One can always argue the details of this textual question in any given case. In Śāntideva’s case it’s not only a matter of arguing whether “his” two major works (the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Śikṣā Samuccaya) were written by the same person; it’s also the fact that these texts may themselves be the work of multiple writers, in that there’s an early version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (the “Dunhuang recension”) which differs from the received version known to tradition. But there’s an issue here much bigger than the interpretation of any one thinker: should one even try to find the coherent views of an individual author?

Gyatso greatly admired the works of Jacques Derrida, who threw doubt on the idea of authorship, and often focused on the “margins” of texts in order to highlight inconsistencies and ways in which the texts break down. Her course on Buddhist philosophy highlighted parallels between the work of Derrida and of Nāgārjuna. In some respects it’s not hard to see why: Derrida questions the idea of the subject or self, as most Buddhist thinkers do. If the self is unreal, as so many Buddhist thinkers have said, then so is the author. Thus perhaps Śāntideva’s disavowal of his own originality and profundity at the beginning of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. (I have tended to insist that the difference between Derrida and Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy is that Madhyamaka has a point. But that’s a topic for another time.)

It does help, I think, to be careful with questions of authorship – to think carefully about what one means when one speaks of “Śāntideva” (or “Plato”), when the texts come to us from such questionable sources. But I also think it’s all too easy to take the point too far. When one discards the search for coherence entirely, one discards most of one’s ability to learn from the texts one reads.

From the first draft of my proposal to the final draft of my dissertation, my research was guided by this quote from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. (from p. xii of his The Essential Tension)

Significant words here include “important thinker” and “sensible person.” You might find plenty of contradictions or other absurdities in the ramblings of an everyday, average person. But the writers of great works like the Bodhicaryāvatāra put a lot of thought into those works, and their value has repeatedly been discovered anew by thinkers in the generations that follow them. They’re not going to drop random inconsistencies into their work and just think “oh, that’s okay.” If there are contradictions, they’re going to be there for a good reason; at the very least, contradictions need to be explained.

It was this method of looking for coherence that allowed me to find what I think is the most innovative and important part of my dissertation’s interpretation of Śāntideva: the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I was looking at the combination of Śāntideva’s advice that material goods are harmful, and the fact that he urges one to give those gifts to others for their own benefit. Was there a way these two ideas could go together without contradicting each other? Sure enough, there was – you just had to get rid of the idea, which seems like common sense to us but not to Śāntideva, that the purpose of gift-giving is to ensure that the recipient possesses the gift. I could have shrugged my shoulders and said “well, this is a composite text, of course it contradicts itself.” But if I had, if I hadn’t taken contradiction in the important thinker as a problem, I wouldn’t have seen what I came to see.

As far as I know, it was just such an approach that led Kuhn to write his most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a physicist, Kuhn was trying to read Aristotle’s Physics, and found it full of what appeared to be unpardonable errors in logic and observation. Just from looking at the world around him, Aristotle should have known better. Now Kuhn could easily have said “well, we all contradict ourselves and make dumb mistakes; why should we expect better of Aristotle?” But he didn’t. He did expect better from the thinker whose works had been taken as canonical for a thousand years, and rightly so. Once he did, it fell into place: Aristotle was asking entirely different questions, for different purposes, from the questions a Newtonian physicist would ask. Aristotle’s work would make perfect sense if one’s underlying assumptions changed.

More broadly, I think, it’s this search for coherence in the great and admired minds of the past that leads us to find genuinely new insights, ones that change our current perspective. In constructive study, where one seeks to learn from a tradition and not merely about it, there is always the danger that one will only find what one was already looking for – pick out the ideas one already agrees with, and not be challenged by them. One of the best ways to avoid this, to learn something genuinely new, is to focus on those “apparent absurdities,” the things that don’t make sense, and ask how somebody intelligent could have believed them. One might not come to believe in the thing one thought was absurd; but one will likely come to see the world in a new way that will challenge other ideas.

In the prologue to The Sources of Normativity, probably her most important and influential work, Korsgaard provides what she calls a “very concise history” (her emphasis) of the connections between metaphysics and ethics in Western philosophy. I noted recently that the concept of obligation is central to Korsgaard’s philosophy, as it is to Lévinas’s; this prologue provides us with historical reasons why an obligation-centred philosophy might be a worthwhile project.

