Tags
Aristotle, Buddhaghosa, Christine Korsgaard, Derek Parfit, Emmanuel Lévinas, Epicurus, nondualism, obligation, Paul Hacker, Paul Williams, Śaṅkara, Śāntideva, Swami Vivekānanda
The Catholic Pauls, it seems clear to me, oppose ethical egoism in strong terms. Interestingly, however, they do not spend much time attacking it; instead, they attack a kind of altruism that is very different from their own. And their positions interest me greatly because of the way it highlights differences among philosophical concepts of altruism.
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.
That the end of altereity is the end of life as we know it, that it is an exit from the merry-go-round of transmigration is a theme that any superficial encounter with vedic religion will confirm. The bodhisattva puts off that great release for the sake of all living beings but in principle he could depart. This state of kaivalya/moksha is one in which all the parameters of human intercourse are irredemiably broken. ‘The party’s over’.
This realisation beyond the pairs of opposites seems to confound altruism and one can quote in support of that position:
Brh.Up. IV.v.6:
That the end of dualism is the end of altruism seems established and admitted by the Upanishads. (cf. Brh.Up. IV.v.13)One might ask whether ethical behaviour is based on altruism or that it merely can be described as altruistic. But prior to that the concept of sublation in Advaita in particular must be clarified. It is sometimes translated as contradiction which it is but it is contradiction in the Hegelian manner in a higher mode in a new synthesis. An example given is that of the dream which in its own mode has reality but in a different and more comprehensive mode i.e. the waking state, is sublated.
Similarly and likewise in the state of dualism or ajnana/avidya altereity is suffered and acted upon as though it were ultimate. The Dharma sastras have their scope here and one might add Ethical Egoism, Utilitarianism etc.
It may be that by definition altruism assumes the existence of self and other. If so, then I would agree that altruism would only exist in Buddhism on a relative level. Even so, I believe that Buddhism would recognize altruism as a profound method. In other words, if one is caught in cyclic existence believing in the solid existence of a self, then altruism (if it is true altruism, motivated by love for another and not on a motivation to achieve sainthood) counters egoic habits of mind that tend to solidify the concept of self and it benefits oneself and others at the same time.
However, it may be useful to distinguish altruism from compassion. Compassion is not something that Buddhism views as being extinguished with the realization of egolessness. Emptiness and compassion in Buddhism are essentially the same — or at least inseparable as heat is inseparable from fire or water is inseparable from wetness. A Buddhist would view this almost as a law of physics — it is not something that is an idea or a speculation (and maybe that is where Buddhism is more religion than philosophy — because prior to a realization of emptiness there is faith or relative confidence and then there is certainty).
Shakyamuni Buddha taught after his realization — and this action was based on compassion. I don’t believe that this fact is inconsistent with a realization of absolute truth where there is cessation of suffering. If you see someone whose suffering is based on an illusion (say a person who believes they have cancer when they don’t), the suffering is real and the compassion is real.
Notions of Buddhism (or other mystical or meditation traditions) in popular Western culture — and there are a lot of them these days — frequently miss this point (the intrinsic connection between compassion and enlightenment). The result is a concept of enlightenment as an ultimate affirmation of a separate self achieving a permanent, solid, safe, all-powerful state where no pain exists. It is the Matrix view of Buddhism — where at the end of the path enlightenment is achieved, the self sees through all delusions and then machine guns everyone else.
Jim, can you say a bit more about the connection between emptiness and compassion? I’ve been trying to get my head around this a lot lately – my talk at the SACP dealt with related topics. In what sense are they intrinsically linked? So far I’ve mainly found what Śāntideva says in the eighth chapter: that because the self is empty, one who truly understands emptiness will be as concerned for others as for himself. This may mean that “compassion” or even “altruism” are not the best translations of words like karuṇā, since ultimately the other-concern is self-concern. Is that all there is to it? Because I’m not entirely sure that Ś makes good sense there: I have a hard time seeing why, if the self is so unreal that one shouldn’t privilege it, then suffering is not also so unreal that it shouldn’t be prevented.
The text that I was thinking of regarding the connection of emptiness and compassion is from Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. He is one of the great 20th century meditation masters in the Barom Kagyu and Nyingma lineages. This is from his book Vajra Heart at 75:
“Just as water is wet and fire hot, the natural expression of awareness is the flame-like heat of compassion. This awareness has unfabricated compassion as its nature . . . In the Sutra teachings, emptiness is prajna (knowledge) and compassion is upaya (means). In the Mantra teachings, the samadhi of suchness is emptiness and the samadhi of illumination is compassion. Right now, as a beginner these two appear to be false [Note: I believe that here by “false” he means conceptual or fabricated.] but when really resting in awareness, in emptiness, the expression of this awareness spontaneously arises as compassion.”
