Tags
Aaron Stalnaker, Alasdair MacIntyre, architecture, Aristotle, ascent/descent, autobiography, chastened intellectualism, H.P. Lovecraft, identity, Ken Wilber, Mañjuśrī, Plato, Vasudha Narayanan
I opened Love of All Wisdom to the public, with three first posts, on 1 June 2009. That was ten years ago today.
In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity. A lot happens in that time. Ten years ago, Instagram, Snapchat and Lyft did not exist; Uber, Airbnb, the Chrome browser and the Android operating system were less than a year old. There had been no “Arab Spring” protests; Syria was a place one could go for a pleasant holiday seeing ancient historic sites. Barack Obama had just been inaugurated president of the USA a couple months before; Tony Blair had left office only two years before; Benedict XVI was still just halfway through his reign as pope. When I used the term “populism” to describe Thai politics, I was resurrecting an obscure term that had faded from mainstream political discourse, as if I’d been talking about irredentism. As for me, I was not married, did not own a home or a dog, and did not have a permanent job. I not only got a permanent job but got promoted to management; I got married and dealt with my wife’s cancer treatment. And I have kept blogging throughout. (It was essential that I moved to a biweekly schedule – the three posts a week with which I started in 2009 would be unthinkable for me now.)
I’d like to commemorate the occasion here by talking about how my own thought has changed over that course of time – linking back to many of the posts that catalogued those shifts. The most obvious change is that I now call myself a Buddhist, which I did not do when the blog began. But the identification itself, the calling myself a Buddhist, felt minor at the time: it was simply for the pragmatic purpose of deciding what kind of chaplain I would want if I needed one. As it turns out, I think my identification as a Buddhist has come with some significantly bigger shifts, some of which predated the identification, some of which came after. But I think it is fair to sum up my differences from ten years ago in the phrase: I was not a Buddhist then, and now I am.
One aspect of that shift is methodological. When I chose the title “Love of All Wisdom”, I think it carried with it a certain Wilberian optimism about somehow putting together all the philosophical traditions of the world. Thus I had long emphasized what I saw as perennial questions, of which the foremost were Ascent and Descent and intimacy and integrity, in the hopes of reaching a grand synthesis between them. But that project came to hit a wall. The traditions, I came to find, were too far apart in their questions as well as their answers. One can still love all wisdom, and I would like to think that I do. But one must stand apart from, disagree with, a great deal of it. Methodologically I moved from Wilber to MacIntyre; at the heart of that move was the idea that one must inhabit only some traditions, not all of them. One must choose, or better yet be chosen. And if there is one tradition that has intellectually chosen me for sure, it is Buddhism. That means that my difficulties with non-self become an urgent problem for me to address while, say, the Kantian advocacy of unconditional truth-telling fades further from view.
But that methodological shift has come with many substantive shifts: situating myself within Buddhism has come alongside concrete ways that I think my philosophy has, since 2009, become significantly more Buddhist. For one thing, I have largely embraced what I once, following Aaron Stalnaker, used to call chastened intellectualism: a position that “affirms the value of intellectual apprehension and reflection, but it questions the neutrality and absolute sovereignty of thinking.” (Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil 275) Likewise akrasia is the basic human condition: simply knowing that something is good is not nearly enough to get us to do it. It is really, really hard to be good. I don’t use the term “chastened intellectualism” nearly as much as I used to, because I feel little need to: at this point it’s obvious to me that human thought is systematically distorted by illusion, as Buddhist texts tell us it is, and the really weird thing is that anyone (like the classical rationalists) would ever have thought that the ego was master in its own house.
Knowing the difficulty of being good, in turn, suggests that practice is essential to getting there – practice that goes beyond simply thinking. So I engage in various Buddhist practices now that I did not when I began this blog, many of which I started during the difficult period of cancer treatment. These can include scriptural reading, but they also include a secularized but still Buddhist-derived mindfulness meditation, and they still include a nightly anuttarapūjā phrased as a prayer to Mañjuśrī. And the fact that I consider Mañjuśrī fictional does not trouble me nearly as much now as it once did: we need all the help we can get, and prayer as an ethically productive work of fiction is a big help.