Plato and Aristotle, Korsgaard notes, had a philosophy focused on excellence (aretē, often translated “virtue”) rather than obligation, as do most of those who today reject Kantian and utilitarian ethics and are therefore usually lumped into the catch-all category of “virtue ethics.” Their ethics had much more to do more with what is good, what we should care about, than with what others oblige us to do. But, Korsgaard adds, in Plato and Aristotle this account depends on metaphysics, on a view of the way things really are. For them, a thing’s highest perfection and potential – its form – was in some sense more real than the existing particular thing as it actually is.

Korsgaard correctly notes that Christianity changed Western philosophy’s emphasis, away from excellence and toward obligation and law, with God as the lawgiver. But what if we no longer assume that God is the source of ethics? What we cannot do, she says, is go back to Plato and Aristotle’s world of excellence. “Because for us, the world is no longer first and foremost form. It is matter.” (4) By identifying ultimate reality with matter, we have separated the real from the good; we no longer look at actual things as reflecting a higher and better potential. And this means that a Platonic or Aristotelian ethics of excellence is no longer available to us.

What Korsgaard does not say, however, is that this new, hard, scientific world is entirely bereft of value. Indeed, she sees that it cannot be. (Although she does not put it in these terms, science’s claims to truth are themselves grounded in value.) She says:

If the real and the good are no longer one, value must find its way into the world somehow. Form must be imposed on the world of matter. This is the work of art, the work of obligation, and it brings us back to Kant. And this is what we should expect. For it was Kant who completed the revolution, when he said that reason — which is form — isn’t in the world, but is something that we impose upon it. The ethics of autonomy is the only one consistent with the metaphysics of the modern world, and the ethics of autonomy is an ethics of obligation. (5)

Now I think there is something very wrong with this paragraph. Korsgaard has accepted that value has a real place in the world, even the world of a modern scientific metaphysics; and she then claims that value’s place in the world is one of obligation (as opposed, by implication, to excellence). The next parts of the book flesh out her account of the ethics of obligation, but let us leave that aside for the moment. Let us assume for now that Korsgaard, in the rest of the book, succeeds in founding ethics on obligation. Isn’t there still something missing?

Korsgaard’s account of value, as provided here, derives that value only from obligation. If her account in the rest of the book were correct, it might be the case that all moral value comes from obligation. But is that the only kind of value in the world? Korsgaard never tries to argue that, and it’s hard to see how she could. She opens the prologue by saying: “It is the most striking fact about human life that we have values. We think of ways that things could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than they are; and of ways that we ourselves could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than we are.” (1) But things are not obliged to do or be anything, certainly not on any Kantian account of morality. Indeed if one were to imagine obligation being applied to things, it would likely have to be on something like the Greek teleological metaphysics that Korsgaard explicitly rejects: it is the purpose of a knife to cut well, therefore it is that knife’s duty to cut well.

There is, then, a yawning gap in Korsgaard’s historical account of value, even if we take her account of morality and obligation to be true. At a minimum, this ethics must be accompanied by an aesthetics. Some accounts of ethics – including those I’m most sympathetic with – do not restrict their concern to morality in the strict sense, and might therefore include aesthetics, but this appears not to be the case with Korsgaard’s. And while Korsgaard’s quote above tantalizingly lists “the work of art” along with “the work of obligation” above, suggesting the importance of aesthetics, it seems on a fuller reading that this is only apparent: when she uses the word “art” elsewhere in this passage, she contrasts it with what is natural, and so appears to mean only “artifice,” the Xunzian point that we are not naturally good but need to work on it.

And so it seems that aesthetics, at least, is missing from Korsgaard’s account. Just as we need an account of how people’s actions can be right and wrong, so we need an account of how things can be beautiful and ugly. Kant did not have this problem since he had a highly developed aesthetics, but it is not clear whether Korsgaard buys it. But it would seem, on Korsgaard’s account, that one must either adopt something very much like Kant’s aesthetics (as she does with his ethics) or return in some respect to a semi-premodern metaphysical account that sees value in the world while still taking science into consideration – as Hegel tried to do, for example. If one takes this latter route with aesthetics, however, it would seem that one is compelled to do so with ethics too.