Here is another citation:
In the last verse of The Gateway to the Ocean of Bodhicitta, A Mind Training Prayer, Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye writes: an aspiration that all beings may experience bodhicitta “which is emptiness suffused with compassion.”
I frequently hear Westerners assert that the bodhisattva “puts off” his liberation, but I’ve never found this claim made in any Indian text whatsoever. There, liberation is in some sense constituted by the bodhisattva path; especially once one gets to the Lotus Sūtra and its assertion that there is only one vehicle, there can be no non-bodhisattvic liberation to put off. I don’t think the bodhisattva could depart even in principle.
Re sublation, I prefer the term “supersede”: it seems to be the best way of conveying that double sense of transcend-and-include.
There are various forms of the Bodhisattva vow and putting off one’s own enlightenment seems to be a feature of them all or an implication. Tibetan vow:May I assist all sentient beings to attain Buddhahood, and may I be the last one to attain Buddhahood when all sentient beings have attained Buddhahood, as did Avalokiteshvara (Tib. Chenresi) pictured here.
Supercede is an arguable term and it captures the meaning. However ‘sublation’ has entered the jargon. Due for supercession perhaps.
That vow is interesting. There’s a trick to it, though, in that it’s about buddhahood rather than liberation per se. Since buddhahood (as opposed to simple nirvana) is all about compassion, I don’t think an aspiring buddha could logically decide to attain buddhahood now; if he did that, he’d be missing one of the prerequisites.
Grammatically, is the claim that Avalokiteśvara was the last one to attain buddhahood, or just that he did in fact obtain buddhahood? It could be read both ways. If the former, it’s a strange claim – since there are beings who have not attained buddhahood, was he the last one in his kalpa which then ended…? The latter seems more likely; but note that it implies that, while Avalokiteśvara might have intended to put off his buddhahood, he effectively didn’t succeed; he became a buddha in spite of himself. Being so compassionate he would of course hope that others would be liberated instead of him, but that very compassion was what wound up liberating him – almost accidentally.
In Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher, he comments on the bodhicitta section of the Longchen Nyingthig ngondro.
He describes the bodhisattva’s motivation in terms of three analogies (I believe that these are traditional analogies that predate Patrul R.’s text). The least motivation is the motivation of a king — one who attains realization and then leads his subjects to enlightenment. The second highest motivation is the motivation of a boatman — one who travels with others and crosses the river at the same time. The highest motivation is the shepard, one who guides others to realization and is the last to attain it.
I’ll see if I can find some cites. Most of my readings are from modern teachers — so they may not serve your purpose.
Well, readings from modern teachers can have their value. They won’t tell us what Śāntideva himself thought, but they can help fill in some of the logical gaps in the system – answer questions that we might ask of the texts which Śāntideva’s contemporaries wouldn’t have thought to ask. Sometimes, even, when it’s hard to tell what an ancient thinker was thinking, a modern commentator’s exposition may offer us the best hypothesis. And I am interested here in the logic of the system, how it is that one could see emptiness and compassion as intrinsically linked.
To my way of thinking, the claim of alterity is simply that this is what I mean when I talk/think about my experience of encounter. It just is the experience of meeting “not-me.” The ethics follows from this, but it is an ontological claim. (Or, to put it a la Levinas, ethics itself becomes “first philosophy,” and either displaces or becomes conflated with ontology.
(I meant to add: in some ways this is sort of close to an Anselmian way of thinking.)
Skholiast, could you spell this out a bit more? It strikes me as an interesting take on the idea, but a little enigmatic. What is it to say that alterity is what we mean by encounter? One might be tempted to say this is mere tautology: it’s speaking of definitions and nothing more. I think there’s something else to it, but what? And in what way is it Anselmian – do you mean in the sense that value is here fundamental to ontology?
