Tags
Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, G.W.F. Hegel, Jay Garfield, Madhyamaka, Maria Heim, Pudgalavāda, Śāntideva, Wilfrid Sellars
The conflict between Buddhism and qualitative individualism is a major difficulty for my own philosophy. In addressing that conflict, there is one approach that has repeatedly stuck out at me. I don’t think it actually solves the problem, but it may be a step towards a solution.
That step is to build on the similarities between the Buddhist conventional/ultimate distinction and Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific image. Both of these dichotomies are focused on the human person or self: at the conventional (sammuti/vohāra) or manifest level, selves and their differences are real and important, and stories can be told; at the ultimate (paramattha) or scientific level, selves disappear, reduced to smaller particles that form a more fundamental level of explanation.
We may note here a key way that Sellars departs from at least Buddhaghosa’s Buddhism. He agrees with Buddhaghosa’s view that the ultimate/scientific level is an important respect truer than the conventional/manifest. But the further difference is very important: for Sellars, the manifest image is necessary for ethics (and probably aesthetics and politics.) It is at the manifest level that ethical or normative claims make sense; the scientific image is normatively inert. Cells may be more complex than atoms, but they’re not better; they just are. Natural science has not found ways in which concepts of good and bad help us to explain anything. Once upon a time, when God was the best available scientific explanation for biological diversity, they might have. But that is no longer remotely the case. So, for Sellars, we need the manifest image, with its less scientific approach, in order to be able to speak about good and bad.
I suspect that Sellars is right about this. I am coming to believe that we do indeed need to posit both a conventional essentialist level of reality and an ultimate reductionist one – and that that ultimate level of reality is normatively inert. All value, all goodness and badness – ethical, aesthetic, soteriological – exist at the conventional level. Buddhaghosa would not agree with me on that point: for him the dhammas, the ultimate simples to which reality is reducible, are intrinsically laden with the qualities of kusala and akusala, good and bad. Yet I think Śāntideva and his Madhyamaka fellows probably would agree with me, and with Sellars. Their conception of the ultimate is very different – it is non-conceptual, anabhilāpya, beyond words – but that also makes it beyond value. Śāntideva says at Bodhicaryāvatāra IX.11 that puṇya and pāpa, goodness and badness, arise only in one who has illusions. In that respect Śāntideva turns out closer to the Pudgalavādins, who argued that ideas of good and bad karma could make no sense without the concept of a person. (Students encountering Buddhism often ask, “if there’s no self, what gets reincarnated?” It is a good question, and one that also applies to a naturalized karma without rebirth.)
Sellars’s scientific reality, then, is somewhere between Buddhaghosa’s and Śāntideva’s conceptions of ultimate truth: like Buddhaghosa’s it is describable in reductionist terms, but like Śāntideva’s it is not a source of normativity. Goodness and badness are part of the manifest, conventional, level, the level where stories can be told. And it is at that conventional level where the qualitative individualist concept of a true self – like any Aristotelian essence – can exist.
When we put non-self in Sellarsian terms in this way, I think a couple things may follow. It allows room for our preexisting reasons for action, which I think are essential starting points for us to have any reasons for action at all. I don’t accept Śāntideva’s famous argument that we should act selflessly because there is no self, because – as Stephen Harris pointed out – without the existence of beings it is no longer clear why we should do anything at all, including prevent suffering (“no one disputes that” is not a sufficient answer). Rather, ethical action needs to start from our preexisting reasons at the conventional level – as in some sense it already does in Buddhist societies. And that conventional level may well have room for qualitative individualism.
The thorny question that perplexes any such approach, of course, is the first question that Hegel would ask: what is the relation between these two levels of reality? That is not an easy question to answer, for Buddhaghosa or for Sellars or even for Śāntideva. Hegel would take that question as a fatal weakness in all of their systems, such that both levels must be fully incorporated into something higher. I am not sure that I agree with him, but am also not sure I have a way to answer that criticism. It is likely the next question I need to wrestle with.
All of this is why I have found it so important to disagree at such length with Maria Heim’s and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s non-ontological reading of Buddhaghosa. I do wish they were right that Buddhaghosa sees the ultimate truth as no better than the conventional; it would be much easier for me to agree with him if they were so. I just find that Buddhaghosa’s writings do not support that interpretation. On the other hand, I find it of central importance for a Buddhist philosopher to realize that Buddhaghosa is indeed talking about how things actually are, not merely giving a guide to what one might encounter in meditation practice – and I find plenty in Buddhaghosa’s writings to support the claim that he is doing just that.