I recently noted the strong similarities between Korsgaard’s philosophy of obligation and that of Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas, in one of his better-known essays, tells us that “ethics is first philosophy” – and by “ethics” he means obligation. But, I’m told, Speculative Realist Graham Harman retorts that “aesthetics is first philosophy.” I’m wondering if issues like this are what Harman has in mind: we don’t just need an account of moral value, we need an account of value as such.

In his excellent post which quotes Harman to this effect, Skholiast adds a quote from Wittgenstein that “Ethics and aesthetics are one.” I’m not sure I would go that far; but it seems to me that there must be some sort of connection between the two, a connection that Korsgaard implies only to ignore. We could, I suppose, say that axiology is first philosophy – “axiology” meaning the study of value – though that phrase doesn’t sound nearly as cutting as either Lévinas’s or Harman’s.

Ethical egoism of some description – say, as advocated by Epicurus – is a perfectly respectable philosophical position. One can say that one’s reasons to benefit others are all ultimately based on benefit to oneself, if one’s own self-interest is rightly understood. Neither Paul has a great deal of sympathy for this position, as far as I can tell, but it is not what they take as a target for their attack.

Rather, they reserve their greatest ire for a position that derives other-orientation from ātmanism – or at least from nondualism. Though Śāntideva is the last to believe in an ātman, he, like Vivekānanda, nevertheless gets to altruism by deconstructing the self, saying the differences we perceive between selves are not ultimately real. Śaṅkara and Buddhaghosa would likewise have taken the first step and deconstructed the self, saying the different human selves we perceive are; but what they would not have done would have been to take this as a justification for altruism. As with Epicurus, our primary goal needs to be our own liberation from suffering. This conclusion, the Pauls take as logically acceptable, though they disagree with it.

But the next step that Śāntideva and Vivekānanda take and Śaṅkara and Buddhaghosa do not – to say that Epicurean egoism is not acceptable because the individual self it defends is unreal – is a step too far, in the Paul’s eyes. For by deconstructing egoism, they reason, Śāntideva and Vivekānanda also effectively deconstruct altruism. (Williams’s chapter is entitled “How Śāntideva destroyed the bodhisattva path”!) If there is no self, there can be no other about which to be concerned; nor can there even be suffering to be prevented.

But neither Paul says this because they wish to advocate an Epicurean egoism, to take us back to the egoistic nondualism of a Śaṅkara. They want us to be altruistic – but only on the right grounds, and these grounds are grounds of encounter. For there to be real altruism, there must be real others; and therefore altruism must come out of encounter and not out of ātmanism or nondualism.

And while up to now I’ve discussed this issue in the sectarian terms of Catholics attacking Buddhists, I think the distinction made here also shows up in contemporary analytical ethics. Derek Parfit has argued for altruism on grounds which even he identified as analogous Buddhist non-self – the self is not a real entity from moment to moment, and so we should not privilege it over others. Mark Siderits has recently taken up, at book length, the similarities between Parfit’s view and those of Buddhist thinkers like Śāntideva.

I used to think there were close similarities between Parfit’s (and Śāntideva’s) view and that of Christine Korsgaard, who – like them – argues that full-blown egoism is not rational. But the Catholic Pauls pushed me to see the differences between them. For Korsgaard criticizes egoism in a very different way, one that they could endorse.

Korsgaard, it turns out, does not deconstruct the ego itself – only egoism. The self, on her account, is quite real; but its reasons for action are not fundamentally egoistic. In everyday life, “We do not seem to need a reason to take the reasons of others into account. We seem to need a reason not to. Certainly we do things because others want us to, ask us to, tell us to, all the time…. We respond with the alacrity of obedient soldiers to telephones and doorbell and cries for help.” (The Sources of Normativity 140-1) Korsgaard tries to argue that reasons for action are public in their very nature; each individual’s reasons for acting are not separate from the reasons of other individuals. And one of the fundamental ways in which reasons apply to others is obligation, which comes out of respect for others’ humanity or personhood. If I am blithely torturing a stranger (Korsgaard’s example, derived from Thomas Nagel) and the stranger asks “How would you like it if I did that to you?” I can continue to torture the stranger, but not in the way I did before, for the stranger has now obligated me.