Sorry if I seemed a bit cryptic, Amod. You are right that it is an argument “by definition,” and probably does risk a kind of circularity– much as does the Anselmian proof. What I intended by this is just that when I try to analyze what happens in encounter (and, while I think I could extend this to any encounter with any other, human or otherwise– including minerals and perhaps even concepts– I’ll restrict myself here to the human other for the sake of simplicity), I find I can’t make sense of breaking this down to a case of projection. For me, “atmanism” fails because what I mean when I speak of my relationship with my students, for instance, or my parents, or my lover, simply is (phenomenologically) the waylaying of my subjectivity by what I cannot anticipate or expect; no matter how familiar I am, the other will surprise me, will exceed what I know. And yet even this summary feels to me more like some empirical evidence I’m offering, whereas what I mean is deeper, and precisely not empirical. I can’t make sense of my own experience if I say that when I embrace my loved ones, I am just an instance of the great Geist embracing itself. I don’t say that this notion makes no sense, but it does not allow me to make sense of my encounter with the other person.
Somehow I doubt this is much clearer than my previous more riddling comment. But thanks for pressing me on it. I’ll keep trying. (I do believe there are experiences that inherently resist words, but I don’t consider this a license for muddled thinking).
* by “the causal account I find here”, I meant in Patrul of course, not this post.
I remarked to Elisa Freschi on her blog
http://elisafreschi.blogspot.com/
that I thought the soul was an acceptable concept holding together the diachronic in the form of the general context of the person, character and so on as well as the synchronic which is the actual constellation of elements in the person at any one time classically at the time of death. I know that the Buddhist and Humean (succession of perceptions) view is influential but ‘soul’ understood aright is not stupid really and it has a default intelligibility to it. Just sayin’.
What makes the advaitin run? ‘I am tired of the eternal round of transmigration’ is the usual complaint to the Master when carrying firewood and seeking instruction. I think you have to be reared to that to feel it. I understand it but I don’t feel it. Man is the shepherd of being said Heidegger but he went astray. Moral: read ontology but carry a guidebook.
I do wonder about this as well. Advaita, like most Buddhism, seems premised on the idea that life is suffering (or unsatisfactoriness or however one wants to translate duḥkha); and this is in some sense more fundamentally than it is joy (satisfactoriness, sukha). Ultimately I don’t think this is right, and this is why I don’t (in the fabled last instance) consider myself a Buddhist; it’s both why I rejected the First Noble Truth”, and (among other things!) why I decided to get married. One suspects that the claim that life is fundamentally suffering has a lot more appeal to people who lived in malarial rice paddies and watched their children die of tuberculosis than it does to modern Westerners in their air-conditioned miniature palaces.
It is not accurate to say that Buddhism views suffering as more fundamental than joy. Since the third noble truth is cessation of suffering, it is clear that Buddhism views suffering as compounded, a result of causes and conditions, and subject to change.
And it is superficial or only partially accurate to equate suffering with the worldly experience of pain. If that were the case, then cessation of suffering would be the same as the normal, worldly “pursuit of happiness”. In fact, aversion to sensory pain and attraction to sensory pleasure are two of the “eight worldly concerns” that are the subject of renunciation at the start of the Buddhist path.
Buddhist teachings note three types of pain. The first is called the “pain of pain”. This, as I understand it, is what we conventionally think of as pain. However, the analogy is of a cut on top of a boil, or a toothache on top of a fever. It is like an insult added to an injury.
The second type of pain, the “pain of alternation” is also easy to understand. This is the idea that everything changes and change creates pain. We work to improve our situation and, even as things are falling into place, they are falling apart. Even our body is deteriorating, growing older. At the end, everything will be gone.
The third type of pain is more difficult to understand. It is called “all pervasive pain”. Because it is all pervasive, it is not as easily understood — as a fish might not understand water. For me, I understand this as an existential type of pain. It is the sense that in a single moment — even a moment of extraordinary conventional pleasure where everything has come together for a moment — there is a sadness, a sense that there is nothing solid to grasp onto. All pervasive pain is present in all situations, conventionally painful as well as conventionally pleasurable situations.
You don’t have to accept these ideas, but it is hard to refute them persuasively if you don’t give them their due.
Jim, I find this quite helpful. Is there a locus classicus for this tripartite classification?
Here are a couple of modern sources:
1. Chogyam Trungpa, Collected Works, Vol. 4 at 208-09.
2. Patrul, R. Words of My Perfect Teacher, Chapter 2, Section 4.1 at 78-79.
thank you. It has been too long since I referred to The Words of My Perfect Teacher. I must say that I find your brief existential gloss on “all-pervasive suffering” to be more compelling than the more causal account I find here.
