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After I had my first epiphany in Thailand, being changed by Buddhist ideas, I thought for a while that philosophy was the key to a good and happy life – that what we really needed to live well was to understand and think about the big questions of life. I see that attitude now as a young man’s naïve enthusiasm. As I read more Hegel, I’m particularly struck by how little guidance there is in there for living well. Living well requires reflection, yes, but above all the kind of reflection that comes out of practice. And I don’t primarily mean the meditation and meditation-like practices to which Yavanayāna Buddhists so often reduce the idea of “practice”, but the likes of therapy, exercise, and the very fact of going through daily life and learning from one’s experience and mistakes.
So what, one may well ask, is the point of philosophy? What good is it to follow the difficult and complex questions of philosophy, to try to understand the Hegelian dialectic or deontic logic or the Abhidhamma? Is it just a parlour game that happens to give intellectual pleasure to a few Aspergians with their peculiar obsessions?
Philosophy is an intellectual pleasure for most of us who study it, of course, and it would be transparently false to deny that that’s a main reason for doing so. But it’s not the only one. For me, the continuing value of philosophy is that it alone is able to find truth at the highest and widest level – truth about the basic and fundamental questions which we usually take as settled, but about which we may turn out to be wrong. For truth about many of these questions, people typically turn – rightly – either to natural science or to the traditions we call “religious”, sometimes separately but often enough in some combination.
It is in that combination, I submit, that philosophy really becomes necessary. The traditions we label “religious” have a hard time understanding each other; it is often even harder for natural science to reach any sort of understanding with them. When scientists try to speak with those from traditions we call “religious”, they typically end up talking past each other. But philosophy, at least, is something that both have reason to respect; it is the common ground on which truth can be established between them. So too, “interreligious dialogue” too often winds up in the mode of mere conflict resolution without getting close to truth: it might stop people from killing each other (certainly a worthy goal), but they remain as convinced as ever that the other is entirely wrong. It is philosophy, especially with a dialectical method, is able to find a deeper understanding that comes closer to the truth.
Philosophy, then, is the way that we can find a truth broader and more universal than the ones from narrower traditions. And yes, that list of “narrower traditions” does include natural science, which must necessarily do a miserable job of explaining value, and likewise cannot answer the epistemological questions about how we can trust empirical evidence and establish natural laws in the first place.
But there’s another important question to ask: why seek truth at all? For some people, that question would be disingenuous. The advocate of scientific atheism who believes it to be the truth, or the advocate of evangelical Christianity or Nichiren Buddhism who believes it to be the truth, already has an answer to this question. Such people already believe that finding ultimate truth is important; they just disagree about what that truth is. It is my contentious contention that philosophy will help them find a truth they do not now possess; they may dispute that contention, but they are agreed on the importance of looking for truth in the first place.
Yet there do exist people who simply don’t try to seek truth at all. They are purely pragmatic; they live their life just as it is and try to be good and happy people according to standards that have worked for them all their life, and don’t question whether those standards are true in any sense larger than that effectiveness. Do such people need philosophy?
Well, no, they don’t – not normally. Most people in history have not been philosophers and their lives have often been just fine.
Philosophy comes to matter for normal people when their normal way of being starts to be a problem. When the lifelong believer is rattled by suffering enough to doubt her faith. When the atheist starts being plagued by thoughts about deeper purposes in the universe or life than he has so far imagined. When the interfaith couple want not merely to tolerate each other’s differences, but to really understand each other in terms that make sense to themselves. When the life of a young utilitarian political activist reveals itself as fruitless.
When you see the problems with your normal way of being, then you need to think about it. You need to start asking the big questions that you didn’t need to ask before, questions often ridiculed but essential to someone in that position: “What is the meaning of life?” “What am I doing here?” “Is this all there is?” “What should I be doing with myself?” “What do I really believe in?”
Science will not tell you the answers to these questions, nor should it. The traditions we call “religions” have their answers, and for people immersed in those traditions those answers are good enough – until this point, where the answers they have been comfortable with start to break down. It is philosophy – whatever its tradition – that has proposed answers to these questions, and more importantly, has given the reasons that can make those answers stick.
Great post!
I do think that you are unjustifiably dismissive of religion — you assume that philosophy is separate from religion, that religion is a belief system that will necessarily break down, and that a belief system that is less than complete in understanding the truth is to be rejected even if it may be expedient in cultivating good qualities such as compassion or generosity and resulting good actions.
Basically, I think you underestimate the power of habit. The problem with philosophy is that it is very difficult to think your way out of suffering. The mental habits that create suffering are deeply embedded. Some practices to reverse habitual patterns are required. These can be invented on an ad hoc basis based on disciplined practices of giving to cultivate generosity or cultivating patience (count to ten) to address aggression. But it is very hard to invent these on our own — partly because we often don’t see our own faults clearly enough (you can see this if you have ever observed an angry man rationalize his anger). For these, a system is very helpful and religions offer established systems that can provide support, support that is wholly lacking to a student of Western philosophy.
