Monthly Archives: June 2009

Neither career nor hobby

30 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Family, German Tradition, Social Science, Work

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I wanted to link here to a wonderful post I just found on Livejournal, though it appears to be a couple months old. The author, an artist, has written eloquently on something I’ve been finding vitally important but had not yet managed express. Namely, there is a concept missing in our vocabulary about work: we have a serious blind spot for what is between “career” and “hobby.” A career is what you do for money; anything you don’t do for money, gets relegated to the status of an indulgent pastime, a mildly pleasant but unserious way to while away the hours until your real work begins anew.

There’s a hidden, and I think pernicious, assumption underlying such a dualism: that anything not done for money is just not that serious. Feminists have rightly criticized the effects of such an assumption when it comes to childrearing and homemaking; but I think we’ve yet to seriously think about its effects for other kinds of unpaid work.

I do not plan on this blog ever making me any money. Nor do I plan on it advancing my academic career. If either of those happens, great. But those are not the point; I feel an inner drive to do a kind of writing that I can’t make money off of, and that’s more important to me than the kind of writing that does pay. This is something central to my life, and it makes no sense to relegate that to the category of “hobby.”

The original post’s author (who goes by the alias haikujaguar) suggests that we should refer to our meaningful unpaid work with the honourable names of “vocation” and “calling.” I’m less certain about this, because for so long these terms have had the connotation of paid work. The term “calling” comes from the German Beruf, which now simply means paid work. (Was sind sie von Beruf? is German for “What’s your job?”) Continue reading →

In defence of hypocrisy

28 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Virtue

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Recent news of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s affair provides an appropriate occasion to discuss a topic that’s been on my mind lately: hypocrisy. When social conservatives like Sanford or Bill Bennett get caught in vice, the charge immediately hurled at them is hypocrisy; this is said to make their crimes far worse than those of, say, Eliot Spitzer, who wasn’t that kind of moralizer in the first place. But I want to make the case here that hypocrisy is really not so bad.

A defence of hypocrisy is not original to me. There are plenty of right-wingers who’ve defended hypocrisy in these sorts of situations: William Vallicella blogged about it a while ago, Jeremy Lott wrote a whole book about it, and most recently James Matthew Wilson‘s defence of hypocrisy at Front Porch Republic was where I heard about Sanford’s adultery in the first place. But these men do not share the ideals of those who usually attack hypocrisy, and I think the point might be more persuasive coming from a left-leaner like me. I oppose Sanford’s and Bennett’s sexual politics, and I think their behaviours were unjustifiable; but I want to claim that these two criticisms are and should be mostly separate.

Put it this way. Suppose a man preaches anti-racism, tells all his friends they must avoid racism, donates to anti-racist causes; but himself refuses to hire black people or associate with them professionally. Now imagine a man who acted the same way toward black people but advocated doing so — a man who said that black people are unreliable and should not be hired or associated with. The first man is a hypocrite, the second man is absolutely not; the second man is sincere, and true to himself. But is the second man then better than the first? I don’t think so. In both cases the serious wrongdoing is the racism, not the hypocrisy. I might say, actually, that the hypocrite who preaches anti-racism is at least a bit better than the consistent man who doesn’t; the first is doing some good. Moreover, one can point out the inconsistency between his behaviour and his ideals, in a way that helps his behaviour change for the better. It’s much harder to change the man whose bad ideals match his bad behaviour.

Intimacy and integrity

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, East Asia, Epistemology, Jainism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self, Truth

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I’ve found Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity to be one of the more helpful ways to think through the significance of culture in philosophy, especially when dealing with East Asia. To help Westerners understand East Asian thought, Kasulis portrays it as having an “intimacy” orientation, as opposed to a more familiar “integrity” orientation.

Now Kasulis is aware enough to realize that there are exceptions to all such generalizations, and some of his examples of “intimacy” come from the West too. The distinction is supposed to function more like one of Max Weber’s ideal types. That is to say: one may never encounter intimacy or integrity orientations in their pure forms; any actual culture or person or book will probably contain some mix. Nevertheless, by thinking of the two as relatively coherent extremes, one is better able to understand what’s going on in the middle.

When applied to ethics and politics alone, the distinction is not particularly original and could even come across as something of a cliché: basically, the modern West is individualistic and oriented toward individual rights and the integrity of the individual, while East Asia focuses on the intimacy community and the ensuing responsibilities of interdependence. Where Kasulis’s work gets interesting is when he applies the distinction to theoretical philosophy. Continue reading →

Pre- and trans-ego

24 Wednesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Self

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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.

Why computers don’t understand

22 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by in Consciousness, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science

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My previous post on consciousness, responding to Ted Slingerland’s views, attracted great responses that deserve a more detailed explanation. Ryan Overbey addresses my claim that scientific experiment cannot disprove consciousness because such experiments depend on experience and perception:

You say “experience and perception” presume consciousness. In that case, consciousness for you seems to be defined as any system of taking in sensory data, storing information about that data, and processing that information. Am I reading that correctly? We have computer programs that can do these things. Would they fit your criteria for consciousness. If so, cool! If not, why not?