There are very strong echoes here – possibly uninentional – of Emmanuel Lévinas, the Jewish archetypical philosopher of obligation and encounter. Obligation is not a concept that shows up in Śāntideva – or, for that matter, in Aristotle. Korsgaard’s own introduction notes that it was the Christians – surely under the influence of Jewish law tradition – who began to move the mainstream of Western philosophy away from concepts of excellence (or virtue) and toward concepts of obligation. And this obligation always seems to be an obligation toward someone irreducibly different from oneself. The Advaitic ātman might have good reason to reduce its own ignorance, but it is not obligated to do so.

So, leaving aside egoistic philosophies for the moment, we can draw boundaries between two quite different justifications for altruism, two different ways in which egoism can be considered an error. In Korsgaard, Lévinas and I think the Catholic Pauls, we get an encounter variety of altruism, where each separate and individual self is in part constituted by binding obligations to others (whether other people or God). Whereas in Śāntideva, Parfit and Vivekānanda, we get a nondualist variety of altruism, one based on the idea that the selves themselves are not really real. The Catholic Pauls attack the second because they wish to move us toward the first.

So far, it’s pretty much the usual story of 19th-century reform. But Hacker takes his critique much further than the basic historical point, and this is where it gets interesting to me. Hacker’s special ire, beyond his general disdain for modern Hinduism, is reserved for the “tat tvam asi ethic”, the idea that because we are all ultimately one infinite spirit (“you are that,” as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad supposedly claims), we should help each other because we are really helping ourselves. For Hacker, it is not merely the case that classical Advaita Vedānta thinkers never adopted an altruistic or activistic ethics based on the tat tvam asi of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, but that they could not have. For, Hacker claims, “From the philosophical point of view, to base the tat tvam asi ethic on the foundation of the Vedāntic monism of consciousness is a logical impossibility.” (“Schopenhauer and Hindu ethics,” p. 305) On the next page he goes on to describe the tat tvam asi ethic not merely as a “logical impossibility” but as a “logical monstrosity.” (p. 305, my emphasis) Hacker wants to show the tat tvam asi ethic is a modern invention because, in his mind, the great Vedāntic sages of old were way too wise to ever have fallen for such a load of garbage.

What is it about Vivekānanda’s tat tvam asi ethic, in Hacker’s mind, that makes it logically impossible and even monstrous? For Hacker, genuinely ethical behaviour – by which he means altruistic behaviour – depends on the existence of separate persons, whose differences are irreducible:

Ethical behavior presupposes an interpersonal relationship, which loses its metaphysical justification if individual personhood has no ultimate reality…. Neither the monism of will nor the monism of consciousness or spirit has a real place for the concept of person. But when this concept is not taken seriously, ethics remains on a naturalistic level; that is, there is no true ethics, good and evil have no truly metaphysical relevance, and ultimately there are only ways of realizing or veiling the impersonal universal One…. There is no sense in which an identification of a “that” with a “thou,” such as we have in tat tvam asi, can explain why good and bad behavior exist. Interpersonal relationship is not identity, and it is certainly not identity of a person with an impersonal being.

As philosophical argument I do not think this goes very far, not by itself anyway. Much of it depends on the semi-tautological identification of “ethics” with altruism. If one acknowledges that an ethics can be based on self-interest and that other-interest can be grounded in self-interest, then there seems little logical problem here: the tat tvam asi ethic might not really or ultimately be altruistic, but so what? Even in historical terms, Hacker seems to be on poor ground in believing that such a monistic ethic is purely modern. Hugh van Skyhawk, replying to Hacker in the 74th (1993) volume of the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, argued that a similar view was found in the sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknath (also spelled Ekanāth or Ekanātha). Eknath told his listeners (in Skyhawk’s translation) that the true yogī “immediately gives up his own interests and ventures into difficulties for the sake of others”; and argues for such altruism on strongly nondualist grounds:

He, for whom there is no more “I” and “mine” and “thee” and “thine” by virtue of the contact with the worship of the divine non-duality and the Self is called the highest bhakta. If he gives his fortune (nijavitta) to another, no misgivings arise in his citta. He does not even sense a trace of alienation. No feelings of doubt arise. The object in the right hand is given to the left hand. Who is the giver here? Who is the receiver?

Overall, then, Hacker’s arguments against monist ethics aren’t particularly persuasive. What excites me about Hacker’s arguments is his reasons for making them. Wilhelm Halbfass’s introduction to his collection of Hacker’s writings stresses the increasing importance in Hacker’s work of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. And Catholicism, it seems to me, stresses encounter over ātmanism: it is all about one’s relationship to a God with whom one is not identical.

