I’d like to now envision the book I am working on. This post is something like a proposal for the book, both to clarify my thoughts on it and (more importantly) to hear yours. As I write it I keep in mind the wise advice of my dissertation advisor, Parimal Patil, that fundamentally a dissertation proposal is telling a lie. You don’t actually know what the final result is going to be, or you would have already written it; the act of researching it will necessarily make it something different from the proposal. You just don’t know how it will be different. With that in mind, let me attempt to say some more, in a nutshell, about what the book will be.
One of the reasons I’ve put so much attention into my debate with Evan Thompson is that it has helped me sharpen my view of what I intend my book to be arguing. Fundamentally, I intend the book to articulate a Buddhist eudaimonism: to make the claim that being good, generally and probabilistically, makes our lives better. Before Thompson started criticizing that view so hard, I hadn’t been as clear to myself that it was the view I wanted to articulate. Now, I see it as the core philosophical position I want to put forward and defend.
I want to open the book (possibly following a discussion of method) with what I take to be the bare foundations of ethics. For me this is to point out that we always begin ethical inquiry with a set of preexisting ends, cares and aims, and I think these must be the starting points for such inquiry. I accept Bernard Williams’s argument that we cannot really be said to have reason to do something unless a new motivation to do it “could be in some way rationally arrived at, granted the earlier motivations”. I also think that human ends do generally fall within a predictable range, and that many of our preexisting ends – such as the desire to punish wrongdoing – are bad ones, and can be judged as such with reference to reflection deriving rationally from our other motivations together with the nature of the world.
I intend to take up this line of reasoning to articulate a concept of human flourishing which includes multiple categories of intrinsic ends and goods. I think that traditional Indian Buddhist philosophy allows only two such ends – seeing correctly (yathābhūtadassana) and the removal of suffering (dukkhanirodha) – which it takes to be almost identical. I argue, for reasons I brought up in conversation with Thompson, that a good human life does include ends beyond this, and in that I depart from traditional Buddhist philosophy (though not necessarily practice). I don’t attempt an exhaustive account of what these ends could be, but I think they at least include love, justice and self-respect, defined in particular ways, and likely some form of achievement or self-actualization. I also depart from contemporary qualitative individualists like Martin Hägglund who give the removal of suffering basically no role. (I intend to say more about Hägglund soon.)
With such a conception of flourishing in mind, I argue virtue conduces to this flourishing: it makes our life better. Virtue does so in multiple ways. First, virtue partially constitutes some of our ends: the virtue of kindness is itself a constitutive part of the end of love; the virtue of our being just is part of the justice and self-respect we seek in life; the virtues of serenity and patient endurance partially constitute the contentment that follows the removal of suffering. Second, virtue does indeed tend to help us achieve those ends: our being kind and just tend to make others more likely to be kind and just to us, our being self-disciplined and mindful helps us achieve success at our projects. All of this is how I understand the nature of karma, as the Thompson debate has discussed in detail.
Possibly the most important reason that virtue leads to flourishing is that external goods are less important to our flourishing than we human beings, across cultures, tend to think they are. It is this statement that I see at the core of a genuine synthesis between the views of Śāntideva and Nussbaum as I discussed them in the dissertation. It is a middle ground very different from the one proposed by Mark Berkson based on other texts outside these traditions, where one performs worldly acts on the outside but is a renouncer on the inside. Rather, against Śāntideva and with Nussbaum, external goods do matter for our well-being, because goods other than the removal of suffering matter. But the removal of suffering matters too, and against Nussbaum and with Śāntideva, the causes of suffering are primarily mental, for reasons that I think are indeed confirmed by contemporary psychology. To the extent that that is the case, external goods matter less for our flourishing, and virtue matters more.
I intend to spell the case out further with a detailed discussion of four particular virtues: four habits we can build that both make us better people and make our lives better. The first is a serenity which sees clearly how many external goods are external, and is willing to accept the things it cannot change – a virtue that perhaps reaches its hypothetical peak in Śāntideva’s claim that a bodhisattva can be happy even while tortured. The second is patient endurance, kṣānti – the reduction (not repression) of anger in all cases outside of what Nussbaum calls “Transition-Anger”, given the damaging effects that anger has on ourselves and others. (This is one point on which Nussbaum and Śāntideva have already come closer to agreement without my help!)