This need for practices of ethical cultivation has led me to a greater respect for ritual in Buddhism and in general, what Vasudha Narayanan calls the “lentils” rather than “liberation” side of “religion”. I still don’t buy the reason often cited for a “lentil” approach, the populist criterion that something is more worthy of study merely because more people do it. But I have come, much more than I did in the old days, to appreciate “lentil” ritual for my own reasons. And these reasons are not just ethical but aesthetic: I think it’s very important to make room for the spectacular temples that had drawn me to Buddhism in the first place. Those temples seem to open up room for a Buddhism that is not single-minded, that allows room for goals in life beyond than the removal of suffering, just as it allows room for enjoying the story of the Rāmāyana.
All of this leads me to more respect not only for Buddhism as it is lived by everyday Buddhists, but for the lived practices of other traditions as well. And so I still have a high regard for the spiritual benefits of monotheists’ practices. At the same time, I have come to reject much more of monotheists’ theory, their philosophy and theology. Back in 2011 I made a series of posts that suggested we need something like a God, a First Explanation, to make sense of the existence of goodness and badness. So I was willing to describe myself as a “weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist”, as Leah Libresco was before her conversion. I no longer think that God is necessary in this way, and while I’m still a virtue ethicist and still weird, I’m not at all Platonist except through Aristotle – and my Aristotle is increasingly the less Platonist Aristotle of a Duns Scotus, focused on the earthly particulars rather than divine universals. (Which probably makes me now at least somewhat more of a Descender than I was, to use a vocabulary I used to use a lot more frequently.)
I do still think that Buddhists have not thought enough about meta-ethical questions, about what makes dukkha so worthy of avoidance. But I think that the answers to those questions have much more to do with our natures as human beings than with any theological ultimate; value is objective but it’s objectively in us, not in any sort of extra-human reality. My cosmology has become much more Lovecraftian: the uncaring cosmos just is, and our presence in it is accidental. The problem of suffering is just too insurmountable for us to view the world as the work of an omnibenevolent God. I see such a view as also quite Buddhist: the cosmos is the paradigm question that tends not to edification, and we need to start instead with our suffering selves. (Even my interpretation of Aristotle is much less theistic now than it was then – a point that makes a constructive difference since I do consider myself an Aristotelian as well as a Buddhist.)
This is where my philosophical reflections have taken me over these past ten years. If you are reading this, thank you for being a part of them. I don’t know where the next ten years will take me: perhaps I will be still more Buddhist, or perhaps less. But I look forward to finding out, and I invite you to join me on the journey.
Thanks. I enjoy your writing. But aren’t you still trying to substantiate the self, or your self at least.
Could you clarify what you mean by that?
Amod, thanks for sharing your journey over the past ten years. Your honesty and willingness to allow your thinking to evolve — as much as your often thought provoking insights — is inspirational. It has been fun to follow you for at least a good part of the ride.
Fun read about your changes over time. For me, “religion”, as most people use the word, is most often a matter of identity (who am I, where do I belong, what should I do). So that one’s religious beliefs often hide the actual function of the identification — how your new label is serving you. We often discuss beliefs when we should be discussing function
Thanks, Sabio. I basically agree: I generally find the word “religion” to obscure more than it reveals. So I hadn’t identified with any “religion” until I realized a point where it would be functionally very important for me to do so.
Thank you so much for sharing this practice with us. I discovered your blog in 2014, and it has become a regular source of reflection and edification for me.
If you ever find it an appropriate subject for your blog, I would be very curious to read a reflection on the practice of your writing and how it has changed and evolved over time. When do you write? How do you edit? How much do you edit? What have you learned about the writing process by consistently publishing on this blog for a decade? What place do you see the practice of writing playing in your practice of philosophy? I would be very curious to hear your reflections on these questions.
Thanks for reading, Josh, and welcome to the comments. This is a great question and I could say a lot about it, but I only have time to respond briefly at this point.