The point is highlighted in the much more powerful arguments of another Catholic Paul, Paul Williams. Williams, to my knowledge, says nothing about Hacker in his work; since Williams is a Buddhologist, he may well be entirely unaware of Hacker. And yet Williams’s criticism of Śāntideva (in the final chapters of his Altruism and Reality parallels Hacker’s criticism of Vivekānanda in remarkable ways. Among Śāntideva’s most famous passages (now even excerpted in an introductory ethics text) is his “equalization of self and other” in verses VIII.90-119 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, in which he argues that, since the self is an illusion (a standard Buddhist view), egoistic action does not make logical sense and we should be altruistic (an innovation of his). Śāntideva is not a monist like Vivekānanda; he is strongly opposed to the Vedāntic idea of a universal cosmic self. Nevertheless, there is a close parallel in that both Śāntideva and Vivekānanda try to deconstruct our ideas of self in order to deconstruct ethical egoism and urge altruistic action. And so Williams’s criticisms of Śāntideva turn out on similar lines to Hacker’s criticisms of Vivekānanda.

Unlike Hacker, Williams makes no attempt at historical criticism; Williams has no doubt that Śāntideva actually believed all this. He simply thinks that Śāntideva is dead wrong. In thinking and arguing this, he has provoked a strong reaction among Buddhologists, no less than five of whom (Barbra Clayton, John Pettit, Jon Wetlesen, Mark Siderits and José Cabezón) have tried to refute him in print. I’m not going to examine today whether Williams is right or wrong (it is a complex question); but I want to explore important points in his arguments.

What Williams claims, against Śāntideva, is that there can be no compassion unless there are persons feeling the compassion for other persons. Compassion requires the existence of persons feeling suffering; without sufferers, there is no suffering and no compassion. (T.R. (Thill) Raghunath made a similar argument in a recent comment.) If the self is deconstructed, so too is suffering, and indeed perhaps all reasons for action.

Both Paul Hacker and Paul Williams, then, are trying to tell us: you cannot have it both ways. Either you can have a nondual view (monist or otherwise) that deconstructs our everyday selves, or you can have the commitment to altruistic alleviation of others’ suffering. The two don’t make sense together; and the first certainly isn’t an argument for the second.

Such a view seems to me to have profound roots in the Abrahamic monotheisms; while the Pauls in question are Catholic, one could surely also imagine it being made by a Jew. For indeed the criticism reminds me strongly of Emmanuel Lévinas and his insistence on the irreducible otherness of other people – with God as the ultimate other. (For breaking down the distinction between himself and God, al-Hallāj was tortured and killed.) The ethical deconstruction of self seems important to a nondual view of the world; but to refute such nonduality seems central to theism. (But not only Abrahamic theism: the nineteenth-century Bengali devotional poet Ramprasad Sen criticized nondualism by saying “I want to taste sugar, not to become sugar.”)

The issue surrounding encounter, in that case, goes well beyond one’s relationship with God, even one’s relationship with other human beings. Like the question of internalism and externalism, it hits deep issues both theoretical and practical, though from a different angle. And I suspect this is why the question is so pervasive throughout the Western monotheisms.

An earlier post on the subject noted the debate within Indian Sufism, between ibn Arabi’s wahdat al-wujūd and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī’s wahdat ash-shuhūd. But what was new in India with Sirhindī was only that the debate happened within Sufism – Sirhindī was the first Sufi to articulate the idea of irreducible encounter, the opposition to pantheism. Opponents of the Sufis had been putting forth that idea for a long time before that. Perhaps most famously there was the case of al-Hallāj, the tenth-century Persian Sufi, who in in his state of mystical experience proclaimed anā’l ḥaqq, “I am the truth!” Al-ḥaqq, “the truth,” was one of the traditional 99 Muslim names of God; for saying that he was God, al-Hallāj was swiftly put to death.

