Love of All Wisdom

As much as I love philosophy, I’ve never been an entirely comfortable fit with academic philosophy or religion departments. But until recently they were more or less the only game in town, the only way to get philosophical ideas heard by the world – unless one tried to be a freelance philosophy writer like Ken Wilber, an even more excruciating path to follow. Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies argued that the great periods of philosophical creativity in the past have come with particular institutional settings – the monastery, the Greek agora – and that in the recent past it has come above all with the research university and the popular-press book, two institutions with whom philosophy’s future may now be in is in some doubt.

Blogs, however, excite me as a new way to do philosophy, one not available to previous generations. What might it mean to do philosophy primarily in this new format? It’s probably too early to tell. But there’s one towering figure in the history of philosophy who gives us a clue as to what it might look like, and his name is Baruch (or Benedictus de) Spinoza.

Spinoza should be an inspiration for philosophy bloggers in two different respects. First of all, he didn’t make money off his philosophy; he stands out (like Leibniz and John Stuart Mill) as a modern philosopher who did philosophy in his “spare” time. (continue reading…)

Perhaps the trickiest thing about trying to be a philosopher today is the explosion of information in natural science: we are in the era of “rapid-discovery science,” as Randall Collins calls it in The Sociology of Philosophies. Aristotle could write not merely a Metaphysics but a Physics, and his wide range of general knowledge was enough to make him one of the experts on the subject. Even as recently as the 19th century, Schelling and Hegel could have a decent shot at writing “philosophies of nature,” in which they tried to think philosophically through the whole scope of the way the natural world works. But today, not even a professor of natural science can know all the science that’s out there, even in relatively general terms. To some extent, we need to rely on the authority of experts we trust to know their fields well – what Indian philosophers called the śabdapramāṇa, the source of knowledge beyond inference and personal experience. And even if we somehow could know all the science for a moment, we’d lose it almost instantly as the science changes. (continue reading…)

“Religion” and “science” are typically held to be opposing worldviews, especially in the United States where they identify two sides of a cultural divide (such that Jesus fish and Darwin fish are as common on American cars as are bumper stickers). For those of us who are trying to learn from both, it often seems like a relief to hear compromises like the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “non-overlapping magisteria” (abbreviated NOMA). Briefly, in effect, Gould says that there is no need for conflict between science and religion, because science deals with questions of fact and religion with questions of value (or of “moral meaning”). Ken Wilber puts forward a slightly more sophisticated version of the non-overlapping magisteria view:

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. (continue reading…)

What is the source of bad action, the root of our doing wrong or being worse than we should? I’m currently reading Iris Murdoch’s dense and rich Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in which she most frequently identifies this source with ego. Attachment to ourselves is what makes us do wrong. The view has fairly obvious Buddhist affinities. Suffering, we are told in the Pali Buddhist texts, comes from craving and ignorance; this craving is often specifically identified with craving for selfish things, ignorance with belief in a really existing self or ego. Śāntideva states the view most explicitly: if we knew what the self really was, we wouldn’t act in selfish ways, and then we’d be the bodhisattvas we should be.

There is something I find worrisome about this position – something I think Ken Wilber has managed to catch. It relates to a point I made in a previous entry: that it can be wrong to avoid insisting on what is rightfully yours. Sometimes, it seems to me, we act wrongly because we are not egoistic enough. Again, sociological evidence seems to indicate women typically have this problem more than men; but men are far from immune to it.

Wilber catches this point through the generally developmentalist thrust of his philosophy: awakening proceeds in stages. First we must build a healthy ego for ourselves; only then can we transcend it. Wilber refers in this light to the “pre-trans fallacy”: someone who has not developed proper ego boundaries seems a lot like someone who has transcended them, because neither have strong egos; but that does not mean the two are the same. Something like Śāntideva’s meditation on the exchange of self and other – designed to break down a sense of ego and identify ourselves with other people – seems very much like a “snake wrongly grasped” if it falls into the hands of the meek and servile.

There is much that I admire in the works of Ken Wilber, and I think it is essential reading for anyone who wants to think philosophically in the 21st century. That’s not to say that Wilber is right about most things; in many respects I think he isn’t, and I will critique his work in future posts. But before I get to critiquing Wilber’s work, I want to discuss why I admire it so.

Wilber sometimes seems to claim that his work is widely studied in academia. It isn’t, but that’s not a criticism. Wilber’s writing is exactly the kind of work that really needs to be done, but is rarely done within the confines of academic writing. Why? Because Wilber’s work looks at big questions: questions of truth wherever it can be found, the nature of the universe and our place in it, the good life. The traditional questions of philosophy, in other words. Academics generally refuse to investigate these questions, whichever of the three main academic approaches they take. Philologists often believe we have no right to discuss the questions in a text unless we’ve studied it in its own language for decades; analytic philosophers carve up questions into smaller and smaller pieces, leaving the bigger questions unanswered; postmodernists question any questions we might ask, so that the meta-questions are all that are left. (Why these approaches dominate is a question I’ll leave for another time.) Each of these approaches has its value; but each is missing something big.

Wilber’s work finds that “something big.” He takes what he calls an integral approach, meaning an attempt to integrate the valuable insights and truths from every possible source, Asian, Western or otherwise. This basic methodological idea is what makes Wilber’s work a valuable starting point for any cross-cultural philosophical inquiry.