The final two virtues are kindness and justice. I think it is important to examine such other-regarding virtues because they are typically foremost in the minds of opponents of eudaimonism: we all know kind and just people who do not seem to be flourishing, and vice versa. Again it’s important here that the eudaimonism is probabilistic: kindness and justice don’t guarantee good lives, they just make our lives better than they would be without them. Kindness (composed especially of generosity and gentleness) not only partially constitutes the love we seek, it is itself a pleasure. As far as justice (a virtue generally less informed by Buddhism): we need other people for most of our ends, so in order to live well we must rely on them – and that requires filling roles and reciprocal obligations, which can fall apart quickly if we do not live up to our end of them. Essential to living well amid such a web of expectations is a good conscience, which also requires living up to one’s genuine obligations, the legitimate expectations that others can have.
There’s a lot more to say about all of this, of course. And that is another reason it’s going to be not just a blog post but a book.
Amod, I look forward to reading your book! Please don’t take too long.
I wonder if, in addition to empathy/kindness, serenity/equanimity, endurance/patience and fairness/justice you might also want to tackle other virtues some see as vital to an overall conception of virtue (e.g., courage, honesty) or any of the “conservative” and/or “Confucian” virtues alluded to by moral foundations theorists (purity, loyalty, freedom from coercion, apporpriate deference to authority). Also, maybe the role of phonesis in all the moral virtues?
Thanks, Seth. There are a lot of virtues I could write about! My hope is to focus on a couple that will make the overall point best, which is why I’ve selected the four above (for now anyway).
Phronēsis may end up playing a significant role, though – in order to help answer the question of how we decide between competing ends and virtues. Regarding “conservative” virtues – it’s important to pick traits that I believe actually are virtues! There is one that may play that role, though, and that is reverence – which plays a significant role in connecting my conception of karma to more traditional ones.
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Amod: The scholar in me hopes that you will stuff your book full of footnotes and references. A book will allow you to go crazy with references in a way that you can’t do in your blog, and I hope you will take advantage of that. It’s a great opportunity to “acknowledge intellectual debts” past and present, as Manfred Kochen put it in “How well do we acknowledge intellectual debts?” (Journal of Documentation, 43(1), 1987, 54–64).
I also hope that in expressing your Buddhist eudaimonism you can also recognize the ways in which Buddhism may point beyond eudaimonism. My sense of Buddhism is that it includes eudaimonism but also points beyond it. I tried to suggest this in my comment on your post from May titled “Bad things, good people, and eudaimonism”, though I may not have said it well. Jim Wilton and I were also pointing to this, to some degree, in our comments on your post from last year titled “The wisdom of serenity”. As I phrased it in my comment on the latter post, “liberation of the potentialities of mind should also be mentioned, including, especially in later forms of Buddhism, a sense of vast fluid multi-perspectivism.” This may be more than flourishing, depending on how broadly we define flourishing.
As humans our potential cognitive development is not unlimited but may be greater than we think. This could be called a “developmental” view, which is explicit in the Buddhist idea of “path” (magga/mārga) and in recent edited collections in philosophy and psychology such as Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2016), Advancing Developmental Science: Philosophy, Theory, and Method (Routledge, 2017), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Development: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2019), Development of Adult Thinking: Perspectives from Psychology, Education and Human Resources (Routledge, 2020), and Handbook of Integrative Developmental Science (Routledge, 2020).
Christine Swanson’s chapter “Developmental virtue ethics” in the aforementioned book Developing the Virtues argued that “the dominant canon of virtue ethics has not yet appreciated that virtue ethics itself needs go ‘developmental’ in a thoroughgoing way.” The same argument could be made from a Buddhist perspective, since Buddhism is arguably “developmental in a thoroughgoing way”.
Nathan, thanks for this helpful and detailed comment. Certainly I would imagine a book having detailed references – and I’ll have to see what the presses think. (There’s this disturbing trend in publishing lately to make references as difficult to follow as possible, by having author-date references in the endnotes so that if you actually want to go to the book you have to flip pages twice. I’m hoping I can manage to get more references that are reader-friendly.)
