Continuing my response to Seth Segall, my greatest disagreements are with his second point. So I will begin by quoting that at length:
As a hospital pastoral care provider I minister to patients of all faiths, and I have been impressed at how their faiths shape their own understanding of the virtues and contribute to making their lives admirable. So, if you are a person who finds a belief in rebirth compelling, and if you find that a belief in rebirth inspires you to practice being more compassionate to others, I have no quarrel with you. Please continue. The only statement I am willing to make without hesitation is that a belief in rebirth (let’s just use “rebirth” here as a stand-in for all the parts of Buddhism I happen to disagree with) doesn’t work for me, and I expect it won’t work for the majority of modern Westerners. I don’t want to be imperialistic about my beliefs. My attitude is, “this is what works for me,” and if you are feeling the same kind of dissonance with aspects of the Buddhist tradition, see if it works for you, too. On the other hand, I would never want to tell the Dalai Lama that he is practicing Buddhism wrong.
I do recognize the importance of working with people as they are, especially in a difficult field like pastoral care. Still I am nervous about saying that false ideas – which I do take rebirth to be – constitute “the best model for” any given person. Here I think it is important to remember how classical Buddhist thinkers see our suffering as rooted in ignorance, and the way out of it as requiring the clearing out of delusion: seeing things as they are (yathābhūtam). Moha, delusion, is as destructive a mental state as craving and anger. So I think we must tread carefully when it comes to endorsing ideas that are false. And I think Seth and I can agree that some ideas (that the earth is flat, that vaccines cause autism) do fall into that category.
There is indeed a longstanding Buddhist (and especially Mahāyāna) tradition of upāya-kauśalya, “skill in means”, where one teaches ideas that are false, or at least not strictly true, because they will be spiritually beneficial to the recipient. The most famous example is the Lotus Sūtra’s story of the man in the burning house whose children aren’t persuaded to leave because of the fire, so instead he tells them there are toys outside. But in the end of the Lotus Sūtra story the man actually gives his children even better toys, so what he said was barely even a lie at all. On the question of whether one should actually tell falsehoods, or let others live in falsehoods, for spiritually beneficial purposes, the story is something of a cop-out. It is still common in Mahāyāna tradition to say telling outright falsehoods is acceptable in order to reach those of lesser spiritual capacity – but even there, one needs to be clear to oneself that they are falsehoods. Delusion is never a good thing; allowing people to remain in delusion for their own benefit is, at best, a second-best approach. Given the depths to which human delusion can reach, allowing people to remain so is often important and even essential for their well-being, and I do grant that. But we should still acknowledge it for what it is.
I do not take the Dalai Lama to be infallible. If he believes things that are false, that is a problem. Can certain delusions lead people to better and more virtuous lives? Yes, under some conditions, and it may often be the case that letting people live in those delusions is more helpful than trying to cure them. But that remains a dangerous line to walk. Virtue-generating delusions can easily turn to be vice-generating. I could use as an example the fact that some Buddhists have advocated against government antipoverty programs on the grounds that poverty is karmically deserved. It is harder to argue against such people if one has already granted that their false beliefs about rebirth are fine because they “work for” them.
I must further admit a deep, and increasing, hostility to the use of terms like “imperialism” to describe an advocacy of true beliefs against the false. “Imperialist” is a pejorative (at least in the contemporary context), and one that I find entirely unmerited in cases like the ones under discussion. Seth’s comment here seems to suggest that merely to advocate for truth over falsehood counts as “imperialism”. Is it “imperialist” to deny the truth of the flat earth? How about the truth of climate denial? Anti-vaxxing? If this is “imperialism”, then truth requires imperialism, imperialism is an appropriate way to conduct ourselves, and everyone should be an imperialist. Now since misinterpretations on claims like these can easily get blown out of proportion these days, let me be clear that I intend that previous statement as a reductio ad absurdum: of course none of these latter claims about imperialism are true. For that reason, advocating for truth is not imperialism, and we must stop calling it that. If there is any place where my disagreement with Seth is categorical and absolute, it is on that point.
Truth matters; it matters that people see things as they are. I grant that there are many cases where it is pragmatically effective for people to remain in delusion, but we must at least be clear to ourselves that it is delusion. Given Stevenson’s kind of evidence, I could grant, for now at least, that perhaps – perhaps – rebirth as such is not a delusion. But as far as I can tell, ethicized or karmic rebirth – for which Stevenson &co. provide no such evidence – is. It may be helpful and even necessary to allow others to remain in delusion about it, but we must still be clear to ourselves that that is what it is.
