finds its classic expression in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism: the good is pleasure, full stop, and the best life is one that increases that pleasure. That utilitarians seek to increase others’ pleasure and not merely their own is just a variation within libertinism, as the other-oriented Mah?y?na Buddhists are a variation within asceticism. While Nietzsche scorned pleasure-seeking as such, his emphasis on the aesthetics of life is strong enough to give him close affinities with this position. Libertinism typically relies on an empiricist metaphysics like that of Hume, one which often denies that it is a metaphysics: neither a higher reality nor commonsense tradition is to be trusted. True knowledge is to be found only through our senses – and our senses tell us that pleasure is good and pain is bad.

One frequently finds these positions combined, of course. Classical Christian thought puts together a Jewish traditionalism (affirming the goodness of God’s created order) with a Platonic asceticism (suspecting the goodness of this world in favour of a world to come) – leaning much closer to the asceticism in Augustine and to the traditionalism in Aquinas’s natural law. (The Bhagavad G?t? also combines those two: be a traditionalist on the outside and an ascetic on the inside.) Libertinism has become common enough in the modern age that our common sense tends to mix libertinism and traditionalism, especially in an other-oriented way: left-wing politics is typically about allowing others to seek pleasure as well as maintain their work and family. And asceticism mixes with libertinism above all in Epicurus and his school, who believed that pleasure was the only good – but that the way to get the most pleasure is by isolating oneself in an ascetic community without being pulled around by one’s desires.

I find myself tossing around this categorization a lot because I find some appeal in all three. Practically speaking, libertinism comes very naturally to me, and I do find the goodness of pleasure quite apparent; it is probably the closest to the way of life I have chosen and am choosing. Asceticism also holds a strong appeal to me, especially in Epicurus’s terms: our desires often lead us astray and make us miserable, and we need to find ways to control them. I have decided against the monastic life, but I respect it greatly and note the happiness of those who follow it. By contrast, I’ve usually been suspicious of traditionalism as a practical philosophy, which has seemed like it may be mere self-deception. And yet in theoretical terms, I find myself being most persuaded by traditionalism and its epistemological conservatism, which seems like the best way to take account of the many partial truths offered by different traditions. I suppose all of this is just to say how hopelessly confused my own philosophy feels at the moment, but I hope these reflections are of some value to others who are trying to think life through as well.

Apologies for the giant mess of tags and categories on this post – it seems necessary for such an attempt at a broad generalization over the history of philosophy.

Simply imagine what would happen if we indeed said that modern physics support mysticism. What happens, for example, if we say that today’s physics is in perfect agreement with Buddha’s enlightenment? What happens when tomorrow’s physics supplants or replaces today’s physics (which it most definitely will)? Does poor Buddha then lose his enlightenment? You see the problem. If you hook your God to today’s physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it. (from Grace and Grit, p. 20)

Gould’s claim would be a great way of resolving the conflicts between science and religion – if it were true. The problem is that it isn’t. A rigid separation between fact and value cannot be rationally sustained, and rare is the “religious” person who tries to do so. Gould approvingly cites encyclicals from Pius XII and John Paul II allowing Catholics to believe in evolution; but they don’t do so on the grounds of a fact-value distinction. The popes say we may believe in the evolution of the body as long as we also believe those bodies have souls; but the existence of souls, if true, would be a fact. It is a fact imbued with moral meaning – but so are the existence of grinding poverty, the development of a fetus, and the heritability of homosexual orientation.

Other “religions” are similarly concerned with questions of fact. Much of Buddhism is composed of psychological hypotheses about the nature and origins of human suffering. If we can disprove empirically that suffering is caused by craving, then we have effectively disproved Buddhism. Wilber is right to see that if we tie our “religious” claims to scientific ones, then they become far more tentative, far less a source of certainty; but that’s just in the nature of knowledge itself. People have disagreed on matters “religious” since time immemorial. (The soul that’s so essential for the Popes is explicitly and directly denied by the Buddha of the Pali suttas.) Science does offer ways of resolving some of those disputes, for those inclined to listen. To refuse to tie your beliefs to experimental evidence, for fear that they might be disproven, is to refuse to allow your beliefs to be true.

It’s not just that “religion” deals in matters of fact. It’s also that science deals in matters of value. I’ve previously discussed the way in which health is itself a value, and medical science is inescapably normative in prescribing the healthy functioning of human beings. The point applies even to biomedical science with no explicit psychological component, but it goes double for psychology and neurology, which cannot help but deal with questions of happiness, virtue and vice.

The NOMA idea only has a chance of making sense if we separate questions of value out into an a priori realm completely detached from the physical world – as Kant tried to do, for example. But it’s an inordinately difficult task to try and derive a full set of answers to questions of value without reference to the physical world, and I don’t think that even Kant managed to succeed at it. Even when asking questions of ethics and meaning, we need evidence from the physical world. And that means that, indeed, science may disprove matters like the Buddha’s enlightenment – not causing him to lose it, but demonstrating that he never had it in the first place. The point is all the more reason to embrace some degree of uncertainty; new connections in the physical world are likely to be discovered, in ways that change things we thought we knew for sure. I’ve previously noted the difficulty with attempts at certain knowledge. Since writing that post, I’ve become a little more confident in saying we can never truly have certain knowledge – but, of course, I have not become certain.

