At my Indian wedding, the ceremony referred at length to becoming gṛhastha: that is, entering the householder stage of life. This turned out to be truer than intended: my wife and I are in the final stages of buying a house. We will close, and move, over the next couple of weeks, and I will be taking a break from writing Love of All Wisdom during that time. I expect to return near the end of September.
Until then I’d like to leave you with this. I recently stumbled on a wonderful old post of Skholiast’s where, in response to a query from Gary Smith, he lists a number of short and pithy theses about what it is he believes. It looked to me like a useful exercise. I’d like to try it here myself. Most of this has been said elsewhere, by me or by someone else or both, with actual argument to justify it. But I thought it might be helpful to attempt a pithy summary in a single place.
1. There is truth in everything.
2. There are no easy answers. Or self-evident truths.
3. The world is filled with perennial questions that recur over and over in separate times and places. It is also perennially filled with multiple different answers to those questions.
4. Finding the right answers to contested questions requires a process of transcending and including.
5. We must always start our inquiries from where we are. That doesn’t mean we should end there.
6. If you endorse a contradiction you are endorsing something false. You’re not likely to create the effects you want either.
7. To a question like “Is there a God?”, the answers of which we should be most suspicious are “Yes” and “No”.
8. Good and bad are real, not imaginary. That much is clear. What makes them real is a harder question.
9. Some truths are universal, but if we can ever find them, it will be by means of our cultural particularity.
10. The world is always more complex than anything we can say about it, but to understand is always to simplify.
11. Certain concepts, like “religion”, “Hinduism”, and “phlogiston”, obscure more than they clarify. For this reason, these particular concepts are generally better off not used. This is not the case for most concepts.
12. The rapid discoveries of natural science stand to change and modify many of the great ideas put forth over the centuries. They stand to invalidate far fewer of them.
13. The idea that all true or legitimate knowledge must be empirically testable is not itself empirically testable, and it is therefore self-refuting. This cannot be stressed enough.
14. To the questions of what is genuinely good and bad and what makes empirical knowledge possible, our best guides are the various traditions of philosophical inquiry that have endured for centuries – as long as we bear in mind that they all disagree with each other.
15. Virtues are means between vices, but a specific kind of mean. A virtue is a synthesis of the truth in the vices. A mere compromise between vices can be still more vicious than either vice by itself.
16. Justice is just as much a mean as any other virtue. Taking too little can be as serious a problem as taking too much.
17. One can lead a good and flourishing life without participating in politics. Political participation can make a life better, or worse.
18. The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change yourself. But that’s not the only point.
19. Active questioning is the path to truth. It is not necessarily the path to happiness. Both matter.
20. 20% of everything I believe is wrong. I just don’t know which 20%.
Nice exercise! (BTW: my favourites are no. 10 and no. 13)
Re. no. 16: what do you mean by taking too much justice?
Thank you. I phrased #16 confusingly, I realize now. I didn’t mean taking too little or too much justice; I meant taking fewer goods (honour, property, etc.) than one should. That one was an imagined retort to Grotius; he says justice is not a mean because taking fewer goods than you’re entitled to is even better to than taking the right amount. More on that here: https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2009/06/justice-as-a-mean/
Congratulations on your imminent elevation to the ranks of homeowners!
You appreciate, of course, that this is one of those transitions that tests your assumptions about who is “us” and who is “them”.
Best wishes!
Thanks, Jim. Yeah, I can see that. Being an adult is weird.
Still need to thrash out #8 with you over some drinks some time. Good and Bad certainly can be real – but only in respect to a given objective.
It seems to me that the problem of limited resources means that those objectives and thus the perception of good and bad must necessarily differ between disparate observers.
Regarding #17, engagement in society at some level is nearly unavoidable in a crowded world.
Quiet disengagement economically acts as a form of tacit endorsement of the status quo – which is seen as a valuable asset by those who wish to maintain or strengthen their grip on those who would resist their dominance over society. Thus the emphasis behind political disengagement tactics, such as voter disenfranchisement.
Disenfranchised voters may be exiting politics – but they can’t escape economics, which is exactly where their rulers want them.
In other words, you can lead a pleasant life without engaging in politics – but by doing so you may be making others suffer by your tacit consent and economically reinforcement of a corrupt system, if that is the status quo.
As Heisenberg’s principles suggest, there really is no such thing as an uninvolved observer.
Of course we can take that in a non-economic direction as well.
If slavery were still alive and well in the US today, would you still consider it Good to remain politically disengaged? How about if you lived in Germany, 1938?
What’s the threshold for societal injustice, where quiet acquiescence goes from being acceptable, to being evil?
I presume that there is one, or are you suggesting that you could tacitly accept any evil done in the name of the society to which you belong?
Hello! Just found your blog. I liked your summary of the points and I’ll follow the link to that site.
You wrote from 2009;
“Rather, Hinduism gets a worse rap than Christianity overall because scholars are too timid, often for reasons of career self-preservation, to say all the positive things about Hinduism that they do about Christianity. There are countless well regarded academic programs, articles and other institutions that specialize in Christian theology – but it is an act of courage to acknowledge that one specializes in Buddhist or Hindu theology. (Even my own milder self-portrait – that I specialize in “constructive” Buddhist studies rather than “theology,” learning from the tradition critically and thinking with it as an outsider – has cost me at least one academic job. And that was just the job where the search committee told me this fact directly; I strongly suspect there were other cases where my positive view of Buddhism got me taken off the list as well, they just didn’t happen to tell me about it.)”
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I was wondering why a positive view of Buddhism would have cost you an academic job? Are positive views of religion in general viewed with suspicion? If so why?
Were the situations you describe above because the other academics did not like Buddhism in particular? If so, why?
Do they not realize that job discrimination on the basis of religion is illegal? Is religious discrimination common in the academic world?