The answer to the question here is: absolutely not. Taking in empirical data and processing it, in the way that a computer program does, does not count as experience, perception or consciousness. Why? Continue reading →

The God that matters

21 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Deity, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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You believe that there is no God? Well, what is God? Suppose that God is the greatest being that can be conceived. Now even if you don’t think that such a being exists, you can still understand the idea of such a being; you can still conceive of it. Therefore, whether or not such a being exists in reality, it must at least exist in your mind. But a being that existed in reality would be greater than a being that existed only in your mind. Therefore, for such a being to exist only in your mind, and not in reality, would be a contradiction in terms; for if it existed only in your mind, it would both be the greatest being that can be conceived (that’s what you’re conceiving of) and not be the greatest thing that can be conceived (because the same being existing in reality would be greater). So the greatest being that can be conceived – this being must exist in reality as well as in thought.

This is a simplified version of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, often called the “ontological” argument. I’m not sure whether it really works; I’m inclined to say it doesn’t, although it’s hard to say where the logic goes wrong, especially in the more sophisticated version presented by Anselm himself.

Nevertheless, I consider it the best and most important of the proofs of God’s existence, even if it doesn’t work. Why? Continue reading →

When is a philosophy a technique?

18 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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A question that I saw recurring throughout the SACP was technique: when is philosophical reflection about our ends or goals, and when is it just about means to those ends? I’d previously thought about this question with respect to S.N. Goenka’s vipassanā meditation: the word Goenka uses most frequently to describe it is “technique.” The webpage describing vipassanā refers to it as a “non-sectarian technique”: thus Goenka’s claim that people from “any religion” can practise vipassanā – as long as they don’t bring any religious symbols into meditation practice.

This question of technique came up at least three times at the SACP. Continue reading →

Does Asian philosophy exist?

17 Wednesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, East Asia, Metaphilosophy, South Asia

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At the SACP, South Asian (Indian, Tibetan) and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese) thought both have a central place, with Western thought on the margins. At the vast majority of philosophy conferences, Western thought has a central place, with both South and East Asian thought on the margins. I say this not to complain about the general marginal status of Asian philosophy; that’s not news. Rather, I’m increasingly beginning to wonder whether there is anything to “Asian philosophy” at all.

SACP members often lament that the South Asianists and the East Asianists don’t talk to each other much. Douglas Berger, a thoughtful and erudite scholar I had the pleasure of meeting at the SACP, recently started the interesting email list ASIAN-THOUGHT-L with a main objective of encouraging cross-Asian discussion. My own categories on this site are organized the same way. But does all of this make any sense?

In terms of areas of concern, at least, South Asian and East Asian philosophical thought each seem much closer to the West than they are to each other. (“Western” philosophy here refers to the stream of thought originating in Greece, including the Islamic world.) South Asian thought is preeminently concerned with psychology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and transcending the everyrday world, which have all been topics of central concern in the West since Plato – but are relatively little discussed in East Asia. East Asian thought, in turn, is concerned above all with politics, human relationships and social ethics – major concerns in the West but less so in South Asia.

The obvious constant between South and East Asia, of course, is Buddhism. But Buddhism here starts to look like the exception that proves the rule, for Buddhist thought changes drastically as it enters East Asia. East Asian Buddhist thinkers were much more concerned with worldly affairs and politics than their South Asian predecessors had been, and the elaborate structures of South Asian theoretical philosophies got dramatically pared down in systems like Ch’an/Zen.

So is it worth talking about Asian philosophy at all? Perhaps only as a move in intellectual politics – joining forces to carve out a space for philosophical reflection that is not Western. As for my categories, well, they seem a fitting organization for now given how much I talk about Buddhism. But I could imagine changing them on these grounds on the future.

EDIT: “a main objective of encouraging cross-Asian discussion” was originally “a main objective of encourage cross-Asian discussion.” That’s what I get for trying to blog on a layover.

Defending consciousness

15 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by in Confucianism, Consciousness, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Self

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First event at the SACP was a panel involving Edward (Ted) Slingerland, discussing Confucius’s thought. Slingerland was arguing, against the somewhat behaviourist interpretation promoted by Herbert Fingarette, that Confucius has a conception of “interiority,” or subjectivity – that we are not just the sum of our roles and actions, but there’s a consciousness inside.

The objections to Slingerland were of two kinds. First, people misinterpreted him and objected to the idea of interiority (or consciousness), thinking that he was arguing for interiority himself, even though he repeatedly insisted he was only interpreting Confucius and didn’t believe in it himself. (I’m surprised how many people did that.) Second, people objected (roughly) that Confucius couldn’t possibly have believed in interiority, typically on the grounds that he was a lot smarter than that.

The big surprise, to me, was that nobody (least of all Slingerland) seemed to step up to the plate and defend interiority – to say that yes, there’s actually something going on inside our minds. Continue reading →

SACP conference

13 Saturday Jun 2009

Posted by in Blog Admin

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For the first half of next week I’ll be heading to the annual conference of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy – a sort of retreat at Asilomar Conference Grounds in California. It’s my first time attending the SACP, and I’m not sure whether I’ll have time to blog while out there – hopefully I’ll be spending all my time either at talks or talking to other philosophers. I’m not even sure there’s an Internet connection. But one way or another it should provide a lot of fascinating food for thought, which I hope to blog about either during or after the event.