Non-Sufi Islam, it seems to me, stresses the gulf between God and man as a way of maintaining human humility. Stephen Prothero’s popular new book on religious difference identifies pride as the central problem in Islam, comparable to sin in Christianity or suffering in Buddhism. I suspect this is why Muslims lay so much stress on tawhīd, God’s inviolable unity, and treat shirk – idolatry or “associating partners with God” – as a cardinal sin. To raise anything in the physical world to God’s level is to assume an arrogant knowledge of God. In the early days of Islam, the Mu’tazila school, relying on this idea of tawhīd, had argued that the Qur’an was a created object like anything else perceptible, and so one should read it with a rationalistic and allegorical eye. To read it as literal and inerrant would be arrogant, idolatrously taking the Qur’an as a partner with God. But one of the reasons the Mu’tazila became a minority position was that their view was used to license human arrogance: the caliph, the human ruler, had no limits on his power if he could take the Qur’an as meaning something different from what it literally said.

It has been my sense that, while there has been some suspicion of Christian mysticism through the ages, it was not persecuted within Christianity as strongly as the Sufis were within Islam. I think this is because official Christianity has drawn the line between God and man far less sharply than has official Islam (and I suspect official Judaism). What defined the Christianity accepted as orthodox in the Nicene Creed was that God had in fact become man. This idea of God-become-man is, as I understand it, what James Doull finds most significant about Christianity: in it, objective truth (God) and subjective humanity can be united. The idea of God as man has been accepted by all the major strains of Christianity since then – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant – but in its time it had seemed absurd to many if not most. The Arians took a more traditionally Jewish view, that Jesus was merely a prophet, a teacher, an exemplary human being. To say that he was more than that would be impossible, for it would identify perfect God with imperfect humanity. Their foes the Docetists took the exact opposite view: that Jesus was purely God all the time and was never actually human. Despite being at opposite ends of the spectrum, the Arians and Docetists shared the view that no man could ever be perfect enough to be God.

Go to India, on the other hand, and the view is vastly different. There, to identify human and God is commonplace. It’s not just that God takes a physical form, in a way scandalous to Muslims. Many traditions – especially Jainism and Yoga – are all about becoming godlike, taking on superhuman powers and transcending the universe. And most prominently, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, we all already are God, we just don’t know it. For this reason, Nicholas Gier takes these mainstream Indian traditions as examples of what he calls spiritual Titanism: worrying attempts to make man into God. Gier clearly thinks that Titanism is a bad thing. He doesn’t explicitly argue the case against it, but he returns repeatedly to environmental crises: human beings have tried to become godlike in their attempts to master nature, and now we are paying the price. Here, the problem of human arrogance appears again with an ecological cast.

My own position on all this goes back to this post. I agree with the orthodox monotheists that humans are fallen creatures, not worthy of deification. In Buddhist terms, this is why I denied the Third Noble Truth: I have not met anyone I would consider awakened (“enlightened”) in this lifetime, and could not imagine becoming awakened in this life myself; and I also don’t believe in rebirth, so I don’t see our perfection as possible after this life. We are deeply flawed creatures and must always remain aware of those deep flaws; that’s why humility is important.

But. Unlike the monotheists, I don’t see any reason to prefer God to man. For in my view any capital-G God, any god that has created the world or is omnipotent, cannot be taken as a model of moral perfection. God’s track record as revealed in the world is no better than ours; his track record in scripture and tradition is often worse.

And all this, in the end, takes me back to the Aristotelian mean. We must be humble enough to recognize our deep flaws; but not so humble that we submit ourselves wholly to another entity with flaws as thoroughgoing as ours (or close to it). We cannot fully trust ourselves; but we have no choice but to trust ourselves to some extent. The line is difficult to walk, but no genuine virtue is ever easy.

EDIT (11 Jul 2010): The original version of this post claimed that James Doull was an Anglican preacher. A former student of his informed me that he wasn’t, although he was always a believing Christian and belonged to an Anglican community in his later life. A number of his students and grand-students became Anglican priests, however, and that’s probably where my confusion arose.

What is at stake on this point is a crucial feature of any foundationalist position – that is, a position that relies on basic first principles, such as the existence of truth, and not merely on pragmatic effectiveness. Any such position relies in its logic on the difference between demonstrative and dialectical argument – that is, between arguments from first principles and arguments to first principles. (I take the distinction from a short and helpful discussion on pp. 88-9 of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry.) This distinction is what that the young Socrates at first fails to grasp in Plato’s Parmenides: because Zeno’s arguments show the flaws in others’ positions, Socrates sees them only as sophistry rather than as what they are, namely dialectical arguments knocking down others’ premises in order to establish the truth of Parmenides’s view. The young Socrates knows only demonstrative argument, and not dialectical argument. In an anti-foundationalist position like Ni’s (or Richard Rorty’s), where there are no first principles, there is the opposite: only dialectical argument, and no demonstrative.