Turns out it wasn’t always so. The title of Rawls’s thesis would have appeared a little drab at the time, but it’s striking to those who have read Rawls’s later philosophy. While the thesis deals heavily with questions of community and interpersonal relations, it says very little about Rawls’s later concern for the organization of the state. And soon after he wrote it, Rawls would go off to fight in World War II, and the horrors he saw would turn him agnostic. But what’s far more striking in the thesis is the continuity between the old (devout, pious) Rawls and the new (secular, political) Rawls. For my part, I have previously thought of Rawls as a philosophical foe – associating him with the utilitarianism that I rejected – and the thesis confirms to me that, in the most important respects, Rawls was thinking in all the wrong directions.

Fundamental to the thesis is a rejection of Greek philosophical thought from Plato and Aristotle onwards. In a line of Christian thinkers going back at least to Tertullian, Rawls rejects the influence the Greeks have had on Christianity from Augustine onward. Why? Because Greek thought is what Rawls eccentrically calls “naturalistic”: it asks what the good life is for humans, what humans do desire and what they should desire. But for Rawls all desire is part of the problem. We cannot see God as truly ultimate if our relation to him is one of desire – as it is in Augustine’s longing for God, let alone in the erotic longings of medieval women mystics like Teresa of Ávila. Augustine sees the heavenly life as the best life – and that’s the problem. We shouldn’t be thinking about the best life for ourselves, or even for others. We should be thinking about God as a person who is not an object of our desire at all. Ironically, Rawls’ later exclusion of religion (as “comprehensive conceptions of the good”) has its precedent in his own Christian views. Things would have been very different had Rawls been a Buddhist, in a tradition where so much is founded on our desire to end suffering.

Rawls does not argue for Christianity itself, taking it merely as a given starting point – and thereby anticipating his later attempt to debate politics without allowing religious debate to enter into it. Rawls never seemed to want to talk about religious foundations, early or late in life, even though the middle of his life had given him reason to change the roots of his own convictions from Christian to agnostic.

But the connection that strikes me most between the young Rawls and the mature Rawls is the opposition to ideas of merit or desert. Along with the Greeks’ striving for the desired good (eudaimonia), the later Rawls rejects Aristotle’s idea that social goods should go to the most deserving. In the early Rawls, this idea takes on a theological underpinning. He passionately rejects the Catholic doctrine of merit, which states that good works receive supernatural award. (This is why you will sometimes see the Buddhist terms pu?ya and p?pa, “good karma” and “bad karma” respectively, translated as “merit” and “demerit.”) Rawls rejects merit with a passionate fire rarely found in his later, more analytical writing:

The human person, once perceiving that the Revelation of the Word is a condemnation of the self, casts away all thoughts of his own merit. He sees that the givenness of God is everywhere prevenient, and that he possesses nothing that has not been given. He knows that what he has received has been given by some “other,” and that ultimately all good things are gifts of God. Therefore in the face of this givenness of God, in the face of His perfect and righteous mercy, he knows that he has no merit. Never again can he hope to boast of his good deeds, of his skill, of his prowess, for he knows that they are gifts.

The more he examines his life, the more he looks into himself with complete honesty, the more clearly he perceives that what he has is a gift. Suppose he was an upright man in the eyes of society, then he will now say to himself: “So you were an educated man, yes, but who paid for your education; so you were a good man and upright, yes, but who taught you your good maners and so provided you with good fortune that you did not need to steal; so you were a man of a loving disposition and not like the hard-hearted, yes, but who raised you in a good family, who showed you care and affection when you were young so that you would grow up to appreciate kindness — must you not admit that what you have, you have received? Then be thankful and cease your boasting.” Thus there is no man so upright that the Word of God beside his goodness will not condemn. There is no goodness that beside God’s goodness does not become a “filthy rag.” (239-40)

Rawls here deals with a point I discuss in my dissertation: the partial dependence of virtue on external goods. Martha Nussbaum criticizes the Stoics for distinguishing between virtue, internal to ourselves, and external goods that we cannot control, saying that only the first matters; I argue that this is a point ??ntideva would concede, that our virtues have causes outside ourselves. (He could hardly say otherwise, given his rejection of free will.) The question is, what do we do with this point? Rawls, in his earlier and later phases, effectively takes it as a reason to leave virtue aside entirely, in favour of divine grace or social institutions. In my view, against Rawls, virtue is a crucial component of the human good – and the human good, for ourselves and for others, is what it is most important for us to focus our attentions on.

Nevertheless, there’s a valuable cautionary point in this passage of the early Rawls, one I agree with. Our virtue is not ours alone, in that there are causal conditions that make it possible. It is something we should be thankful for. Other virtues make a pyrrhic victory if they take us to arrogance and away from humility; they are lacking without the gratitude for the things that makes them possible. Here the early Rawls can do us a service by making us more virtuous – despite himself.