Excellent points, hard points, necessary points. In the _long_ run (however we might define “long,” truth matters. You cannot side step this. Misreadings of Nagarjuna as some sort of proto-Heidegger are adharma. All that text and talk about “beyond” duality are a project of evasive monism. It doesn’t work and makes for morally corrupt Buddhists. Alas.
Amod, thanks for being generous with your time in thinking this through with me.
I am still trying to get to the heart of our difference of opinion regarding this specific issue. Perhaps it stems from attitudes steeped in our different professional trainings. As a philosopher you are concerned with discerning truth, whereas as a psychologist and heathcare pastoral care provider, I am more concerned with how living people instantiate good and admirable lives using whatever cultural resources they happen to have at their disposal.
I am thinking of the following example. A Christian tells me he experiences the indwelling Christ within, a Jungian tells me he is aware of the awakening of his unconscious archetype of the spirit, and a Buddhist tells me he is aware of his Buddha-nature. Now while these are not identical concepts, and while all three of these people could probably delinate phenomenological differences between the indwelling Christ, the spirit archetype, and Buddha-nature, there is a way, I believe, that there is a family resemblance between these experiences. They each possess an inner connection to a source of widsom and goodness they use to orient their lives that they express through different religious metaphors. As a listener, I can feel my way into each of these experiences and understand what they mean for each of the speakers, and also feel a commonality between them despite their differences. In my own way of understanding, each has made use of their cultures’ available resources to develop some internal voice that orients them towards becoming better people. That capacity to develop such an internal voice through one’s cultural resources is a universal human capacity.
Now in thinking about through this example, I don’t feel any need to tell the Christian he is wrong and that what he is really experiencing is either his Buddha-nature or the Jungian archtype of the spirit. I see these as equally valid alternative paths to good human development. At the same time, I do not personally believe that a divine Jesus Christ can literally be inside people, or in the existence of unconscious archetypes, or, for that matter, in the metaphysics (as opppsed to the metaphor) of Buddha-nature. (I am too much of an Augustinian, and I don’t believe people are instrincially good.) I see these not as literal truths, but as useful metaphors for some aspects of experience that we are capable of speaking about in different languages. I think they metaphorically allude to a real phenomenon even when they are literally not “true” in some other sense.
Then, to delve deeper into the difference between our stances, I don’t think that the metaphysical ideas I suspect to be true (as opposed to my ideas about statements concerning intersubjectively observable facts) have a knowable truth value. I am willing to be agnostic about their ultimate truth, and I am willing to have others have different beliefs without telling them they are wrong. The most I am willing to say is that I find them personally useful—in a Jamesian pragmatic way—in orienting me towards the world.
Thanks, Seth. Perhaps first on our disciplinary orientations: I might have had a different reaction to your book if it were framed in the terms of psychology and pastoral care – somewhat as Harvey Aronson’s Buddhist Practice on Western Ground is, for example. But the structure of the book – with almost every chapter seemingly focused on a philosophical topic – indicates it to be a work of philosophy, and at that point discerning truth is the issue.
I think the context of pastoral care or talk therapy, where we’re thinking of how best we can handle the needs of people with very different cosmological understandings of the universe, is a very important and valid one. But I think that context would call for a very different book! Because I think the Christians or Muslims who don’t accept a Buddhist metaphysics would also have trouble accepting a Buddhist-Aristotelian ethics. You and I have shared skepticism about Engaged Buddhism in the past, and I think that skepticism is well placed within Buddhist tradition; I think it’s much less well placed in a tradition that says the nations will be judged on how it treats the least of these, or insists on the role of humans in supporting God’s justice. I think that as a Buddhist one could still minister to such people, but one would have to be clear about where one thinks them misguided. Whether on metaphysics or ethics or biology or anything else, one needs to work with people where they are, rather than trying to convince them of everything. I don’t think trying to leave out metaphysics is the most helpful way to approach that.
Which brings us to the last point that says metaphysical ideas do not have a knowable truth value, whereas “intersubjectively observable facts” do. I disagree with this. Another friend of mine made a similar claim a couple years ago, and I responded to it in two posts then. That is, while I agree that intersubjective verifiability is important for knowledge, I think it can be, and in these cases probably is, a way to smuggle in an unsustainable empiricism. There are ways to verify and falsify metaphysical and ethical claims. The clearest are shared assumptions and non-contradiction. In the case of rebirth, insofar as we are considering it a metaphysical question, there are even empirical ways to verify and/or falsify it (including Stevenson’s evidence on one hand, and the weight of psychological research on the embodied nature of consciousness on the other).