I have been thinking a bit about the “beyond eudaimonism” kind of view. I think it might relate to the point I made at the end of the previous round of Thompson correspondence, about an orientation to self-transcendence. There are a number of places I want to read up more on this, from Nishitani Keiji to Jennifer Frey.
Can you say more about what you mean by “developmental”?
You said: “I think it might relate to the point I made at the end of the previous round of Thompson correspondence, about an orientation to self-transcendence.” Yes, the self-transcendence that you mention there is primarily what I am thinking about, although there may be more in Buddhism that is “beyond eudaimonism” as well. There are many aspects of this that could be discussed. When I mentioned “a sense of vast fluid multi-perspectivism” in Buddhism, I was thinking of the kind of literature surveyed in Bret Davis’s chapter “Zen’s nonegocentric perspectivism” (in the edited collection Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach, 2018), which includes Nishitani.
What I mean by “developmental” is close to what I wrote in a comment on your post titled “On delusions and their pragmatic efficacy”, where I pointed to a third position between relativistic and universalistic statements from you and Seth, a third position that emphasizes “learning through growth of and reorganization of knowledge”. There I called the position “dialectical”, following Michael Basseches. It could also be called “developmental”. But “development” is, more generally, a process of growth and reorganization that increases capacity in some respect, not just in knowledge narrowly conceived, although development of knowledge is an important kind of development. You responded in that discussion with an apt redescription: “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.” Your statement is a description of epistemic or epistemological development. I take the etymological root of “Buddhism”, bodhi or awakening (and other key words such as magga/mārga or path), to be emphasizing development, including development of knowledge but also development of awareness, including awareness of one’s own mental functioning, awareness of multiple perspectives, meta-awareness, and so on.
All of the above may sound obvious to people who are well-versed in Buddhism and philosophy and developmental psychology (and their applications such as counseling), but as we noted in our comments on your post titled “On delusions and their pragmatic efficacy”, if we don’t think and act from a developmental view then we can obstruct further development. And this is quite easy to do, in my experience. Whereas when thinking and acting from a developmental view, that developmental view will keep developing. Christine Swanton seemed to have something similar in mind when she appended “developmental” to “virtue ethics” to speak of “developmental virtue ethics” and said that even virtue ethics should be more thoroughly developmental.
This thread is making me think of Dale Wright’s Hegel-like historicizing of the idea of Enlightenment. Dogen says, “when one side is illuminated, the other is dark.” Any apprehension we have of the larger reality we are a part of is always limited by our perspective and therefore—no matter how vast—always a partial view. The more we can encompass differerent perspectives and integrate them, the more we approach an understanding of the larger whole, but there is always more to it that can be integrated from an even wider perspective, and their is never a final and complete aperspectival view. In this sense, the idea of “going beyond Buddha,” as Dogen might say, means that the movement towards this enlarged vision of wholeness is always developmental, and our idea of the final goal of enlightenment keeps evolving as we approach it. This ability to keep on integrating new perspectives is not really a “virtue” that lies “beyond eudaemonism,” but I would argue is an essential part of Buddhist eudaemonism itself and what differentiates it from Aristotelean eudaemonism.
Right, as I said above: “This may be more than flourishing, depending on how broadly we define flourishing.” In other words: I don’t see any major problem with defining flourishing broadly enough to include all this and calling it a Buddhist eudaimonism, but even then, in the spirit of inquiry, it may still be worth asking the question “What would it mean to go beyond eudaimonism?” just as Dogen may provoke us to ask the question of what it would mean to go “beyond buddha, thereby vigorously exalting the dharma that goes beyond buddha”.
I should also clarify that above when I referred to a sense of multi-perspectivism or awareness of multiple perspectives, I didn’t mean the integration these perspectives as part of my own epistemic development, but rather the continuous acknowledgement that the world around and within me is massively multi-perspectival. These perspectives are always already integrated as the world, but not integrated in my personal knowledge. Right now as I sit and type these words there is a cloud of insects buzzing in front of me and a massive chorus of birds and small animals nearby: Am I continuously aware that these are all perspectives and that I am a guest of all these perspectives so that life right now is more than just a self-centered human typing words into a WordPress text box?
