Tags
AAR, academia, Edward Said, Glenn Wallis, Gregory Schopen, religion, Thomas Kuhn, Vasudha Narayanan
I’ve been wanting to follow up on an earlier post and ask just what science, natural science, really is. I realize that the concept “science” has two separate and distinguishable, though related, meanings. On one hand, “science” has a normative meaning – it names an ideal, of how our investigations into the empirical world should be conducted. On the other, it has a descriptive meaning – it names a set of institutions with a history, inhabited by fallible human beings who, often as not, fail to live up to that ideal even though they are supposed to live up to it.
The first, normative meaning is the one with the most philosophical significance. This is the one with normative weight; it is in this sense that, if we call something unscientific, we are saying something bad about it. I haven’t pinned down the details of this normative sense as much as I’d like yet, but I think it involves testing falsifiable hypotheses, making controlled experiments, controlling for variables, and above all rejecting hypotheses that turn out to be falsified. I expect to say more about this normative sense of science in the near future.
Overall I think it is that first (normative) sense of science that’s most relevant to philosophical inquiry, inquiry about the nature of reality and how we should live in it. But the second sense also matters, if only because we need to isolate it as a way of understanding the first. In this descriptive sense, science is what scientists do, and scientists are people who have been trained in academic science departments. This is the realm where scientists fudge data to fit their own political agenda or that of their corporate funders. It is also what Thomas Kuhn famously catalogued in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where the consensus among scientists moves much more randomly and haphazardly than the normative ideal should indicate. There is something about science in the first sense that is (I would argue) inherently good; this is not the case about science in the second sense. A man who has a PhD in biology but regularly falsifies data to fit his preconceptions is a scientist in only the second (descriptive) sense, not the first (normative) sense.
What strikes me about this distinction, though, is that much the same distinction could be made about any given “religion.” Not about “religion” as such, for this pernicious category is almost never itself taken as an ideal, but about the various traditions it is taken to encompass: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism. When one Christian tells another “that’s not the Christian thing to do,” she is speaking in the normative sense. She is not saying “you are not acting in the manner of historical Christians, such as the Borgia popes and the Inquisition.” She is saying “you are not living up to Christian ideals”: ideals of charity, hope, forgiveness.
And so likewise in Buddhism. I have a longstanding beef with scholars of Buddhism like Gregory Schopen, who wishes that Buddhist “texts would have been judged significant only if they could be shown to be related to what religious people actually did.” For Schopen, scholars of Buddhism should study Buddhism in the descriptive sense, and the descriptive sense alone. And Schopen’s view predominates in the field; this is why Glenn Wallis could write his Buddhist Manifesto only after he had left the mainstream academy. (Thus the highly problematic, but still predominant, view that anyone who calls herself a Buddhist is a Buddhist.)
The same applies to the study of most other traditions, as when scholars of “Hindu” traditions follow Vasudha Narayanan’s populist injunction to study “lentils” rather than “liberation.” It is sad that such a view prevails in religious studies, though fortunately it does not prevail in the study of science. As I noted before, if the study of science were to take its methodological cue from Schopen and Narayanan, the sociology of creationism would be held more valuable than evolutionary biology. (On this prevailing approach, even ethics starts to get used to mean the study of what other people do, irrespective of what actually is good or bad.)
The one tradition that gets an exemption from all this is Christianity. Since its early days as the National Association of Biblical Instructors, the American Academy of Religion – the main North American academic institution for the study of “religious” traditions, the organization which one must join if one wishes a scholarly job in the field – has embraced a large number of Christian theologians. They get to talk about Christianity in the normative sense, about what it is to be a good Christian. There are plenty of anti-theological scholars who would like to see the Christian theologians expunged from the AAR, but the theologians are much too powerful and entrenched; the anti-theologians mainly exert their weight in the studies of other traditions. The result is a division of labour that is Orientalist in Said’s pejorative sense: Christianity, and no other tradition, can be examined as a normative ideal, a way that people should be and not merely a way that they are. In that respect, in the North American academy, it is Christianity and Christianity alone that can be studied as science is, with a normative eye to its values and truth claims as well as a descriptive eye to its history and sociology.
I once battled to gain this kind of respect for non-Christian traditions; no longer striving to be a professor, I no longer care so much about the dysfunction of the profession. I go over the point because I think it’s instructive in thinking both about what science is and what “religious” traditions are: the grubby history of scientists as a profession does not in itself tarnish the ideal of science for which most of them have strived, just as Schopen’s research showing Buddhist monks owned property does not in itself tarnish the ideal of the propertyless monk free from worldly attachments. Human beings are flawed, and regularly fail to live up to their ideals. That fact does not make the ideals unworthy.
elisa freschi said:
Amod, I do not know the AAR-milieu and you are surely right in the analysis. But why should one abandon altogether the descriptive concerns? Why not studying *also* lentils, once the right to deal with Buddhism as a coherent ideal is granted?
Amod Lele said:
Oh, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest the descriptive study should be abandoned. It is well worth doing the sociology of creationism, and the sociology of biological science itself; I just don’t think that these are as important as actual biology.