What’s remained constant about my writing is that I am something of a compulsive writer: I write pretty much whenever I get the chance. (A large part of that is on my subway commute to and from my day job!) What shows up here is a tiny fraction of the amount I write in my journals. That is in part because of something I learned a long time ago about the writing process for me: it is much easier to write when completely uncensored, not simply in the sense of being unafraid to offend but in the sense of not worrying at all what others think of it. My journals are for me and me alone, which means that I’m unafraid to write things in them that might turn out to be garbage – and it is because of that that I pretty much never get writer’s block. I can get stuck on a particular project and frustrated by that project, but I never get to a point where I can’t write at all. That would not be the case if I was thinking of an audience.
What’s changed is that I do edit significantly more than I used to; my posts are more polished, as well as longer. My first posts from 2009tend to be 250 words, maybe 500, because I was told that’s what a blog post is supposed to be. But I found soon that I need 1000 words to make a point and argue for it, and so relatively soon that became a guideline. So too, I’m now viewing the blog as part of a serious scholarly conversation that cares about evidence: when I started writing the blog I don’t think I would have dreamed of writing something like my recent series on Buddhaghosa, which was painstaking and took me a long time to write (with the editing included as part of the writing). But in those old days I wouldn’t have had a senior scholar like Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad responding to my blogging!
Thanks for your response! It confirmed the direction I’ve tried to move with my own writing. I’d always succeeded at writing until graduate school, when I began to feel as though my entire life of previous writing success had been a lie and that I actually had no idea how to write. In subsequent years, I realized that I had been approaching writing as a task one finishes for the purpose of a single assignment or publication instead of as a way of life. I began to see that published writing is usually only the smallest portion of what writers produce in the course of (often compulsively) writing out the contents of their minds. Since then, I’ve been trying to nurture the habit of writing out the thoughts that occur to me instead of allowing them to float freely through my mind uncaptured.
What you said about allowing yourself to write without worrying what others will think also resonated with me and reflected a very recent development in my writing practice. I began to understand that the paralysis I experienced from time to time when I tried to write was the result of listening to my own inner projection of the critical voices of others. It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve learned to create private, dedicated spaces where I’m free to write whatever occurs to me. Like you, I’ve found that this helps immensely in liberating me from “writer’s block.”
Thinking is hard. Writing is hard. Doing both can sometimes make it easier, paradoxically — but doing both while you are supporting a spouse through cancer treatment, revising your own employment plans and expectations, and undergoing a religious “conversion” of sorts (not your word for it, I recognize) — well, let’s just say there’s nothing obviously easy about it. In reading / blogging along with you the past decade I’ve learned a good deal. I too engage Wilber less than I used to, but Kasulis’ intimacy/integrity (which you introduced me to) has actually become more important to me. I salute your genuine commitment to breadth — you may not be able (or want) to explore “all” the traditions, but by choosing “a few”, you demonstrate that thinking through encounter is plausible — the universal (wisdom & liberation) in the particular (tradition & lentils). Best of all continues to be continued cross-blog encounter and dialogue. Here’s to another decade of a continuing long, strange trip.
Also– a question. I seem to remember a post in which I think you considered, and then rejected, a third axis beyond intimacy/integrity and ascent/descent. I can’t seem to find that post now — do you remember it? Or maybe I am misremembering something?
Aha! I found it. “The different pieces of Intimacy and Integrity”, followed by “Putting Intimacy /Integrity back together”.
I’m not sure what you’d be referring to… I did acknowledge multiple perennial questions which I placed ascent/descent and intimacy/integrity among. The third axis that I talked about the most was one I got from you, of ātmanism/encounter: I took it up a little with respect to Nishida and Mou Zongsan. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
Ah wait, I see you beat me to it. Glad you found that – I wouldn’t have thought of those in those terms, because that’s about splitting up intimacy/integrity rather than introducing an entirely separate axis.
Thanks for all this. I wouldn’t say it’s been easy to keep the blog up over ten years, but of all the things that were hard to do during that period, it was pretty far down the list.
BTW, I did get your email and am writing a reply.