Also, Amod: I am not sure I understand your suggestion (or rather, your sympathies when you suggest) that “…the claim that life is fundamentally suffering has a lot more appeal to people who lived in malarial rice paddies and watched their children die of tuberculosis than it does to modern Westerners in their air-conditioned miniature palaces.” I can grant that comfortable late capitalist consumers might feel themselves to be immune from much suffering (or that it may not even have occurred to them to reflect upon it), but why not say, here, so much the worse for modern Westerners? Are we not conflating plausibility with truth here? (I don’t completely want to separate these, even for inhabitants of this benighted kali yuga, but some distinction needs to be made, yes?)
When I spoke of “appeal” above I was indeed talking about plausibility, not truth. Important to clarify that.
Thanks, Jim. It is worth mentioning this tripartite classification of duḥkha here, for sure; but views like it are exactly my reason for saying that suffering is more fundamental to Buddhism, and significantly more so, than joy. Translation can be a messy beast here, and the classification does give one pause in rendering duḥkha as “suffering” (though I suspect we may be able to agree that “pain” is even worse); “unsatisfactoriness” may be the most exact sense. Still, however one renders it, the second and third kinds of duḥkha make it very explicit that duḥkha is something at the root of all the phenomena in the world around us – in a way that sukha is not. Sukha, satisfactoriness, plays a much, much smaller role in Buddhist thought, and there’s a reason for this.
You are right to stress the Third Noble Truth as well: it is conditioned things that are duḥkha, and the Third Truth promises us a release into the unconditioned. As I noted in the earlier post, though, I do disagree with the Third Truth.
Amod, I suspect that your rejection of the truth of enlightenment colors your view and leads you to see suffering as more fundamental in Buddhism than cessation of suffering.
There is no question that understanding suffering is important in Buddhism. Suffering is an entry point for the Buddhist path because it is an experience that is inconsistent with delusion. It is the point where our fabricated world of a solid “self” and a solid “other” comes into contact with reality and begins to unravel. We feel we are a good husband and our wife serves us with divorce papers. We are a successful professional and we get laid off. We get cancer. All of these are teachings about the fluidity of the world and how we solidify the world into concepts to which we become emotionally attached.
Suffering is approached differently in our conventional world and in each of the three Buddhist vehicles. In the conventional world, we try to relieve suffering by changing external circumstances. We change our job, find a new girl friend, buy a new car, adopt a new Buddhist belief system, etc. The first turning of the wheel identifies the cause of suffering as attachment or craving. As a means for relating to suffering, the Hinayana path looks into the cause without reacting habitually — in the conventional worldly approach of grasping what we like and avoiding what we don’t like. With regard to emotions, the Hinayana approach is a little like Alcoholics Anonymous — the approach is to recognize that emotions are based on desire, that they cause suffering and that we don’t have to indulge them.
The Mahayana approach depends on a processing and understanding that arises out of the Hinayana path. Seeing suffering clearly and reducing attachment on the path of individual liberation leads to an understanding that the self is not solid moment to moment. This is a great relief and lets the practioner develop a sense of humor and actually relax a little. What arises in practice next is a curiosity about the world — and this naturally comes with softness and appreciation. The Mahayana path also approaches suffering in a new way. As the saying goes, suffering becomes “manure on the field of bodhi”. As in the Hinayana conflicting emotions (kleshas) are not indulged in — but there is a curiosity toward the emotion — less of sense that emotions are “bad” and should be avoided. Instead the Mahayana practitioner uses emotions to soften the heart and develop compassion. The practitioner begins to lose his temper in an argument with his wife, notices the color and texture of the emotion and feels it in a full way. A good practitioner can feel the twinge of the emotion and reflect on it and use it in almost the same moment it is experienced. If you have had the experience of catching an emotion like anger, realizing that you are not perfect, and feeling it convert to sadness, that is a transitonal approach from Hinayana to Mahayana. The true Mahayana occurs when you extend the approach to others. You see someone suffering with a painful thought and, because of your understanding of how that suffering arises in your experience, you feel a softness toward them. As a result, there is the possibility that you might do something unconventional (i.e. not based on how the result relates to you) that might actually help cheer that person up or relieve their suffering.
The Vajrayana approach is a refinement of the Mahayana approach. It is based on the experience of emptiness of self and other and confidence that arises from that. In its highest form, it represents the end of the path — the end of Buddhism. I am not going to say too much about it — partly because it is not something that is normally debated in public forums — but largely because I don’t feel competent to speak about it.
It is worth adding that that it is a mistake to view these paths as a progression in which one path is left behind for a better path. It is more of an approach where each vehicle incorporates and builds on the prior vehicle. It is also very moment to moment. Sometimes it is appropriate to be in AA. Sometimes it is appropriate to reflect back on how you are progressing on the path — and when you do that it is naturally a Hinayana approach. That is not a problem.