I once felt, with a kind of shock, the same spirit of inquiry when I read a passage by Gerald Bruns comparing Martha Nussbaum and Emmanuel Levinas:
“Nussbaum is among the more interesting because she has pretty much given up the idea that ethical theory has to be framed in terms of rules and beliefs, but meanwhile she still retains the idea that ethics is subject-centered, that is, it is still conceived in terms of a moral spectator, a perceiving agent, someone (to be sure) situated in circumstances calling for action or decision, but whose situatedness is still characterized in terms of seeing and describing the situation…. Levinas would say ethics cannot even get under way until we get rid of the idea of ‘the primacy of perceptive intuition’; and that is because ethics means turning the subject of perceptive intuition inside out…. Nussbaum speaks almost exclusively in terms of responsiveness to situations, whereas Levinas speaks of the stranger who will not be done away with even though I murder him, who destroys my self-relation by turning his face toward me, whose face turns me out in the open. Here ethics concerns not the good life but the real one. To put it as bluntly as one can, there may be nothing good about ethics.”
There’s nothing special about this passage, and I don’t even know how accurate his portrayal of Nussbaum and Levinas is, but when I read the passage 25 years ago it shocked me enough that I still remember it. The best philosophy shocks me into asking what may be beyond my idea of the good life.
I should probably admit that Lévinas is among my least favourite philosophers. He reminds me of Peter Singer in that the life that follows from his philosophy seems to be a wretched, self-abnegating guilt. If that’s what self-transcendence looks like, include me out. I think there’s a lot more value in a self-transcendence that starts paradoxically from self-interest and proceeds to dialectically transcend it – as with Śāntideva’s beautiful verse VIII.129: “All who are suffering in the world are so because of desire for their own happiness. All who are happy in the world are so because of desire for others’ happiness.”
Thanks for pointing to those two posts of yours, which I hadn’t seen. I agree with your attitude about demandingness in those posts. And I don’t know much about Levinas, so if you have to choose between throwing out Levinas and throwing out self-transcendence, certainly ditch Levinas. What struck me about that quote from Bruns was the radical questioning of my assumptions about ethics, not any moral prescription or obligation. “A self-transcendence that starts paradoxically from self-interest and proceeds to dialectically transcend it”, as you said, is fine as an autobiography of my epistemic development (I would like to think that would be the story of my life when I die), but speaking ontologically doesn’t self-transcendence already preexist my personal epistemic development and invite it? If I am to be happy by desiring others’ happiness, first I need to become aware of those others and their perspectives.
Yeah, I think that’s where the paradox is at its most paradoxical. I do have some pause on saying self-transcendence precedes our personal development ontologically, because I think the root of any values (including self-transcendence) is in beings that value – living beings. It’s not out there in the material universe that preexisted living beings, which is a cold meaningless Lovecraftian void.
Agreed that what we’re calling self-transcendence in Buddhism properly understood (but I can’t present that argument now; I assume it’s obvious) is not holism, pantheism, ātman, etc. But self-transcendence does preexist you and me in the sense that we are products of a very long history of life that also produced very many generations of living beings, some of whom began developing and passing on knowledge of that very long history of life and living beings, knowledge which included knowledge of self-transcendence (and not just conceptual knowledge but also practical knowledge). We’re not the first living beings to think of this, and we couldn’t have thought of it without everything that came before. So self-transcendence preceded us and is inseparable from (dependent upon) the history of life. Notice that there is a third term here: not only (1) living beings and (2) the material universe, but also (3) the history of life, which is larger than living beings but smaller than the history of the material universe: it is the processes that generate the information required to produce living beings. See the work of scientists such as Sara Imari Walker about this distinction between living beings and the history of life. Also, the universe is only (I assume) cold on average: in some parts it’s damn hot.
After writing the previous comment a couple of days ago, this has still been on my mind, since once we bring in the entire history of life, there are countless directions this could go. I wanted to clarify that the history of life is much more than the history of genes, as explained in, for example, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (MIT Press, 2005/2014).