A relevant final note to all of this: I am aware that Jay Garfield recently came out with an edited volume on Sellars and Buddhist philosophy. As of the time of my writing this post I have not yet read it, but I am excited to do so. Several articles in the book look directly relevant to everything I’ve said here, and I am confident that my mature position on this topic will be shaped by it. But I thought it would be well worth posting this first because I came to my own Sellarsian understanding of Buddhism entirely without that book or its contributors, and I think it is helpful to show the world what an independently arrived Sellarsian Buddhism might look like – especially if my position then changes as a result of having read it.
Amod, I like to think of the relative and absolute realities not as separate realities that then somehow have to be related to each other, but as separate viewpoints on one reality. Each viewpoint is useful for different purposes, but there is no reason to privledge one realtity as truer than the other. Reality is too intricately complex to be described by an single language or viewpoint. In some ways, this is parallel to physics, chemistry, and biology as all being descriptive languages of reality that are useful for different purposes, but it makes no sense to say one descriptive language is “more true” than the other. Buddhist relative reality is the useful place where we negotiate the 10,000 things in their unique separateness, and absolute reality is where we go to appreciate the all-togetherness of things. One allows for ethics, the other allows for a broader perspective beyond ethics. A martian coming to earth could perhaps watch human history with its wars, plagues, betrayals, and cruelties as being natural and aesthetically beautiful in the same way that we can appreciate the power of tornados, earthquakes, and volcanos–or the relationship between predator and prey in the jungle–without resorting to moral categories. In Zen, we do not privilege the absolute over the relative–they are, as we say, “not two.” Those who get stuck in one-sided attachment to the absolute are said to be suffering from “Zen sickness.”
I think that is a perspective often found in East Asian Buddhism – Tiantai as well as Zen. It is very different from early South Asian views (Śāntideva’s Madhyamaka as well as Buddhaghosa’s Theravāda). The “not two” is relevant here – “nondual” is a literal English translation of advaita, the term for the school of Śaṅkara who was one of Buddhism’s biggest Indian foes. For Buddhaghosa, the one descriptive language is indeed truer than another in the sense that it is a truer description to say “the earth revolved to the point that the sun became visible from our vantage point” than to say “the sun rose up”.
I think there is something appealing about a more nondual view, but I’ll admit also finding it a little puzzling: if the ultimate truth isn’t any truer than the conventional, then why do we even bother with it at all, when the conventional is so much easier to understand?
“if the ultimate truth isn’t any truer than the conventional, then why do we even bother with it at all, when the conventional is so much easier to understand?’
Its value, Amod is that it balances out the one-sidedness of our everyday naively essentialist view of thing-ness and separateness. Think about how even a brief experience of unity consciousness and transcendence–whether spontaneous, through meditation, or through the ingestion of psychedelic substances–can alter the frame of meaning-making of a person for a lifetime. People feel these brief transcendent moments are among the most important experiences of their lives and they feel changed in certain meaninful ways in their wake. Neverthess, I would never want to make the ontological claim that the psychedelic experiecne is more “real” than everyday experience. It does serve as a corrective, however, that opens up wider realms of meaning. I understand that none of this is in Buddhaghosa’s Buddhism, and indeed, it enters Buddhism as Mahayana and Vedanta grow up together and swap ideas–but speaking from the point of view of my own lived experience and not from the point of view of the Pali canon, the nondual view seems to make more sense to me.
So my first reaction to this point is to note how much I think the concept of “experience” is overused and misleading as a central interpretive concept for Buddhism – some thinkers, like Candrakīrti, actually warn us away from relying on it. My Buddhaghosa posts have warned against an overemphasis on it. I don’t know Zen as well, but Robert Sharf has argued that this is very much true even there: the emphasis on experience a modern addition to Zen, and the concepts used to describe it are not used that way or otherwise rarely found in premodern texts. In the context of the present discussion, I think the idea of ultimate truth had relatively little to do even with meditative experiences, let alone psychedelic ones.
But having said all that, it is true that the idea of ultimate truth is often employed in the sense of a corrective – especially given that our usual ways of perceiving the world, unguided by ultimate truth, are so one-sided, so oriented toward pursuits of fleeting worldly pleasures and petty anger. And your point about the different natural sciences is relevant too. Even physicists are unlikely to be so bold as to argue that physics is more true than biology, and biologists certainly wouldn’t agree with them. It may be a matter of different levels of analysis – and that point is relevant to Sellars’s side of things too, in that it may be a problem that he divides between the manifest and the scientific image as if the latter is one thing. Physics and biology really don’t have the same view of the world – the latter does seem to require some degree of holism for its explanations to make any sense, and some would even argue it requires teleology, which isn’t the case for physics. A lot to think about…
What I have always found puzzling about the conventional/ultimate distinction in Buddhism is that, unlike the ultimate, the conventional seems to immediately disgregate into a multiplicity of levels. We see this in the tradition itself, with different schools emphasizing different understandings of what the “best” conventional may be. And we find this in the natural sciences too, where each science is in a way the “best” conventional description of its own chosen field, as you well mention about physics, chemistry and biology being all useful descriptive languages of reality.