The point: One cannot deduce conclusions from first principles (demonstrative argument) with someone who does not share those principles. Rather, one must argue from the assumptions and principles of one’s interlocutor, in order to show that the interlocutor’s position is flawed and one’s own is preferable (dialectical argument). Only by doing so can one arrive at anything like a foundationalist position in the first place. No foundationalist that I am aware of has ever tried to argue otherwise. Even Descartes doesn’t begin his argument with cogito ergo sum; rather, he begins both the Meditations and the Discourse with everyday commonsense knowledge and why it isn’t good enough. The first principles – the existence of truth or self – are first only logically; they do not come first chronologically, in argument or in human development. And the question on which a foundationalist position stands or falls is whether the foundationalist can show his interlocutor’s position to be flawed enough that it merits abandoning in favour of one more like his own. In the case at hand, I believe that I have done this – argued why a position based entirely on pragmatic effectiveness will fail on the grounds of pragmatic effectiveness.

I tried to do the same in my arguments against postmodernism. It does little good to argue that postmodernism is false or contradicts itself, and therefore fails on my terms. It is far more important to argue that postmodernism’s performative effects are neutral or worse, so that it fails on its own terms.

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.

Skholiast makes two criticisms of Wilber, which are closely related to each other, and which reflect his interest in 20th-century “continental” thinkers, especially Emmanuel Lévinas. The second criticism is probably the more fundamental: Wilber, according to Skholiast, is too much of an “ātmanist,” too beholden to nondualist philosophies (of which Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta is the prime example). He doesn’t leave room for the priority of Lévinas’s philosophy, namely encounter with the other.

But while the immediate ancestors of Skholiast’s view may be in the likes of Lévinas, he is right to claim an older pedigree for it. For Vedāntic monism indeed makes an uncomfortable fit with Western monotheisms, in which to say “I am God” is a heresy.

Skholiast reminds me a little here of the Indian debate over Sufi mystical experiences. While Sufism is a controversial phenomenon in the Arab “heartland” of Islam, in South Asia Sufism basically is Islam. That Sufi mystical practices such as dhikr chanting are valid spiritual pathways – this is not widely disputed in South Asia. Rather, as I understand it, the dispute between conservative and tolerant Islam happens there within Sufism. South Asian Muslims have typically all agreed with the Spanish mystic Muhyiddin ibn ‘Arabī that dhikr or similar practices can get you an experience of cosmic oneness, where the boundaries between yourself and the rest of the world all break down. The debate is over what this oneness means.

Ibn ‘Arabī preached an idea which later comes to be called wahdat al-wujūd, the unity of existence. For him God is the only being that is truly real; everything else is an illusion. (The similarity to Śaṅkara should be obvious here.) The experience of unity in dhikr allows one to perceive that true oneness in existence.

Another Indian Sufi, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, criticized ibn ‘Arabī. Instead of wahdat al-wujūd, he described Sufi experiences as merely wahdat ash-shuhūd – a unity of experience. One does indeed perceive that everything is one, but that is only a first step: one must go beyond that oneness because everything is not one. To identify creator with creation is a heresy. Rather, the experience gives you a sense of the true greatness of the one who created everything: “Not ‘All is Him’ but ‘All is from Him.’”

These are meaty debates and I don’t have space to try and figure out my own position on them here. Where I do take a stand is on a methodological issue in Skholiast’s first, related, point. Mostly because of the second criticism, Skholiast argues that Wilber doesn’t do “emic justice” to the Abrahamic traditions. Wilber, according to Skholiast, claims that the majority of Christian saints have got it wrong about Jesus – presumably those who are not “ātmanists.” Skholiast says that this claim “would be astounding if he made it about chess masters’ opinions of the Ruy Lopez, or music critics’ estimations of Beethoven’s late quartets, or even of Zen masters’ account of the Tathagata.” I have some serious methodological problems with this approach, if I understand Skholiast’s criticism correctly. I’m all for humility in the face of great thinkers who have gone before us, realizing they might have depth we haven’t yet seen in them. But the great spiritual masters disagree with one another on matters of fundamental import. If the grace of Jesus of Nazareth is the only way to human salvation, then following the Noble Eightfold Path simply will not get one there. Each side may well be (and probably is) partially right, but at least one side must be partially wrong.