Hi Jim – I think we may disagree less than you think. I find little to reject in your second paragraph. I agree that non-intellectual practices of some sort are often essential to beat bad habits, and established traditions are often good at providing these. (I like the way you phrase the last sentence as well, that the support is lacking “to a student of Western philosophy” – the Greeks had a number of such practices, but they died out over time after the rise of Christianity.) I probably was too dismissive toward meditation-like practices in the first paragraph because I think there’s a great overemphasis on them among contemporary Buddhists (and relatedly among Wilberians), but I do think they have a valuable place.
Where things get trickier is when you dispute “that a belief system that is less than complete in understanding the truth is to be rejected even if it may be expedient in cultivating good qualities such as compassion or generosity and resulting good actions.” Here, I think we may well be getting to one of the perennial questions: to what extent should truth be valued for its own sake, and not merely as a means to an end? A much thornier problem.
Thanks Amod. I do think our views are pretty close.
I do not think that in the short history of Buddhism in the West there is an overemphasis on meditation. But I do think there are some interesting differences. The first difference is that the the current generation of Buddhists in the West is almost entirely lay practitioners or householders. Nevertheless, these practitioners in many cases have received lineage transmissions for the full set of practices that Eastern monastics receive.
The second difference, I think, results from a broader Western viewpoint that values the cognitive or intellectual (mind) practices over devotional (heart) practices. Ultimately, in Buddhist teachings, the two are inseparable. Emptiness is not a dry, intellectual experience, but is suffused with devotion and compassion. However, practices designed to cultivate wisdom tend to fall into two categories: mind practices oriented toward insight, prajna or clear seeing (shamatha / vipashyana; shikantaza; resting in the nature of mind) and heart practices designed to shape the mind and to cultivate positive qualities — or to use more traditional buddhist language, to accumulate merit. Heart practices include lojong practices such as tonglen from the Kadampa tradition for cultivating compassion, mandala practices for cultivating generosity, prostrations for cultivating humility, guru yoga for cultivating devotion and Eastern layperson’s practices such as dana (giving), mantra, lineage prayers, etc.
I think that your perception that meditation is overemphasized in the West is a combination of a lay sangha practicing historically monastic practices and a cultural deemphasis on the more “religious” seeming traditional heart practices. This results in a narrow view of meditation as consisting of only cognitive, mind practices. The second of the developments (deemphasis on heart practices) is the one that is most problematic in terms of continuity of Buddhist lineages. These days we even have “secular Buddhists” doing mind practices and eschewing all Buddhist ritual and who even deny the veracity of fundamental concepts such as karma and rebirth.
Interesting perspective, Amod. Let me share what I think is an insight into the nature of philosophy that I have been mulling over these past few days after wading through a little Husserl and a little Krishnamurti. You have been warned. :D
>Philosophy comes to matter… When the lifelong
>believer is rattled by suffering enough to
>doubt her faith.
I doubt whether it is always or even usually provoked by suffering (philosophical thinking in normal people) or more by a natural bent of mind to seek out these aspects in what may otherwise appear to be mundane existence. It is this attitude by which the commonest quotidian event (buying vegetables, say) can be translated into a weighty tome on ethics and political economy. Also, the reflection engendered by suffering is hardly proportional to the pain experienced — which means that there is a golden mean even for pain.
But I digress: if we essentialise philosophical thinking as critical analysis, and criticism further as Doubt, it emerges that the conclusion of any analysis depends on Desire more than anything else. That the true queen of any inquiry is Satisfaction and not Objectivity. For how does one decide when to stop doubting? How was Moore so satisfied by merely showing us his hand that the external world is thereby proved? Is it truly possible to doubt everything even as one continues to live and buy vegetables? Or would doubt, if sincerely pursued to its never-ending horizon, lead eventually to annihilation? saMshayAtmA vinashyati of Gita fame comes to mind: rendered, for modern ears, as the observation that “a pervasively critical attitude effects gradual erosion of epistemic systems vital to optimal functioning of an organism”.
I’m quite sure this has been argued by someone somewhere, so, do you know any individual/school that has? And what’s your take on it?
I suppose a lot of these questions will depend on how we define certainty and doubt. I find what I know of Wittgenstein’s reflections on those topics utterly unpersuasive, but I think he’s right on that much, that we need to know what we mean when we talk about them. I’ve addressed the topics of certainty and doubt a number of times before but I do think I haven’t sat down with the topics enough to think about what those terms really mean, exactly. But in terms of what you’re asking, I’ve probably said the most about it here. I’m not sure where I would go to look further than that… Hume, I am told, said “practice refutes my doubts”, but I don’t think it’s the case that the doubts are refuted, put aside for the moment because there is so much else that must be thought about – and done – in the interim.
In the first place, there is great utility in philosophical inquiry, even for someone who does not innately care about the pursuit of truth. Consider a random handful of classic philosophical questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of justice? What does it take for a belief to be justified? Is the world we see illusion or reality? The answers to such questions cannot help but to have a critical impact on how one ought to live one’s life. Surely one should subject one’s intuitive beliefs about these things to critical scrutiny, and work hard to come as close to truth as possible. Many philosophical questions are fundamental to human life; the only reason it often does not seem that way is that people simply assume they know what the answers to these questions are, without ever daring to make a serious inquiry.
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