I hesitate to jump into a dialogue uninvited, but perhaps a third perspective would be helpful here: When I read the exchange between Amod and Seth above, I’m reminded of the distinction that psychologist Michael Basseches made between what he called relativistic thinking and universalistic formal thinking (others have made similar distinctions).
Seth’s comment above can be read as adopting a kind of relativistic thinking justified on pragmatic grounds. Amod, in both his post and his response to Seth’s comment, sees the limitations of such relativistic thinking and emphasizes the importance of universalistic thinking about truth, especially when clients in counseling (or other people) make bad decisions based on the the falsehoods in their belief systems.
Michael Basseches’s work is useful here because he has already synthesized these two positions: the third alternative to relativistic and universalistic thinking that unites their strengths while discarding their weaknesses is what Basseches calls dialectical thinking. I imagine that Seth and Amod are both capable of dialectical thinking, but above some of their statements can be clearly classified as relativistic versus universalistic positions: Seth’s “I see these as equally valid alternative paths” (relativistic) versus Amod’s “Truth matters; it matters that people see things as they are” (universalistic). A dialectical synthesis of Seth’s and Amod’s statements would be something like: “Learning matters; it matters that people, traveling on their alternative paths, learn to see things more clearly than they had seen them before.”
A simplified description of the dialectical position is that everyone is always learning through growth of and reorganization of knowledge. This may sound obvious but is not fully acknowledged by either relativistic or universalistic thinking. Continuing with a simplified description: The relativistic position doesn’t acknowledge that everyone is always learning through growth of and reorganization of knowledge because (in the version expressed by Seth above) concepts are just useful metaphors that point toward some good or goodness (or something like that); nobody can be proven wrong about these concepts, so the concepts can’t be refuted so as to result in learning, so there is nothing to learn, or the concepts are already sufficient so there is no point to learning. The universalistic position acknowledges that someone can learn through growth of and reorganization of knowledge, namely someone whose concept is wrong, but also tends to presume that someone else (the expert) whose concept is true has nothing to learn about the referent of that concept, especially not from anyone whose concept is wrong.
Basseches has provided sophisticated accounts of how dialectical thinking applies in counseling; see his series of two articles from 1997 titled “A developmental perspective on psychotherapy process, psychotherapists’ expertise, and ‘meaning-making conflict’ within therapeutic relationships” and his 2003 chapter “Adult development and the practice of psychotherapy”, for example.
I’m fine with that, Nathan. Dialectical thinking on this description is a process of getting more justified in one’s position and thus better reaching a closer approximation of the truth – which we should indeed be wary of declaring we already possess. The key issue on the present context is that, as far as I can see, such a dialectical exchange can only happen when both parties are clear about what their positions on the issue are. That is, if one believes that people are reborn and the other isn’t, there will be less learning from each other if one of them won’t come out and state that disagreement.
And you are invited – on the upper left of the blog I specifically say I invite you to leave comments!
Thanks, Amod: my assumption that my comment was “uninvited” has been refuted by clearly contrary evidence.
You said: “there will be less learning from each other if one of them won’t come out and state that disagreement.” Very true, and stating it that way makes clear just how prevalent this problem is—this can be an obstacle to learning in all kinds of situations. The relativistic statements in Seth’s passages above evade this problem, I suspect.
Your statement that “such a dialectical exchange can only happen when both parties are clear about what their positions on the issue are” reminds me that your phrase “be clear” (both in your post and in your comment) could have at least two different meanings: that I can clearly explain my own position/concept to myself or that I can communicate that explanation to someone else so someone else can clearly explain my position/concept back to me or to anyone else. My previous comment assumed a type of case in which “someone whose concept is wrong” at least has a clear self-explanation of that concept, but there is another possible type of case in which someone can recite words and phrases like “rebirth” and “rebirth is being born again after death” but cannot offer further explanation of what the words and phrases mean because they have no coherent belief system related to the words and phrases. This is not so much a “wrong concept” as it is not much of a concept at all. Psychologist Keith Stanovich called these two types of cases “contaminated mindware” (wrong concepts) and “mindware gap” (lack of concepts) respectively. A dialectical exchange could reveal that one or both parties is either of these two types of cases in relation to a particular issue.