My previous post examined the problems that led me to move away from utilitarianism, including its Rawlsian variant. Happily, I also found solutions.
While working at the UN in Bangkok, I spent a lot of time at Thai Buddhist temples, because I thought they were the most beautiful places I’d ever seen – such incredible feasts of colour. I didn’t just go to the biggest and glitziest, the main tourist attractions; as an urban geographer I wanted to explore the city, and I kept heading to temples way off the beaten track. This attracted a lot of curiosity from monks who rarely saw foreigners, so I had a lot of conversations with monks – people who, having started with very little, chose to have even less. I got fascinated by Buddhism – both from my encounters with monks, and from the idea of a nontheistic religion. So I kept heading back to the used bookstores on Khao San Road, devouring whatever I could find about Buddhism – finding the likes of Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught.
But Buddhism hadn’t yet made a difference in my life, while I was working in Bangkok. That would come later, as I travelled through Laos and upcountry Thailand, keeping philosophical journals as I went.
In my journals, I came to reflect on the fact of my own dissatisfaction. In my times at McGill I had felt very unhappy because I lacked a good job and a girlfriend. In Bangkok I had a girlfriend, but the relationship made me even more unhappy. I also had a well paying job opportunity that many would envy, but in an environment so charged with politicking that I couldn’t wait to get out. Finally, of course, the job did end, and I had the chance I’d been waiting for, to travel for fun upcountry. But I was lonely, travelling all by myself; what I wanted was some people to talk to. Then I met some Thai people at a guesthouse who wanted to talk, but they didn’t speak much English so the conversation was limited. So I wanted to find some fellow foreigners to talk to in English – and I did, but I didn’t like them very much.
I took some stock of this situation in my journals. These events sounded to me like some sort of Buddhist parable; I just wished I could figure out what the point was. But eventually I did. I thought especially of the Second Noble Truth from the Pali suttas, that suffering comes from craving. Maybe, I thought, the problem isn’t with me not getting the things I want. Maybe the problem is with me. At age 21, especially for someone who’d grown up frequently being treated as if he was the smartest person on the planet, that’s the kind of realization that can change your world. It did change mine.
And yet, all the Western philosophy that I’d learned before didn’t just go away. I’d learned important, powerful, beautiful things that seemed true – and often seemed opposite to the Buddhism I’d found myself in. Is there a way to reconcile the two? One way or another, that question has been central to my life ever since.
I’m enjoying this narrative. In ways that have become clearer to me over time (I didn’t start out with much inkling), becoming an academic specializing in Asian philosophy is the kind of thing that automatically demands explanation. My own explanation is as follows: (1) I am innately/reliably predisposed to privilege intellect and critical reason, (2) I lost my head over certain aspects of traditional Chinese culture in high school. (There has always been an Indic component too, but it takes a distinct second place.) The impetus for my work is basically that I want to use critical reason to understand why I lost my head. Unlike most of my colleagues, I have not started out from a position of familiarity with Western philosophy – I have started developing that only gradually. I feel like sustained interest in and appreciation for Western thinkers is some kind of sign of “maturity” for me, because at the gut level for years it was just a torrent of pure sinitude.
Interesting story, Stephen – what do you mean you “lost your head”? Do you mean you fell in love with them to the point you went crazy, or you were immersed in them (perhaps involuntarily) and they made you so upset you went crazy? I’m guessing the former, but either way I’m interested to hear more.
Definitely the former. It started with living traditions like martial arts, qigong and health regimens, and visual arts. And a rather peculiar version of “Daoism” that offered much grist for selfish perfectionism. In college I focused in on the early philosophers since they were the ones everyone else was alleging to get their authority from; music ended up taking over as my interest in other living traditions waned. (Though always “for the time being.”) Until I got serious about the early thinkers, there was a generous amount of yavanayana mixed in, which is basically inevitable for a young American interested in Asia. (Agree?) In broadest terms, what this mass of discourses and traditions offered me was some kind of meaningfulness, appropriateness, and good sense that I had never felt from any other direction. As I’ve become more philosophically articulate, I’ve been able to pinpoint the intuitions I share with essentialized China that I do not share with mainstream Western lines of thinking. But the important thing is that the philosophizing came later. To a certain extent I regret the slow progress of philosophy in winning my heart, because in retrospect I was far too friendly to the epistemic authoritarianism core to so much Chinese thought – the disinclination to debate or recognize genuine alternatives.
Yes, I’d agree that some amount of Westernizing is inevitable for anyone raised in the West and starting to become interested in Asian traditions. I’d resist using yavanay?na as a general term, though; part of the idea with the y?na terminology is that it’s specifically Buddhist. The permutations of Westernization in other traditions are typically quite different. With Hinduism, for example, I would tend to argue that Hinduism per se is in many respects the equivalent of Yavanayāna, as even the term “Hinduism” or its equivalents didn’t exist before the British arrived.
Re epistemic authoritarianism, I’m finding that a big issue as I begin to explore East Asian thought. The point came up at the SACP… I was talking to someone (I forget who it was now) and saying how it was important to philosophy that one identify how one’s position differs from others, and argue for that. My interlocutor said he thought that was a Eurocentric position; his take on Chinese thought was that it was a matter of tact and etiquette, that when one wants to spell out a new and different position, one doesn’t disagree outright with one’s predecessor, one leaves it to the reader to fill in the point. I pointed out that Indians are very clear about their disagreements (one of the most common stock phrases in Sanskrit philosophy is “if you say X, no, because of Y”) and he modified the term to “Indo-Eurocentric” – another one of the reasons I’ve tended to think South and East Asian thought are each closer to the West than they are to each other.
I’ve also been finding exceptions to the rule – Xunzi, for example, seems to be pretty clear about telling you that he thinks Mencius and Mozi are full of crap, and explaining why. But more generally, this is one of the reasons I find the intimacy-integrity distinction so useful – it points to a different style of thinking in East Asia, one which at least seems authoritarian at first glance, but may still have its distinct advantages. So my sense has generally been that we can’t expect the same standard of logic from East Asia that we have in the West (or in India) if we’re going to get anything out of it. But you know way more about East Asian thought than I do – do you think I’m way off base here?
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