It is also a mistake to equate the Theravadin tradition with Hinayana. The three yanas are an Indian / Tibetan approach. The Theravadin tradition stands on its own and incorporates compassion and is a complete path.
This is my understanding of the Buddhist approach to suffering. In terms of Buddhist philosophy, we can say with certainty that suffering is not a fundamental element of human experience — it is created. Buddha nature and the joy that is experiences when Buddha nature is realized is uncreated. You can disagree with that — as you do — but then you are not a Buddhist.
I think the first sentence of your post gives the game away. I never said suffering was more fundamental to Buddhism than the cessation of suffering. I said suffering was more fundamental than joy, or happiness. There’s a big difference. Or at least, if you don’t think there’s a big difference, then that’s where our difference lies. Certainly in traditional texts sukha is treated very differently from dukkhanirodha, or even nibbāna itself. You won’t see the Pali texts identify nirvana with sukha. Indeed I think you’re addressing a related point yourself in a comment above when you note that the cessation of suffering is different from the pursuit of worldly happiness.
Suffering and its cessation are equally important in Buddhism, I’m quite ready to admit: the Third Noble Truth matters as much as the First. But the cessation of suffering leads to something quite different from joy – it is something beyond both suffering and joy, or at least that’s the best way we can characterize it with our limited words.
In my view, to cease suffering entirely is also to cease joy. Is that a Buddhist view? Well, some Buddhists would likely agree with me on the point, and some wouldn’t. Mahāyāna texts are more likely than Theravāda to describe liberation as joyful; bodhisattvahood seems more joyful, in a sense, than nirvana. But then bodhisattvahood is also described as sorrowful: the bodhisattva still suffers in some sense because of his great compassion for all the other suffering beings. The reason his suffering is said to end, as far as I can tell, is that he (unlike ordinary beings) can recognize – at a deeply felt emotional level – that suffering and joy are illusions, and so in some sense not really feel them anymore.
Thanks, Amod. This is an interesting topic to me.
I think Buddhism is sometimes misconstrued as a religion that is focused on negatives because of misconceptions about the First Noble Truth and misinterpretations about the meaning of “emptiness”. I think it is fair to speculate that practitioners such as Jigme Gyalwai Nyugu and Patrul Rinpoche and H.H. Khyentse R. who each spent decades in solitary retreat were not suffering the entire time — but were drawn to retreat and had an experience of mahasukha or joy in their practice.
Vajrayana Buddhism in particular talks about the union of bliss and emptiness. From Maitreya’s Uttaratantra shastra through Vajrayana teachings, the concept of a basic ground of non-dual goodness is important. And I believe that this experience is associated with unconditioned joy.
My teachers have preferred to use the word joy rather than happiness. I think this is because there is less of a sense of ownership with joy. “He who bends to himself a joy does the winged life destroy.” Joy also has a sense of sadness to it — like the feeling of watching a beautiful sunset as it changes and fades. I am not sure that the intense compassion of the bodhisattva is that far from a sense of joy.
It is interesting to talk about.
But what is ‘real’ as used in these discussions? No standard use of ‘real’ applies. I mean that it is not like ‘real butter’ or ‘a real rolex’. Even if a substance turns out not to be real in those cases it is at least a real fake. The real might be taken to be the non-contingent and necessary or the uncontradicted in the three moments of time – past, present and future. The use of ‘real’ and the examples of ‘unreal’ assure us that we are in the area of the analogy and stipulative definition. Moreover in the case of advaita it is said that although there is such reality you cannot experience it.
Are the Paulists who impugn Sankara and Santideva on their lack of alterity in fact going on the basis of the ordinary acceptation of the notion of the real and not what is meant by those sages. The vertiginous thought occurs that though they mean different things by the ‘real’ we could not tell if it came to pass that we achieved realisation.
Thank you for this post. I really like it. Skholiast pointed me to it just now. I’ve read (and loved) Parfit’s book but I didn’t know about Siderits’ book, so thanks for that among many other things.
Thank you for the kind words, Tim. Welcome to the blog, and I hope you stick around. I suspect you’ll find a lot that interests you here – I left a note on your blog that mentions a few posts in particular, related to this topic.
Pingback: On Śāntideva’s anti-politics | Love of All Wisdom
Pingback: Value beyond obligation | Love of All Wisdom