Here I think Skholiast’s analogy to chess masters and music critics is quite misleading. As non-experts we are reluctant to say chess masters are wrong about chess because they have a specialized expertise we do not have; this is one of the reasons it is so difficult to speak accurately about natural science. But it is surely a gross misunderstanding of Christian saints’ claims about Jesus to take them as a matter of specialized expertise. On their own understanding, Jesus is not a specialty, a limited field of human knowledge; He is universal, a truth who saves us all. Jesus doesn’t just happen to be there “for Christians,” he is the Way, the Truth and the Life. If we get Jesus wrong, we get the truth in general wrong. But once one makes that sort of universal, nonspecialist claim (and I think it’s a legitimate claim to make), one necessarily opens oneself up to nonspecialist criticism: if the truth in general isn’t what you say it is, then maybe Jesus isn’t what you say he is either. I’m not at all sure I agree with Wilber’s ultimate position, but I do think that methodologically he is on firm ground.

Within a century or two, however, along comes the great N?g?rjuna and his Madhyamaka philosophy. Madhyamaka thinkers take the no-?tman doctrine much further. Now the ?tman isn’t just the thinking subjective self; it’s the self-ness in everything. Objects, including the atomized particles and events so dear to the Abhidhamma, are just as unreal as the subject. The deconstruction of the subject leads historically to the deconstruction of the object.

I thought about the point a couple months ago when reading Nick Smyth’s excellent post on existentialism. Existentialism is not an area of much expertise for me, and I appreciate the way Smyth helped make sense of it. The way he portrays it, existentialism is about deconstructing objects and the way we make the world, including people, into objects (with the avowed “objectivity” of scientists and especially social scientists). We objectify people by putting them into categories, making them into the sum of their parts. But people are more than these categories, they are free individuals, choosing subjects, selves. (Existentialism as thus described seems rather the polar opposite of the Speculative Realist movement and its “object-oriented ontology.”)

Intellectual fashion has not been kind to these existentialist views of late. While existentialism dominated much of the mid-twentieth-century intellectual scene, the followers of French philosophy often ignore it now. What’s replaced it has been the postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida. And while postmodernists accept the existentialist critique of objectifying categories, they refuse to accept the choosing subject. Where Jean-Paul Sartre had proclaimed “existentialism is a humanism” because of his intense focus on the agency and choice of human beings, Foucault and Derrida instead turn to an anti-humanist structuralism which largely reduces human agency to the social structures that shape it. Here the deconstruction of the object is followed by the deconstruction of the subject.

I’ve been thinking about this point in reading James Doull’s chapter on Augustine. Doull, discussing Augustine’s Confessions, notes how intellectually Augustine, before his turn to Christianity, made the move from Manicheanism to classical skepticism. The Manicheans, Doull says, deconstructed the subject in their own way: there was no unified self, the self was merely a battleground for the cosmic forces of good and evil. And once Augustine accepted that there was no subject, it was an easy slide for him into a skepticism that believed there was no object either.

I put all of these transitions – the Buddhist, the Augustinian, the 20th-century – together because I think there’s a Doullian connection to be made here. For Doull, as for Hegel and Ken Wilber, intellectual movements in society mirror movements made in an individual’s development, as the movements at both levels involve a rational necessity. I think Doull would argue that these transitions from either no-subject or no-object to neither-subject-nor-object are no coincidence at all: this is something that has to happen once we think it through, whether “we” are individuals (like Augustine) or a whole society (like Buddhist India). It doesn’t logically work to elevate objects without subjects, or vice versa; once you stop having both, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with neither. I suspect Doull would come to a critique of Speculative Realism on these grounds as well: object-oriented philosophy, with the subject objectified in the way Smyth’s existentialists object to, will just lead people to a philosophy that has neither object nor subject.

Would Doull be right about this? I can’t say. To say more would require venturing much more deeply into details of which I have only the vaguest outline so far. I can’t help but think that Doull is on to something here, but I can’t yet back that up in a way that allows me to say so with any confidence.