One solution to the problem of the compatibility of non-self and quantitative individualism, then, might be to look for “one” (not “the”) level, or description of conventional reality, that is subtle enough for the self (as Buddhism conceives of it) to be already negated, but where one can still make sense of quantitative individualism.
I think, in classical Buddhist terms, this level of description correspond to what is traditionally called the five aggregates. These five (form, feeling, etc., up to consciousness) are a dissection of the person (pudgala) into five categories of momentary entitities, linked together by causal threads, but which are distinct in themselves (no-one confuses one’s bodily form with one’s feelings, etc.). So this mere multiplicity and inner dissimilarity of elements within the aggregates is enough to show that the reification of an individual self, which would have to fuse them all, can only be a gross conceptual projection: we ascribe unity (and permanence) to what is just a collection of diverse momentary entities which “hang together” due to their causal interrelatedness.
Crucially, the individual self that is negated here is the one that, per Buddhist thought, binds us to samsaric existence. Without such a reification of the stream-of-aggregates, the whole edifice of klesha (emotionality related to an “I”) and karma (actions moved by it) does not arise.
Yet, at the level of thought were we (conventionally) accept the five aggregates, I think qualitative individualism is still tenable. One can still have different propensities and potentials, based not on a conceptually reified “fat I”, but which simply arise in one’s constitution, causally linked to our past. Sometimes the bare sense of selfhood which results from the continuity of conscioussness is called the “mere I”. I find it quite reassurring that even fully liberated beings are not clones or photocopies of each other. One may teach widely, another may lead an ordinary life and yet another may enjoy the life of a hermit… one may have artistic skills, another may not… and so on.
And so for those of use who are are not yet fully liberated from our exaggerated sense of “I”, we can derive from this a kind of ethical guideline, not only not to allow our thinking and actions to be guided by self-delusion, but also to try to make the best use of our pre-existing propensities and potentials. That is, non-self and quantitative individualism together.
Thanks, Roger, and welcome. I don’t think this is how conventional and ultimate are traditionally understood: in most abhidhammic texts or Buddhaghosa’s, it is persons in the usual sense who are conventional; the aggregates are the ultimate. Mādhyamikas don’t view the aggregates as ultimate, but I’m not sure they’re really conventional either; Madhyamaka tends to deemphasize the whole process of reductionism in favour of an ineffable ultimate.
That said, I think it’s reasonable to take an approach something like what you describe, referring to a “mere I” rather than a “fat I”. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to me that Buddhists and qualitative individualists can agree that the self is divisible, mutable and not autonomous – such a self at the conventional level, seems to be more amenable to a division into aggregates at the ultimate.
Thanks Amod, I’ve been reading your blog with interest for a while already! I’ve mostly studied Buddhism from Tibetan sources; Tibetan Buddhism aligns itself with Madhyamika, although one only has to dig a little to find plenty of Yogachara influence. At least for Tibetans it’s quite standard to consider the 5 aggregates as part of relative truth. I suppose that could be surprising if one is steeped in Buddhaghosha :-)
Just to clarify, I didn’t come up with the concept of a “mere I”. I’ve seen and heard it mentioned several times within the Tibetan tradition. A quick Google search for the Tibetan words “bdag tsam” finds quotes by the likes of Tsongkhapa and even the current Dalai Lama. I think it’s a rather subtle, and perhaps underappreciated concept.
Khenpo Ngawang Palzang in “A Guide to the Words of My Perfect Teacher” (in the section on the two truths according to Chittamatra, at the end of the chapter on bodhichitta) mentions the related concept of a “mere relative truth”, which refers to phenomena as they appear to advanced practitioners (from the Mahayana “Path of Seeing” onwards) when they are not meditating. This “mere relative” is here equated with the specifically Yogachara/Chittamatra concept of the “pure dependent”, a subdivision of the Yogachara “dependent nature”.
So at least in these strands of the Buddhist tradition quite a lot of thought seems to have gone into looking at what is left of appearances (including the “I”), when they are not over-reified in the ways that are refuted by the view of non-self.