JimWilton said:
Amod, your post raises the broader issue of who is the proper teacher of a tradition. Western academia, as far as I can tell, actively discounts the thought of academics who are part of a tradition or at least does not give these academics any particular deference.
I recall attending a conference at parents weekend at Bard College on “Reason and Faith”. The young Buddhist studies professor joked that her students sometimes seemed to be seeking spiritual insights in her classes. She said “Why should I have to be a Buddhist to study Buddhism? You don’t have to be a rock to study geology.”
The Western approach has its strengths, including the encouraging of critical inquiry. However, it also creates absurdities — where Buddhist practitioners with deep understanding of the philosophy and actual practice of Buddhism — often from childhood learning directly from accomplished masters — are not offered academic positions because they lack Western academic credentials and are, perhaps, not perceived to be objective (whatever that means).
All ritual in Buddhism is not simply superfluous cultural baggage. But it might take a practitioner to understand the efficacy of a Zen oriyoki practice or a tantric sadhana practice. Certainly Glen Wallis doesn’t have a clue.
Amod Lele said:
Well, this question is fought over quite a bit, and probably deserves to be, since it follows from such basic foundations. If one believes that the tradition is a bunch of baloney and hogwash, then someone with experience in practising it is no better qualified to teach it than anyone else. I have some respect for that position when it’s explicitly claimed and argued (as several do on this blog); my problem is when academics act as if they’re assuming that position but aren’t willing to defend it.
FYI, as far as I know, Glenn Wallis is a serious practitioner. The school where he now teaches (the Won Institute of Graduate Studies is one of the few North American academies teaching Buddhism where meditation is integrated directly into the curriculum.
JimWilton said:
If a tradition is deemed to be baloney and hogwash, then it shouldn’t be taught at all. Or at most taught descriptively as an historical study.
Amod Lele said:
Well that’s my point – teaching non-Christian traditions descriptively as a historical (or sociological) study is all that most religion departments aspire to do. In doing so, they effectively act as if the tradition is indeed baloney and hogwash, though they are usually far too timid to defend such a claim.
JimWilton said:
The other possibility is that a teacher who is not a part of a religious tradition has enough respect for the tradition to describe the tradition without imposing his or her views. I don’t think that needs to be viewed as timidity. In fact, one could view a thumbs up or thumbs down approach on a two to six thousand year tradition or culture that has inspired artists and poets and rulers and common folk alike as more than a little arrogant.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t have philosophical debates. But that is wrestling with issues on a personal level and trying to understand and draw wisdom from a tradition that has practical application.
Neocarvaka said:
There is also a longstanding tradition (e.g., Carvaka)of exposing nonsense and falsehood bellowed out from “holy pulpits” or “holy lecterns” and the chicanery of ritualistic concoctions of cunning and lascivious priesthood, e.g., Carvaka critique of the Vedic Asvamedha ritual involving bestiality.
It is a fallacy to think that just because a framework of beliefs and practices has been around for a couple of thousand years that critical inquiry into its truth-claims and the rationality and moral status of its practices must be prevented or diluted. This critical inquiry cannot be confined or restricted to mere interpretation or exegesis.
Thill said:
I would add that there are many examples, across time and society, of individuals attaining new levels of understanding, insight, and experience after they cast off the shackles of adherence to tradition. Of course, this has happened in most cases after a protracted inquiry within the bounds of a tradition.
“The traditions of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx wrote. But the others before and since him must have felt it in their bones and brains at some critical juncture in their quest for freedom or liberation.
Adapting Nietzsche’s famous remark that one repays a teacher poorly if one remains merely a pupil, I would say that one repays a tradition poorly if one remains merely its adherent.
JimWilton said:
Vivid metaphor from Marx and very apt for a revolutionary.
I agree with what you say. In any genuine tradition it is necessary to test it, make it one’s own and eventually embody the tradition (or abandon the tradition and find a new path). Without this, a tradition dies — becoming a set of rote beliefs and rituals without meaning.
My point is that it is rarely justifiable as an outsider to reject an entire culture or wisdom tradition that is not his or her own. That approach tends to say more about the preconceptions and fixations of the outsider than it does about the tradition being criticized.
Thill said:
The oddest thing about Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is its thesis that paradigm shifts in science cannot be judged progressive. It is bizarre for a historian of astronomy to hold that the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system cannot be judged progressive. It would also be totally absurd to maintain this view in the history of Western medicine.
Your descriptive sense of “science” must include not only its methods of inquiry, confirmation, and falsification (One of Popper’s fallacies is the false opposition he set up between confirmation and falsification in science. Both are critical to science. Who would be inane enough to think that the mere rejection of false statements or elimination of false theories constitutes growth of knowledge in science or technology?) but also its growing or expanding structure of knowledge. This provides the indispensable basis for the normative sense or appeal of “science”.
Pingback: Humility in science and other traditions | Love of All Wisdom
Pingback: Can collectivities be virtuous? | Love of All Wisdom