But to bring the thread back to the original topic of your book proposal on how virtue helps us flourish, the question that is still on my mind, and that you may want to think about, is: How explicit you are going to be in your book about your philosophical naturalism that is evidenced in your many blog posts with “naturalized” and “naturalizing” in the title? In other words: How much are you going to try to ground your account of Buddhist eudaimonism in a naturalistic ontology and cosmology? If you’re not going to hide your naturalism in the book, then it would be advisable that your references in the book include recent science. I’m thinking of books like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton UP, 2011) and Herbert Gintis’s Individuality and Entanglement: The Moral and Material Bases of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2017).
Emphasizing the history of life draws attention to the interdependence of living beings, which is a core principle in modern Buddhism (such as Thich Nhat Hanh’s interbeing) that grew out of early Buddhist ideas on dependent co-arising (pratītyasamutpāda). Modern life sciences have provided a much more detailed knowledge base for this principle, but the early Buddhist ideas may have been part of traditional ecological knowledge of the kind described by Fikret Berkes in publications such as Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Routledge, 1999/2018).
P.S. I should add that awareness of multiple perspectives does not only mean awareness of the actually occurring perspectives but also knowledge that there could be other possible perspectives beyond those that are occurring or have occurred. This is clear in my comment on Amod’s post titled “The wisdom of serenity” but is not clear in my previous comment above.
I really need to read Wright’s book. He’s influenced me a lot on my approach to karma, but that all comes through his earlier article on the subject.
Especially, I think this kind of dialectical encompassing of perspectives is vital, and I don’t think it’s really there in the South Asian Buddhism I’m most familiar with. From the sound of things, Dōgen and Tiantai have figured it out better.
A classic South Asian Buddhist text that is quasi-dialectical in this sense (though with plenty of mythical flourishes) is the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, the text that introduced the schema of three turnings of the wheel of dharma, which later became an important reference point for Tibetan interpretations of the history of Buddhist philosophy, as Robert Thurman explained in “Buddhist hermeneutics”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 46(1), 1978, 19–39. The Samdhinirmocana Sutra said that the first two turnings of the wheel of dharma were refutable and surpassable and led to further conceptual improvements, but that the third turning was irrefutable and unsurpassable. Since the third turning was the one expounded in the Samdhinirmocana Sutra itself, based on its own authority, this was a circular and self-serving assertion (and a good example of obstruction of further development, mentioned above). But the text provided a dialectical model that later Buddhist thinkers used while refuting the text’s claim of its unsurpassability.
Dale Wright cites the Samdhinirmocana Sutra in his reference list in What Is Buddhist Enlightenment? but there is no index in his book so I can’t find where he discusses it.
I’m excited to read it when it comes out!
I’m wondering if you’re planning on engaging with any of the positive psychology research about virtue and happiness. It seems to me that eudaimonism is an empirically testable position, so it would make sense for a philosopher advocating that position to make use of the empirical research that’s being done in that area. (In my personal studies, I’ve only just reached the point of realizing that such research exists and deciding that it would be a good idea to look into it, so I can’t engage in much helpful dialogue beyond that point yet).
I’m also curious to find out more about where exactly you put the role of external goods in flourishing/happiness. I think I’m pretty close to the Stoics, but not quite all the way there, and it’s still an open question for me.
Thanks, Asa. Short answer is to the first question is yes. There was already some psychology research that I wanted to bring into my Disengaged Buddhism article. Others pointed out that that was a distraction, because the article had enough to say about the Disengaged Buddhists and their neglect by Engaged Buddhists without me taking a constructive position, and I think they were right. But I started writing about it a little bit here.
As far as external goods: my answer in general is the one above, that external goods are less important to our flourishing than we human beings, across cultures, tend to think they are. Specifying it further than that probably requires going into a lot more detail – the kind of detail that I hope the book can provide. But briefly: I think that external goods do matter because some human ends (love, self-expression) do depend on them and are genuine goods. But those ends are not achievable without virtue, and other major goods (like inner peace) do not require external goods at all.
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